Spider-Man: Reign

[cyberghostface]

Spider-Man: Reign is in my opinion one of the more underrated Spidey stories out there. There's a bit of a "all there is to know about 'The Crying Game'" twist that's overshadowed the rest of the story. It's also been derided as a knock off The Dark Knight Returns (and the similarities are acknowledged with a character called 'Miller Janson') but in my opinion all they have in common is the concept of an aging superhero being called out of retirement. Simply put, Spider-Man and Batman are two very different characters -- you're not going to see Spider-Man as a hardened vigilante beating the crap out of Captain America. They're also products of two different periods; TDKR takes place during the Cold War, while Reign (although the connection is not as explicit) draws parallels with a post-9/11 America.

Also each issue was double-sized.

#1 starts...










Peter comes across the kids but doesn't intervene when one is taken away. He is shoved aside and breaks one of his arms.








Peter finds a guest at his door.





Jonah has a package for Peter and tells him to open it. Outside, he provokes the Reign agents into attacking him.




Spider-Man makes quick work of them.








#2...

The return of Spider-Man is causing big problems for Mayor Waters. His assistant, Saks, has a plan.

































#3...

Jonah is taken to Mayor Waters.


















The Webb system covers New York just as symbiotes attack the city.








The ringing causes the symbiotes to retreat.


Peter has gone inside the coffin.








#4...










I'm cutting out the section where Peter fights the Sinister Six to make room for other stuff. The one thing that bothers me a little is that Spider-Man has no problem killing them; he manages to get Electro and Hydro-Man to kill each other, he throws Scorpion out a window, etc. There's not much of an explanation I suppose except for he's old and can't take chances?


After Spider-Man fights Mysterio, Kraven inhales the fear hallucinogens so that fear will be on his side.






On one hand, I really liked the Sandman daughter storyline. On the other it really comes with little build up (Sandman doesn't do much until then). I actually asked Andrews on Twitter about the reasoning for it and his response was this.








Waters attempts to flee but is stopped by Sandman, who tells him that he has what he wants. Waters begs him not to hurt him, but Sandman can't make any promises.












Outside, a kid asks Jonah what this means. "It's a second chance."

Comments

[captainbellman]

Like a spider that crawled inside you and laid a thousand little eggs of cancer!

...A lot of this feels like Andrews ought to have had a co-writer.

[starwolf_oakley]

This series ups post-9/11 paranoia about government overreach a little too much. Like terrorism is nothing but what cops and soldiers use as an excuse to bully people for their own amusement.
"Those are children! You can't shoot them!"
"That's appeasement talk! You're one of THEM!"

I wonder if Sandman's daughter led to "different aspects of Flint's mind are personified in sand" stories that were done in both AMAZING and the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon. But this seems to be an actual daughter that inherited his powers, not the personification of Flint's "inner child."

[cyberghostface]

There was a Zeb Wells storyline during the Jenkins era where Sandman's consciousness was split apart into among other things a kid Sandman and a girl Sandman.

[lordultimus]

Wasn't there one where Flint kidnaps a girl who thought she was her father, Spidey says that its biologically impossible for him to have a kid, and it ends on a depressing note where the kid gets sent to a shitty foster home?

[starwolf_oakley]

AMAZING #615 AND #616 by Fred Van Lente and Javier Pulido.

Brief bit got posted once...

[glprime]

http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/1349808.html

[crimsonmoonmist]

Gotta be a pain to be that guy Sandman walked through,
that sand must've gotten everywhere, especially in his wide open mouth!

[reveen]

Ayiyiyai! This is like 100% pure Mexican black tar melodrama injected right in the eyeballs!

I can see why that can be appealing though, in the way that melodrama tends to be. But it's just dripping with it in a way I've never really seen in a piece of fiction.

[darkknightjrk]

I mean, let's face it, superheroes, especially Spider-Man, are chock-full of melodrama.

[tigerkaya]

meh.

[mrstatham]

I live for the day you progress beyond 'meh' as the only thing you'll say about something.

[tigerkaya]

Whats their to say, I found it disappointing and given how everyone else have said their say I just find a simple word will suffice. Now why don't you go hassle someone else.

[rainspirit]

Some comic book fans can and will never let go of perpetual disappointment. Some other types of people, too! We all have our drugs.

[tigerkaya]

Give them my condolence, their are plenty of good comics if they look hard enough, otherwise I feel sorry for the poor fools.

[angelophile]

I unashamedly loved this story. Some beautiful Peter and MJ dream sequences and Sandman's daughter breaks my heart into a million pieces every time.

[mrstatham]

This. I hate that every time something comes up about it, it's boiled down to 'spider-sperm LOL' (even though there's previous instances of Peter being unable to say, give blood) or juvenile poking fun at the fact we could see his junk in one panel... In a story that was labelled as being for mature readers anyway. To me, that said more about the fans than Andrews for writing that stuff.

For a story blatantly ripping off TDKR, it's got a lot more heart, is a lot more hopeful, and I actively found it more enjoyable than it's inspiration. The use of some of the characters was spot-on, and I liked the development of Venom into a being genuinely upset that Peter had unceremoniously dumped it, and even Jonah's turnaround to *needing* people like Peter is a pretty great riff on the classic characterisation of deciding to tear him down because he can't be as good a man as him.

So.. Yeah. This is a really great Spider-Man story, to me.

[q99]

Hm, I do admit, the Sandman's daughter stuff works for me better than any scene from TDKR.

[mrstatham]

That stuff is solid. I also thing that Peter's characterisation is more appropriate here than what Miller turned Batman into, personally; Obviously it's a little off that Andrews removed MJ to do it, but I think that Peter retreating into himself after MJ's death and then readopting that idea of power and responsibility - this time through MJ, not Uncle Ben - worked way better that Batman.

[q99]

Yea, solid points.

I think another draft or two- add some earlier bits with Sandman to make that even stronger, remove the most eye-rolly bit- and this'd be a much more widely praised story.

[halloweenjack]

I hate that every time something comes up about it, it's boiled down to 'spider-sperm LOL'

Well, Kaare Andrews has absolutely no one to blame but himself for that; he put "Spider-sperm OMG" on a note on a table in a room at the heart of his story, and left it there for the readers to find. There are a bunch of different ways that Andrews could have tweaked that plot device to make it less risible.

For a story blatantly ripping off TDKR, it's got a lot more heart, is a lot more hopeful, and I actively found it more enjoyable than it's inspiration.

I agree--as remarkable as TDKR was in its time, it hasn't aged well at all--and, again, that seems to have come largely from Andrews' deliberate artistic decision, specifically the one to imitate Miller as inked by Klaus Janson. (Other art of his doesn't really look like that at all.)

[mrstatham]

I have to disagree in terms of how Andrews presented that particular reveal; Sure. it's a slightly risible plot device, but it still speaks to me of how juvenile some fans are that it got turned into a massive joke, presumably because it involved sex. So, yeah, it's kind-of a silly plot device, but one that was - I feel - kind-of rooted in previous stories - like the Master Planner stuff, arising out of Peter giving someone his contaminated blood. And then fans, naturally, blew it up ridiculously.

[palgrave_goldenrod]

To be fair, the radioactive spider-sperm stuff is pretty silly, and it's not really helped by the way the story delivers that revelation in a way that is, to put it generously, a wee-bit overwrought ("Like a spider crawling up you laying a thousand eggs of cancer!" Ummm... okay, Peter). I don't hate Reign the way some people do, but I don't think the mockery it receives is entirely because comic fans are overgrown children who find sex icky; "Spider-Man kills his wife with radioactive semen" isn't exactly an easy concept to take seriously, and the writing doesn't really sell it very well IMHO.

If nothing else, if you want people to take the issue of exposure to radioactive semen killing Mary Jane Watson seriously, nodding to the Incy Wincy Spider as a metaphor probably isn't very helpful to achieving that particular goal.

[walkingthroughforest]

One of the first stories I collected monthly. It has its flaws, but I've always loved it.

If this is the last Spider-Man story, that's not a bad way to go.

[baihu]

I like parts of it but, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but Frank Miller was more nuanced with how he wrote Dark Knight Returns and so it felt more natural. Here I can't help but feel everyone's OOC, and being used as a talking head about a certain point each of them represent, but they don't actually represent themselves.

Maybe with Parker, especially when he talks about MJ and we see his inner dialogue. That makes it more personable. Same with Sandman and his daughter. But everywhere else, the dialog feels unnatural, like it's more trying to get a point across poetically, but not in the context of the situation itself.

I can see why some people would like it, and also why people would react negatively. To me at least, I just felt I've seen it done better in Dark Knight Returns. I hate to keep comparing it, but even the choice of art style and the ever-grinning TV hosts and politician is very much like DKR's, but DKR simply did it better.

[darkknightjrk]

I like Reign, it's a good pastiche of The Dark Knight Returns while still being true to Spider-Man, but DKR is DKR, it is as influential as it is for a reason.

[glprime]

I can enjoy this, but no, really, it's just doing a Spider-Man version of "Dark Knight Returns." Seriously.

And the radioactive fluids bit never stops being painfully bad.

[q99]

It does come across as uneven to me. Some big flaws, some good bits.

[baihu]

Does that mean whereever he sweats, Peter exudes radiation?

Also any toilets he's peed in.

[silicondream]

When he's had organic webbing, was he giving people cancer by webbing them up?

And where's all the radiation coming from, anyway? He was bitten by one piddly irradiated spider; that's less radioactive material than you ingest by eating a couple of bananas. Unless Peter's turned into a living nuclear reactor, he shouldn't be throwing off any more radiation than the average person.

[mrstatham]

The 'piddly irradiated spider' also drastically changed his physiology to give him superpowers, so clearly it's worse than eating a couple of bananas.

[silicondream]

Sure, but presumably that's because the spider's venom was mutated in just the right way to include spider-DNA that spliced itself into his cells yadda yadda technobabble, whereas the radioactive potassium in bananas never happens to produce that one-in-a-million effect. It's not like Peter got nuked with massive amounts of radiation ala Bruce Banner or Dirk Morgna.

I'm not asking for comics to make scientific sense, mind. It's just weird for him to be permanently radioactive when he never got a significant dose of the stuff in the first place, and he doesn't have an "generate radiation" theme to his superpowers.

[mrstatham]

Well, no, but 'radioactive bodily fluids' has been a thing for Peter before - as I keep saying, that he can't donate blood is a canon story from the freaking Silver Age. So he has been permanently and consistently radioactive in that sense while not killing people just by physical proximity.

If the science gets handwaved enough that the spider gives him all of his abilities, and there's pre-existing stories with elements of this, I don't see the issue.

[silicondream]

Oh, I'm not condemning Reign for perpetuating the idea; if it's already canon, may as well use it. (Although it's a little strange that Peter and MJ were apparently unaware of the danger, even though they already knew he was radioactive. Was this story written after the one where they tried to have a baby and Reed Richards did all the tests on them?)

And there's certainly no scientific problem with him being radioactive, yet safe to touch or stand near. Alpha radiation is stopped by the skin, so if he's emitting that, he'd be harmless as long as his fluids didn't actually end up inside you.

[mrstatham]

Why not? He can't give blood, as established in an early story by Stan himself.

[lordultimus]

And then Morlun beat Peter to death with Mary Jane's gravestone.

Seriously, that's what his cameo in Spiderverse was.

[cyberghostface]

Kaare Andrews actually pointed out on Twitter since the one in Spider-Verse is depicted as wearing the cast from #1 that it must be from an alternate universe since he took it off in #2. :p