Amazing Spider-Man #602

[cyberghostface.insanejournal.com]

So basically, the Chameleon's back in town. Now he's sadistically dipping people into acid after taking their identities away from them. He wants to infilitrate Mayor Jonah's inner circle, so he kidnaps Peter Parker (who's working for Jonah at the moment.)





Meanwhile, Chameleon is mimicking Peter's voice while spraying him in the face with some sort of adhesive(?) that makes a mask out of the face.







Anyone else getting a feeling of déjà vu?



And then there's Paul Jenkins' Webspinners arc where Chameleon went after MJ as Pete. So this makes it, what, the third time this has happened?

Comments

[skalja.insanejournal.com]

I think we're actually talking past each other, and since it was my rueful aside, let me try and clarify: I'm talking just about the characterization. Being a Silver Age character, and a female one at that, Gwen Stacy's personality was ... er, unstable ... and not only has she gotten a post-death canonization ala Uncle Ben or Barry Allen, but most of the writers who've tackled extended stories about her in the modern age still portray her as the Ideal Girlfriend. So not only are we supposed to see the Silver Age sloppy characterization as internally consistent, we're supposed to think it's the ideal of young womanhood. (This is especially creepy in Marvels, in my opinion.) Gwen Stacy is a character with no goals and almost no interests of her own, not because she's dead, but because no one thought about giving her any. Who cares? She's just the imaginary girlfriend.

On that level, "Sins Past" works for me as a valiant failure because it not only doesn't gloss past the inconsistencies, it brings the inconsistencies to the forefront -- suggesting that when Peter, the rest of the cast, and the reader were putting Gwen on a pedestal, she was snapping under the pressure. (Thus why I say the Gwen/Norman makes sense.) It showed Gwen with clear-cut goals of her own: modest ones, yes, but waaaay better than the, "The invading tanks are so pretty" of Marvels or the catfighting in Spider-Man: Blue. And by retconning the reason for her murder it worked really hard to make the Original Fridging a tragedy for her own sake, and not for the hero's. (Didn't really succeed, but it tried.)

Oh, and astonishingly enough it was a story about the girlfriend cheating on the guy which wasn't judgmental. Too bad fandom, uh, missed the point.

Of course, then there's the fact that the story, uh, sucked. And speaking on a meta-narrative level as you are, I don't disagree with you at all. I'm not sure I would draw as direct a line between Sins Past and Norman Sue, since I'm pretty sure Marvel Knights: Spider-Man ignores Sins Past, and Mark Millar wrote both MK:SM and Civil War -- but then, I also try and tune out a lot of what Quesada says these days. Apparently, uh ... it's for the best.

(It really weirded me out how blatantly Norman/Lily rehashed Sins Past and yet how hard they worked not to mention it.)

What irritates me about Sins Past is that there's an alternate universe story out there somewhere which would have had the same plot, but been written as a devastating indictment of the Silver Age Groupie's fascination with his fictitious, eternally virginal, Girlfriend-on-a-Pedestal. Goddamnit, that would have been an awesome story.

[fredneil.livejournal.com (from insanejournal.com)]

Having no goals or interests is pretty much standard for supporting characters at the time. I wouldn't say that Harry or Capt. Stacy or J. John Jameson were any more fleshed out. Mainly, you just saw them in relation to the main character. That said, giving Gwen to goal of "have sex with the father of one of my best friends" isn't much in the way of character development, or of positive, well-rounded portrayals of women in comic books.

When you mention Peter being non-judgemental, you touch on one of the problems I have with Sins Past. It's easy to be non-judgemental and forgiving toward someone who died years earlier. It would have been more impressive if it had turned out that Peter had known about it all along and had been willing to raise the children with her. That would have really been what a hero would do, as opposed to just not being a jerk. It would also have taken away one of my objections to Sins Past, that there was a period when Gwen acted as though everything was normal between her and Peter when she'd actually had the one night stand and then given birth. I suspect that if they had gone that way, though, the reaction from some wouldn't be "he was willing to raise Gwen's children as his own, how commendable" but rather "DUDE. Don't get played by a woman like that."

I'm with you on Marvels. I can understand why he'd remember her that way, but that panel made me wince. This is another place where denial comes in handy. The way I see it through denial vision is that Gwen Stacy was a great character who was written by Stan Lee, but was only used once after that, when Gerry Conway killed her. Other use of her by Conway? Nah, didn't happen.

[skalja.insanejournal.com]

Harry, I will grant you. Captain Stacy was not that well developed, but despite being "the girlfriend's father" he had distinct relationships with multiple cast members and yes, a goal: find out who Spider-Man is. He even discussed that goal with another character (Robbie Robertson) and angsted about it a bit (what to do if he found out). Gwen, uh ... well, she was a science major, but that was an excuse to get her into classes with Peter. And once, memorably, on the Daily Bugle expedition to the Savage Land, where she posed in a bikini for pictures and was then kidnapped by Kraven ... yeah, look, I think that story is hilarious, but you see the problem, right?

Gwen's goal was not "having sex with Norman;" it was to get her kids away from him, to be honest with Peter and to raise her children, ideally with Peter. Like I said, modest goals, but at least she had them.

What makes Marvels ultra-creepy is that a) it's not Peter thinking that this behavior is charming, it's Phil Sheldon, who is old enough to be her dad, and b) he is thinking how charming this is while this is happening. In any realistic story -- in the story that Marvels is supposed to be, aka a more realistic Marvel universe set in realtime -- Phil would be grabbing her out of harm's way and asking her what the hell she was thinking. But then, that's the moment it really sank in that Marvels is actually a love letter from Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, not a real story.

[fredneil.livejournal.com (from insanejournal.com)]

As a goal, that's not too different from the way Stan Lee characterized her. She always was protective of the people she loved; She tried to protect Peter, she tried to protect her father, so it's consistent that she'd try to protect her children. I don't see that as adding anything to her character. And she wasn't honest with Peter. If we didn't have an established history, that would be one thing, but we've already seen her during the time she was supposed to be pregnant and after the children were born and she's acting as though nothing happened.

On Marvels, I agree with your point b. He should have reacted like that. He says they didn't seem to be there to kill people, but still... big invading tank. I really don't see anything creepy about him thinking her behavior is charming, though. He's not seeing her in a romantic way, it's more "I wish I was still that innocent." The thing is, she's acting as though she were an innocent 12-year old, not an innocent 20-year old, never mind that if there's one thing she shouldn't be innocent about, it's the possibility of non-superpowered people ending up as collateral damage when superpowered people are around.

[skalja.insanejournal.com]

I would think it would be a good thing that Gwen's goal in Sins Past is consistent with her characterization (what there is of it) in Lee and Conway's writing. I guess we disagree on how big a difference it makes to have a character who's been batted around for thirty years' worth of "perfect dead girlfriend" stories stand up and say, "No, this is what I want."

One might argue that it's a bit futile because, this being a retcon, Norman killed her anyway -- on the other hand, you could also see it as Norman, business tycoon and supervillain, being threatened enough by a teenage girl that he felt he had to kill her. Which is a way better story than "superhero's girlfriend get's dumped off a bridge."

And no, she wasn't honest, which was one of the "Sins" she was trying to face up to when she died, but I don't think she was all that forthright in the original comics, either, so I can't say I thought it was a huge violation of her character. She's a scared teenage girl who hides something she shouldn't because her dad's died and she doesn't want her boyfriend to leave her; then she grows a spine, and up. (And then she gets murdered for it before she can fix things: the tragedy of Gwen, not the tragedy of Pete.) I can work with that fairly easily.

Back to Marvels, the reason I think it's creepy isn't because I think Phil has romantic intentions towards Gwen, but I do think he's putting her on a pedestal in that grand ol' chivalric tradition. I don't remember exactly the text he uses but there's a lot of implication that she's too pure to live, etc. etc. It's not Phil Sheldon talking about this nice young girl he just met, it's Busiek and Ross, Silver Age fanboys, talking about the quintessential Silver Age Girlfriend, Gwen Stacy. But because, as you said, Gwen acts like a 12-year-old rather than a 20-year-old, there's a very disturbing picture being painted there of what the Silver Age fanboy wants their ideal girlfriend to act like.

[fredneil.livejournal.com (from insanejournal.com)]

I like that it's consistent with Lee's characterization, I just don't think it's a big deal for that reason. Standing up to Norman Osborne and telling him to leave her children alone isn't that much different from standing up to Spider-Man and telling him to leave Peter alone, especially since she probably thought she had more reason to be afraid of Spider-Man than of Osborne.(As for Conway's characterization, he pretty much trashed the character in the little that he used her before he killed her off. Writing female characters is not one of his strengths.) I think we're coming at this from different perspectives. My image of Gwen is as she was originally written, yours is 30 years of perfect dead girlfriend stories. In that context, I don't disagree that this kind of story could be an improvement. Peter SHOULD romanticize her in his memory, but that the way memory work, not objective truth.

You have a point about "Norman, business tycoon and supervillain, being threatened enough by a teenage girl that he felt he had to kill her" being a better story than "superhero's girlfriend gets dumped off a bridge," but this isn't just a story about a supervillain and a teenage girl," this is a story about Norman Osborne and Gwen Stacy, so it has to fit in that context (And like I said last time we went over this, you've made it sort of fit, but it still requires a lot of work that they should be doing, not you.), and it's a story in a comic about Spider-Man. If he killed Gwen because he felt threatened by her, you've made Spider-Man irrelevant in one of his strongest stories. Plus, it doesn't quite fit with the actual story, where he wasn't looking for Gwen, he was looking for Peter and found Gwen.

I don't know if it's a good idea to bring theories about creators' wish-fulfillment into this discussion. It might be a bad protrayal of Gwen Stacy, but it fits in with the theme of Marvels where Phil Sheldon becomes bitter and cynical, and there's the possibility that he's romanticizing HIS memories of Gwen to fit in with that. Which is a problem when those memories are presented as what actually happened.

But if we're doing that, we can also look at Sins Past as an aging fanboy's fantasy about defiling the 19/20 year old virgin and suffering no consequences. That was my problem with a lot of defenses of Sins Past, both official and not. They came across as an extreme version of a Madonna/whore complex, where all women are really whores deep down, and giving one sexual sins to atone for makes her more realistic. Using "there are some women who do that" as a defense without showing why it applies to this specific woman is essentially saying "there are no women who wouldn't do that."

That said, I have no sympathy for the "they made Gwen a slut" line of criticism, either.

[box_in_the_box.insanejournal.com]

The problem with what you're saying here is that, even if it was done "right," we STILL would have wound up with something akin to the well-meaning but incredibly insensitive portrayals of rape in the '70s and '80s on TV, in which rape was shown to be a bad thing because it makes the MEN who knew the women who were raped feel bad. Gwen was already dead, so that automatically imposes an upper limit on the degree to which the story can be ABOUT her, unless it was told ENTIRELY in flashback, so what we got was basically the Marvel version of Sue Dibny getting murdered, and then RETROACTIVELY raped, all so that the MAN can be all like NOOOOOO THEY TOUCHED MY STUFF.

[skalja.insanejournal.com]

I disagree, but I also think it's kind of silly to keep arguing about a hypothetical "right" scenario when we both agree that the real story sucks and only disagree on the extent of suckitude.

That said, thank you! I've always really hated that "Osbooooooooorn!" line, and never quite been able to articulate why ... "You touched my stuff," is perfect.