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]

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.