Amazing Spider-Man #50

[cyberghostface]

 

Comments

[brerrabbit]

Honestly, I HATE IT. It's such a damn horrible reveal.

It's a spit in the face to harry as a character in my opinion.

Hopefully it gets recon out by the next writer or is actually someone else in disguise.

[cyberghostface]

Yep. I get the impression Spencer is trying to 'undo' Harry's resurrection much like he undid Kraven's by having him commit suicide again. Because if this is Harry then the Harry that came back post-OMD would have to be an imposter (unless this is Horcrux thing).

And I would agree that bringing Harry back was a bad decision (everything about OMD was) but turning him into some demonic zombie thing digging up Gwen Stacy's corpse doesn't improve things.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Ugh, the only thing worse than undoing stuff that's happened before is effectively redoing them.

[deathcrist2000]

Spencer is trying really, really hard to be a DeMatteis rip-off.

[mazway_75]

...Sigh.

Sometimes, even when you see the reveal coming a mile away, it's still annoying when it happens.

[nyadnar17]

Remember back during Dark Reign when Harry and Peter were basically brothers with the same abusive asshole "dad"?

Why the hell can't Harry overcome his abuse and either move or on become a proper hero. Whats wrong with that?

[lordultimus]

Well, if the theory I heard proves true, that Harry was never the actual Harry, but a soulless homunculus created by Mephisto.

(Again, just a theory I heard.)

[armycat23]

Theres nothing wrong with that at all. Im glad that Flash Thompson overcame his ego and selfishness that defined him for a very long time......Harry still having daddy issues is like expired milk that nobody tries taking out of the fridge.

[starwolf_oakley]

Are they turning Harry into Zoom?

"Wally, I mean Peter has to suffer to be a better hero."

[shadowpsykie]

See... ikinda understood that zoom... the zoom that just straight up hates him not so much....

[dragontail]

I'll admit, I'm disappointed.

I gave up on Spidey when "One More Day" came along and (in my opinion) ruined the morality of the character upon whom I'd based much of my morality growing up (YMMV, of course). My LCS gifted me a free copy of Spencer's ASM #1 because it had been damaged in shipping, just for something to read, and I enjoyed it. Kept up with the series via digital, compelled by what appeared to be the groundwork addressing OMD head-on. Even tried the Mary Jane series!

Eventually I lost interest. I came to believe Spencer was more concerned with essaying the 90s Spidey run than he was interested in saying anything new about the characters (plus, his Boomerang obsession is weird... I know why he has it, but it's weird). The Peter/Jonah podcast issues were my departure point - giving Jonah an entire issue to rail against Peter, then showing Peter's response/their reconciliation as a wordless montage felt like lazy writing to me.

Now, this. Sigh... this. It makes sense, looking back through Kindred's appearances so far. And it might even be somewhat interesting, from a conceptual viewpoint, if this is pre-OMD Harry and post-OMD Harry is still running around somewhere (as speculated by Bleeding Cool). Conceptually... in execution, I feel it's Spencer essaying again, this time riffing on the speech pattern/mannerisms given to Harry in the 90s by Jon DeMattias over in Spec' Spidey. Dinner parties, "Pete", over-familiarity with characters... it feels, well, overly familiar.

I'll continue to keep a loose eye on the book, because I remain interested in seeing OMD addressed in-story. But yes - this is disappointing for a 50-issue reveal.

Unless it's a feint. Misdirection. And I'm not sure whether that'd be better or worse.

[tcampbell1000]

I'm honestly thinking it's got to not be Harry now.

[cricharddavies]

Well, I was hoping that it wasn't going to be Flash Thompson, but the possibility that it was going to be Gwen was much more exciting than this.

[thanekos]

" NEXT: .. turns out Gabriel Stacy got a haircut. "

[scorntx]

Initial thoughts:
... oh.
Huh.
... okay then.
(Damn, I was so sure was Ms. Lion.)


Quick question, though... does Kindred get unmasked as being Harry at any point in this ish, or do we just have Normy's say-so?

[cyberghostface]

Just Norman.

[scorntx]

And does he say whether this is Harry?

[cyberghostface]

The letters page does.

[zachbeacon]

I’m not thrilled they drug this mystery along for so long only to go with the obvious choice and an anticlimactic reveal but at least they’re FINALLY doing something with Harry again (it only took 12 years) and they played fair with the mystery instead of being intentionally misleading (Rulk, Identity Crisis) or changing their mind mid-story (too many stories to list).

I still think it should have been Liz, though. She's probably FACADE, right?

PS: Also, how about that Marvel math? “…48, 850, 50…”

[silverhammerman]

We've seen so many supervillains dig up and pose corpses at this point that it's really lacking in shock value. Like, c'mon Kindred, bring something original to the table.

This seeming reveal is underwhelming after 50 issues of interminable buildup, but I don't hate the idea of doing something with Harry Osborn again. Once upon a time he was a major character and a more interesting foil for Spider-Man than his father ever was, and since coming back he's been alternately hapless or completely absent from the narrative. It's been years since I've thought much of Spencer's writing, but getting Harry back in the mix wouldn't be the worst thing he could do, and it's certainly more welcome than him resurrecting Gwen Stacy, or something like that.

[zachbeacon]

Actually, now that you mention it, shouldn't those bodies be a little.. fresher? I could have sworn Slott made it a point to say that, despite the crossover's name, the people resurrected in the Clone Conspiracy were the originals and not clones.

[cyberghostface]

They were still technically clones at the end of the day. The clone Gwen that appeared in Clone Conspiracy ended up melting at the end.

[tripodeca113]

I guess we'll see what happens next.

[steverequin]

Ah, Gwen Stacy, how would we ever recognize you without your headband? It's like Nick Fury's eyepatch.

[steverequin]

Say, whatever happened to the original Gwen clone?

Last time I saw her was during that 1988 summer crossover, The Evolutionary War. If I remember right, the High Evolutionary studies Gwen2 and discovers she is not a real clone, because the cloning technology is too advanced to have been cracked by a university biology teacher like Miles Warren. In fact, she was a woman who was kidnapped and genetically altered by Warren to look like Gwen Stacy, and he was also able to give her a duplicate of Gwen's memory, since that is apparently easier to do than cloning. Then, Daydreamer of the Young Gods restored the woman's original memories and appearance.

But then, the cloning procedure has been retconned into being surprisingly easy, and there's been many Gwen clones since. But what about the first one? Has she been retconned into being a Gwen clone after all?

[cyberghostface]

There was a Spider-Island one-shot that revealed a defective Gwen clone killed the others.