Fanboy Friday: Amazing 'Ending'

If I’m gonna keep calling this Fanboy Friday I really oughta write it / post it earlier in the day. Hm. Hm. Lessons learned. Anyway!

Spider-Man has always been my favourite super-hero. Considering that, you'd think I'd be upset with the current developments in the Spider-Man comics. I'm not. Lemme tell you why.

For the uninitiated, in the last story arc of the long-running series The Amazing Spider-Man, Doctor Octopus was on death's door, dying of cancer, and used his mad-scientist skills to switch bodies with Peter Parker to both save himself and finally murder his arch-enemy in one foul swoop. This sounds like standard super-hero/sci-fi fare to me. You’d expect an eleventh hour solution to this story – Spidey gets his body back, maybe manages to save Doc Ock from cancer in the process, and is left to pick up the pieces Octo-Spidey made of his reputation.

But he doesn’t. The Amazing Spider-Man, which debuted in 1962, ends with issue #700 and the ‘death’ of Spider-Man, ignobly with his mind stuck in the cancer-riddled body of his greatest enemy. A new series picks up from that story and follows Octo-spidey’s attempts to be a super-hero. Why does Doc Ock suddenly want to take up the mantle of super-hero, you ask? Because the eleventh hour solution to the body-swap dilemma had Peter transfers all his memories, including the death of Uncle Ben and the “with great power comes great responsibility” malarkey into Octo-Spidey’s brain. Basically, Doc Ock is now trapped in Spider-Man’s body and has been artificially given a conscience. He decides to deal with this nagging, awful feeling in his brain (it's called morality, Otto) by becoming a superhero and not only that, trying to prove he can do it better than Pete did (hence the name of the new series, The Superior Spider-Man.)

I got this mug from my cousin for Christmas and I’m really happy about it. Despite this weird new storyline, I’m definitely still saying Go Spidey!

You’d think I’d be pissed off by this. My favourite super-person (since before I could read comics!) is dead and his life has been taken over by an imposter. I’ll tell you why this doesn’t bother me. Anyone remember the ‘Death of Superman’? That (actually pretty compelling) tale from the early nineties where Superman got punched to death by Frankenstein and almost single handedly caused the comics-collecting price bubble to burst by flooding the market with eighty different collector’s edition lenticular cover varients that Dads everywhere (including my own) all bought as an investment for their kid’s college tuition?

That sure lasted. Superman bounced back a year later (sporting a bitchin’ Fabio haircut) and all was right with the world. Same thing happened to Captain America a couple years ago after he was assassinated. No matter how many press releases you put out calling this “a game changer” and/or “the new status quo,” you’re not gonna convince me that death is gonna take on ol’ Webhead (especially with Andrew Garfield playing Peter Parker, not Otto Octavius on the big screen for the foreseeable future). People come back to life in comics all the time. Spidey will find his way back to the land of the living soon enough, and in the meantime, The Superior Spider-Man #1 has convinced me that its gonna be a really fun story-arc getting him back.

A lot of critics and fans have been saying that this new Spider-Man isn’t likeable – but really, that’s the point. He’s still Doc Ock. And I for one loved to hate Doc Ock. He’s my favourite Spider-Man villain, and seeing him flounder and desperately attempt to not cackle maniacally while trying to be heroic is hysterical.

Octo-Spidey (I’mma just keep calling him that) is great. Despite how often the comic tries to convince you that re-living Peter’s memories has somehow reformed him, I don’t buy it. Doc Ock isn’t a super-hero. Doc Ock wanting to help people doesn’t make sense and he’s consciously aware of it. His entire attitude towards super-heroing seems to be like he’s compelled against his better judgement to do it. I’m really enjoying the feeling that he’s only taking up this super-hero thing because he’s had the original Spider-Man’s conscience duct-taped onto his mind - he’s compelled by a part of someone else’s personality!

There’s a scene in Superior #1 where Ock runs away from a fight, basically going “screw this!” because he’s getting his ass handed to him (by Speed Demon no less), and he could care less about the robbery he’s trying to stop. But, sure enough, against his will he flings himself back into the line of fire to save a cop, asking himself in as many words “why on Earth did I do that?”

It’s great! I’m really hoping this is leading to an arc where Ock, the longer he lives his life as Spider-Man, slowly moves away from being a super-hero merely because he’s compelled to do so and more towards being a person who is truly reformed and does good of his own accord. I think it’d be a really interesting journey to take him on to have him very slowly and methodically realize the true meaning of “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Unfortunately, I’m unsure this is the direction they’re gonna go in. The twist at the end of issue #1 (SPOILERS) reveals that Peter Parker’s full personality is still kicking around Doc Ock’s subconsciousness, manifesting on the page as a kind of blue wavery Force ghost. While I’m happy to find out Pete’s still ‘alive’ (and, therefore, ostensibly gonna be back in the driver’s seat of Spider-Man’s body before too long) I really hope Peter’s phantasmal presence won’t rob Ock of any agency in his choices to do good. I think it’d be cool to have Ock slowly integrate his bequeathed conscience into his own personality as he learns what it means to be a hero – but if that conscience is literally another person in his head, staying his hand and preventing him from being a villain, it kinda robs him of any character development.

Another potential, very gross snag in where this series could go is the Mary Jane problem. Octo-Pete is, as of issue #1, is trying to ‘re-kindle’ his romance with Mary Jane. If by re-kindle I mean not tell Mary Jane he’s actually Peter’s greatest enemy trapped in Peter’s body. And then ogle her chest. Gross.

Since I’ve never thought of Doc Ock as being evil enough to be a rapist, (especially not now he’s supposedly the protagonist of this series) I'm going to be very, very upset if anything sexual happens between those characters before Ock comes clean because that’s what it'd be. Rape. And that’s incredibly gross. Especially if the writers take it lightly and act like it’s no big deal. I’m really hoping, if the look of horror on MJ’s face on the cover of issue #2 is any indication, that this’ll be dealt with in an appropriate manner very soon. What I’m hoping for is that MJ realizes something’s wrong with her boyfriend, forcing Ock to come clean and feel awful when he realizes what he was really doing and she inevitably lambasts him for attempted rape. Basically, they need to handle it like that episode of Buffy did when the Trio were horrified to realize that if they’re mind-controlling a woman to have sex with them its no longer consensual.

Long story short, Pete will be back in the driver’s seat soon enough, and until then, the Superior Spider-Man limited series (it’s gonna be a limited series. Trust me) is off to a good start, and, barring any gross sexual-political missteps (which, I’m sad to say is a distinct possibility) this is gonna be a really fun series. I’m still kinda disappointed that the “new Spider-Man” didn’t end up being a time-displaced Miguel O’Hara, a.k.a. Spider-Man 2099, as had been red-herringed on twitter, but, ah well. Can’t win ‘em all.

Also, the Living Brain is in Superior #1. That’s reason enough to pick it up.