Winning Friends And Influencing People – “Superior Spider-Man” Fired…Don’t Get Excited Yet.

Marvel is throwing another comic book teaser our way, this one somewhat less mysterious than yesterday’s XX promo, but still ambiguous enough to make us wonder…

…how can “that old Parker luck” (as Comic Book Resources called it) run out so fast when Peter Parker isn’t even driving the bus anymore? I mean, look at those faces teased up on that image: OctoSpidey seems to have pissed off the whole of The Avengers and gotten himself fired. That’s fast work, faster than my Uncle Louie can get himself drunk, disorderly and tasered at GED Prom Night Zumba at the Learning Annex.

In any event, the “Fired” teaser also points to a new arc that will see Ryan Stegman departure. Humberto Ramos will be joining writer Dan Slott, as penciler. Fans of big-eyed, lanky looking manga type characters, rejoice.

Superior Spider-Man drops at your LCS this Wednesday, January 9. Slott and Ramos’s new arc begins in April 2013.

Sticky Fingers: Avenging Spider-Man #15.1 Review

Editor’s Note: With great spoilers must come great responsibility. More or less.

Okay, so Peter Parker is “dead,” and Otto Octavius is Spider-Man now. Whether you agree with how Dan Slott did it or not, it’s the way things are for the time being. And given that Spider-Man appears regularly in four different comic books that I can think of off the top of my head, if you have any intention of following Marvel Comics – particularly the Avengers books – for the next year or so, you’re going to need to come to terms with this new Spider-Man, and get to know what Otto’s like now that he’s Spider-Man, and what makes him tick. You know, besides being suddenly able to walk, see his own junk without a mirror, and leer at Mary Jane (and make no mistake, it will just be leering; if you follow Dan Slott’s Twitter feed, you know that he’s bought himself enough trouble without setting himself up to be confronted by women in red wigs at every comic convention, asking him why he supports date rape via deception in his comics).

Marvel Editorial, possibly realizing that killing Peter on December 26th and leaving readers to wait two weeks for the debut of The Superior Spider-Man on January 9th would only give the most rankled ones more opportunity to figure out how to plant hooker toes on Slott and then dime the police, made the decision to give us the first real taste of the new Spider-Man in Avenging Spider-Man #15.1, released this week in parallel with The Amazing Spider-Man #700.

So: what do we get in our first full issue of Doc Ock as Spider-Man? Scenes of a former villain embracing the responsibility that comes with his newfound power? Or does he frantically masturbate to Pete’s iPhone gallery of Mary Jane pictures before going to the barber, handing over his favorite bowl and saying, “Just follow this”?

End of The (Web) Line: Amazing Spider-Man #700 Review

Editor’s Note: Better Yet, with my unparalleled genius — and my boundless ambitions — I’ll be a better Spoiler-Man than you ever were.

I hated Star Trek: Generations. Yes, I know this is a review of The Amazing Spider-Man #700, but just bear with me for a second.

The climax of Generations featured the death of Captain Kirk. If I’m remembering correctly (and if I’m not, screw it; I’m not watching that pile of shit again), a bunch of scaffolding collapsed on Kirk, killing him slowly due to internal injuries. “It was… fun,” Kirk said. “Fuck this bullshit,” I said.

The problem wasn’t that Kirk died. The problem was the way that Kirk died. Sure, he went down fighting evil, and he did it even knowing that no one would ever know that he did what he did, and that’s fine… but there is no way on God’s Green Earth that James Tiberius Kirk dies due to shitty construction and a bad step. It is wrong, and it is anti-climactic.

You want to kill Jim Kirk? There is only one way he dies: he goes down with the ship.

With that let’s turn an eye to The Amazing Spider-Man #700.

There is a lot in this comic book that writer Dan Slott does reasonably well. He shows two mortal enemies locked in battle, and demonstrates that at least in terms of intelligence, they are pretty evenly matched. He clearly spent some time thinking about Internet gutter wits (Hey Mom! I’m on the Internet!) looking for plot holes and preemptively plugging them, and gives a reasonable explanation for how and why the combatant who survives will act in the way he must for the ongoing conceit to even remotely have legs. And he gave himself an out for the new status quo… which I think we all know isn’t really the new normal. After all, let’s remember that , in the past five or six years, Marvel has killed and resurrected Captain America and Thor twice each. Big name characters in the Marvel Universe get killed and rise from the grave so often they make Jesus look like D-Man.

And yes, someone does die here, however temporarily. And Slott does his best to make that death emotional and moving, and succeeds up to a point. Problem is, that death doesn’t feel earned… and it is the equivalent of dying in a Goddamned scaffolding collapse.

So who dies, and is it all worth it? Well, let’s talk about that after the jump, with one warning: after that jump, there will be spoilers.

Questionable Mental States: Daredevil #21 Review

Editor’s Note: Kingpin left me with ten spoilers in my pocket. I found a comics Web site that makes change.

Whether purposefully or accidentally, Marvel and writer Mark Waid have put themselves into a difficult position by putting the first chronological appearance of The Superior Spider-Man – that is, whoever Spider-Man will wind up being after the events of next week’s The Amazing Spider-Man #700 – into this week’s Daredevil #21.

Because with all the hype and anticipation surrounding what will happen with Spider-Man (as an example: once we published an article about the leak to the Internet of the ending to The Amazing Spider-Man #700, our Web traffic doubled… and we didn’t even publish the actual spoilers), what he does and how he acts in Daredevil #21 will be almost as important to readers as the story about Ol’ Hornhead. It’s kinda like casting the Octomom or John Wayne Bobbit in a porno flick; you’ll get a lot of rubberneckers not watching the thing for its intended purpose.

So even though Spider-Man’s appearance in Daredevil #21 makes complete and total sense with regards to the greater story – not only the story of some still unknown party trying to drive Matt nuts, but of Matt’s conscious decision to lighten up that goes back to Waid’s earliest issues – his appearance here, before the resolution of the current arc in Spider-Man’s home title, means the issue (not the story; there is a distinction there) has a massive, nearly crippling distraction that I doubt Waid originally intended. It makes the reading of this individual issue, during this particular point in pre-Amazing Spider-Man #700 time, an almost schizophrenic experience, where what Spider-Man does and says in two pages is almost, if not more, important to the comic reader than the actual Daredevil story in the preceding 18 pages.

So I’m gonna review it that way: in two parts.

The Internet Is Not Your Friend: Pages From Amazing Spider-Man #700 Leaked (Spoiler-Free)

So the comics reading world has been waiting on pins and needles to find out what happens in The Amazing Spider-Man #700, as it leads into The Superior Spider-Man: will Peter Parker be able to reclaim his body from Doctor Octopus? And if he can, will Ock have done something terrible to make it uncomfortable to be Peter Parker for a while, leading him to change up his costume? Or maybe will the fact that another soul has been in Peter’s body shake loose some after effects from Peter’s deal with Mephisto, reversing the effects of One More Day (a personal favorite theory)?

The anticipation is simply crippling; writer Dan Slott and Marvel Editorial have gone a long way to prevent spoilers of the issue reaching the street, so the idea of having to wait until December 26th for the issue to go on sale to see what happens at the end of the comic is just…

What’s that? The last few pages of the issue have leaked online? Along with a synopsis of the events of the last issue?

I Hate Being Right All The Time

The New York Comic-Con is under full swing, and news is trickling out fast and furious. We reported yesterday about the announcement that Marvel will be releasing The Superior Spider-Man after The Amazing Spider-Man closes up show with issue 700, and how writer Dan Slott is playing things close to the vest as to what will happen to Peter Parker in Amazing Spider-Man #700, who will be under the mask in Superior Spider-Man, and what makes this version of Spider-Man darker than Peter Parker currently is. And in the course of our reporting, I spun out a couple of theories of what is going to happen and who might be behind the mask and why.

Well, that was Thursday’s big story. Yesterday afternoon, at the NYCC Marvel Now panel, Marvel Editor in Chief Axel Alonso revealed the cover to The Superior Spider-Man #2.

Threat Or Menace: Slott on The Superior Spider-Man

So yeah – turns out they were talking about Spider-Man.

Yesterday was the retailer’s breakfast at New York Comic Con where The Amazing Spider-Man writer Dan Slott announced what the hell “Superior” stood for, and apparently he then turned right around and told USA Today that, following the sooper seekrit events of the upcoming Amazing Spider-Man #700 – which will mark the end of that title, at least until someone at Marvel realizes there’s money to be made in releasing a book with the words “Spider-Man” and “800” on the cover – he will be writing a book titled The Superior Spider-Man about… some guy in a Spider-Man suit.

A guy who might, or might not, be Peter Parker.

“I’ve always been the omniscient hand that’s been protecting Peter Parker and Spider-Man, and not letting anything too bad happen to him,” [Slott said]. “And now I’ve become this cruel god. There’s something exciting about that, about going, ‘Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha, here is what’s going to happen to you, Spider-Man!’ And it’s drastic and it’s big and it’s exciting and it’s never been done before.”

So here’s what we know: Slott says that in The Amazing Spider-Man #700, Doctor Octopus has only one day to live, and he knows that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, and he is going to do something unfriendly to Pete. And whatever that thing is, it is going to lead to a somewhat darker Spider-Man.

So what do you have in mind, Dan?