The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal - January 6th, 2008
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11:47 am
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A Flurry Of Stupidity
I used to have a joke about Star Trek 3: The Search For Spock, one of the lesser lights in the Star Trek movie pantheon. I said that Trek 3 would have been vastly improved if, instead of an actual plot, it simply had Leonard Nimoy standing there for two hours with a cue card that read, "SPOCK COMES BACK. THE ENTERPRISE IS DESTROYED."
Having read "One More Day," Marvel's attempt to roll back Spider-Man's continuity, I see now that I was wrong.
Because "One More Day" is essentially Marvel's attempt to hold up a big cue card that says, "IGNORE THE LAST TWENTY YEARS." And frankly, there are ways to do it well, but this wasn't it. Joe Quesada says it had to happen because kids hated Spider-Man being married, but I don't think that's true; I never heard anyone bitching overmuch, and certainly the kids he's referencing - young ones - don't really care much for romance of any kind. The teenaged fans never saw Parker as a playa anyhow, so I doubt there was really the groundswell of anti-Spidermanian hatred he claims.
Plus, you know, why hasn't there been an outcry against that deuced Richards pairing in Fantastic Four? But hey, it is what it is.
The real problem is that it's difficult to write plots for a married character, since there's one less source of drama to go to. Spider-Man is the most emo comic around - I wouldn't be surprised to see a variant on Spidey where he shoots webs by cutting his own arms - and the point is to have a brave kid struggling against unwinnable odds. If there was a comics crossover from any universe, Peter Parker's true nemesis would be Lucy, forever pulling the football away from him just before the kick.
It's hard to write comics about a schlub when you have a guy in a good marriage to a supermodel, and angsty marriages are just worrying because nobody really wants to write about the pain of divorce. So Joe wants to get rid of him because frankly, Spider-Man is not a character, but a commodity.
That's right; the one eternal thing about the big comics is that they have to be written. No matter what, Marvel has to churn out three Spidey comics a month... And that sort of drive does not ensure quality. When they can get a good writer or an artist, that's awesome, and it certainly plumps the sales, but there's a certain guaranteed profitability with Spider-Man that makes it immune to bad writing. People love the character. They'll tune in anyway. Sure, you could hold off on publishing until you got a good Spider-Man comic, but you'd be missing out on 75,000 comics a month.
What that means is that while good writers could take the challenge of a married Spider-Man and run with it, bad writers would go, "Can't we get them divorced? This coming up with unique plots is too hard." And Spider-Man's environment, just like any regular comic, is always going to be reset to the lowest common denominator so that terrible writers can churn out hack plots.
That's a fact of life. I accept it. But One More Day doesn't even try.
See, the fun of continuity - such as it is - is that we pay attention to what happened. And what One More Day does is have Mephisto - a guy with no history nor connection to Spider-Man at all beyond the usual run-ins - come in and go, "Hey. I'll rewrite history for you. None of this stuff ever happened because you guys are so totally awesome, I want to see you broken up. Mwoo, hah, and hah."
So what happens? Everything we know is erased for no particularly good reason, and the environment we have isn't particularly thrilling. I mean, it's exactly what we had before, insofar as I can tell - a complete and utter restoration of the old status quo. Which may serve a financial purpose, but from a plot purpose it's kinda boring.
In other words, it's a cue card saying, "REWIND TWENTY YEARS. SHARE AND ENJOY."
There could have been ways to do it well. I'm all for a good death - that's a lot of angst, even if I would have said that it was done better with Gwen Stacey. Or you could have gotten some omnipotent being who did have a link to Spider-Man by bringing back The Beyonder, a big bad-ass who really could have done a number on the Marvel universe. There were tons of ways to do it well, but Mephisto might as well have been replaced by 24-point Ariel font that said "EVIL PLOT DEVICE."
It wasn't emotionally satisfying, and it wasn't particularly exciting. That's a fail.
Plus, the author - the Bablyon 5 guru J. Michael Straczynski - all but came out and said, "Yeah, this storyline's shit, but Marvel made me do it and I respect Marvel." One wonders how much you respect Marvel if you then turn around and air your dirty laundry in public - he says he angered a few writers with his editorial calls when he was heading up B5, but I'd be curious to see if he'd hire them again if they'd gone in rec.arts.babylon5 and posted the reasons why the version that aired was shit.
So we have a big change done for lazy reasons, done in a not-good way, and uncorking a bunch of dumb drama along the way. Alas, it's a total not-good, and I've just emailed to ask 'em to take Spidey off of my pull list life support. Not that I don't love Spidey... But if the future is the past, then I might as well just pull out my back issues from the good ol' days and read them. Those, I know are good.
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12:00 pm
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I'd Be Willing To Bet....
....That in the future, there will be at least a couple of videogames that look something like this.
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02:36 pm
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Things That Are Not Good
Putting the finishing touches after eleven hours of work on a Magic-related YouTube video that is 11:18 minutes long, only to discover that YouTube has a hard ten-minute limit on length for new members. (If you're old, you get grandfathered in, which is why I didn't notice it - the other YouTube guys I know routinely post thirteen-minute extravaganzas. Bleah.)
However, if you like cat macros and motivational posters, you'll love this. If and when you see it. Derf.
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