Spider-Man is celebrating his 50th anniversary
this year by dying. Some party. At wired.com, Laura Hudson reports, somewhat
bitterly, that “five years after the webslinging superhero was forced to
retroactively erase his marriage to Mary Jane in a desperate deal with the
devil (true story), things are about to get even worse for Peter Parker in Amazing Spider-Man No. 700, an issue so
controversial that it inspired numerous death threats against the book's
long-time writer Dan Slott. So what could happen to Spidey that would make his
satanic retroactive divorce look tame in comparison?”
Easy:
he dies. Humberto Ramos draws the death issue.
Says
Hudson: “Supervillain Doctor Octopus secretly takes over Spidey’s body to
become the new Spider-Man. After a climactic confrontation where Peter Parker
forcibly transfers his memories — and apparently, his morality — into the mind
of his body-stealing enemy to make him a better man, the physical form of
Doctor Octopus expires, taking Peter with it. Reborn as a hero, but still
somehow a pompous jerk, Doc Ock declares that he will become a superior
Spider-Man, a turn of phrase that segues neatly into the January launch of the
comic book Superior Spider-Man,
starring Doctor Octopus as Spider-Man.”
Readers,
naturally, were outraged. Foaming at the mouth outraged. And the Internet gives
them a worldwide, cosmos-spanning place to air their fury. “In Slott's case,”
Hudson writes, “this meant a long series of Twitter death threats where readers
actually tagged the writer in their tweets.”
"Did
I know fans were gonna be passionate about this? Sure," Slott told Hudson.
“Comic fans have always been this passionate. They just haven't always had a
place to put their knee-jerk reactions that was as instantaneous as the
Internet."
Slott
says the story has been in the works for 100 issues, eight years, and it
represents a concept that is startling: “At their core, Spider-Man and Doctor
Octopus are not truly that different.”
Slott
explains at somewhat greater length at Opus 304 of the Rants & Raves
edition at RCHarvey.com (i.e., the Usual Place).
Spider-Man
will undoubtedly be back, web-shooters intact and blank eye-holes bulging. Superheroes
die every other month or so, but their deaths are never permanent. Captain
America died, Superman died, Batman died, the Human Torch died—but all these
deaths were subsequently reversed. So we can expect Spider-Man to reclaim his
body from Doc Ock someday. That’s because superhero worlds are worlds of myth,
Hudson points out:
“They're
worlds of enduring myths that are often elastic enough to stretch into
temporary new configurations, but always seem to contract back into their
original shapes. The point of stories where prominent characters die isn't that
they die (they don't), but the potential for innovation that those temporary
absences offer, and whatever the writers and artists manage to do with it.”