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By Jason Bourgeois
Welcome back! While DC has been going crazy with reboots lately, Marvel has mostly been quiet. Ok, sure. They blew up Oklahoma in Fear Itself, the X-Men renumbered, and they had Manhattan overrun with spider creatures, but really. That's business as usual.
Part of me wanted to talk about recent rumours of a new direction for the X-books, and a potential Marvel reboot, but I hate dealing in rumours. I would hate to sit here and get all worked up over these things and then find out, oops! Not true! That was a lot of energy and vitriol spent on nothing! And yes, I know this is the internet, and it runs on vitriol and prejudgement, but I have better things to do with my time.
Instead, let me drift back to those spider creatures. One of my more infamous rants was on Marvel's decision to have Spidey, and more accurately Mary Jane, undo their wedding through a deal with Mephisto to save Aunt May. I wanted to set my Spider-Man collection on fire. Instead, sanity mostly prevailed, and I just dropped the books, mainly because while I could see there was some quality work being done there, the stories just held little interest for me, and it was hard to read them in the very fresh shadow of One More Day.
I recently returned to the books when Dan Slott became the sole writer, since I've more often than not enjoyed his work, and a lot of time had passed, so that the wounds were not so fresh. And I want to say I was pleasantly surprised, but I wasn't, not really. I like Slott, and the stories were exactly what I expected. They were good. I was back on the Spidey bus!
There were still a few annoying bits, like you have to deal with the wedding still being erased, but if you take the stories for what they are, and don't care about the minutiae of all the details, they are quite enjoyable.
But then came Spider-Island. This story was simply amazing. It had been building in literal ways from story points across the years and bubbling to a natural tipping point, and also built very much on many, many thematic points as well. It's one of those stories that when you see the whole thing, see all the details leading up to it, and realise you have just read a fantastic magic trick where everything comes together so well, you almost can't believe it.
Beyond my gushing hyperbole, the story centered around some old Spider-Man villains teaming up and taking their mutual interests to the next level, trying to turn Manhattan into an island of spider-creatures, that would then spread across the country and globe, converting the entire planet into a giant spider-kingdom, humanity being long left behind. The story involved many of New York's heroes in logical ways that didn't make you wonder why so and so wasn't doing anything, they were! They were integral to the plot, even! But all the big heroics fell either on Spidey's shoulders themselves, or a few of his main cast. So, very much a Spider-Man story, but using the shared universe concept so very well.
During the course of the story, Marvel was teasing the coming of a newish character, the Scarlet Spider, in their own title once the event was over. The character was shrouded in mystery, and it was open season on just whom they might be, what with everyone in New York now being a Spider-Man or Woman. My top pick was Mary Jane somehow retaining her spider powers, but I was dead wrong. My second pick was the clone of Peter Parker, Kaine, and that one actually panned out.
The Scarlet Spider was an overblown idea from the 90s when another clone of Spidey, Ben Reilly, came on the scene, and shook up the Spider-Man books with the revelation that HE was the One, True Spider-Man, and our Peter had been the clone, since the 70s. The basic idea was fine, interesting, and a great vehicle for stories and character building. But Marvel pushed too hard, dragged it out too long, and flooded the market with too many books. Spider-Man almost died as a franchise, and it was only recentlyish that it really recovered.
So, bringing clones back, and some of the masterminds from that story, and the name, was a big gamble from Marvel. They were banking on an ill-advised idea from the 90s being popular, and while time will tell on that, the Scarlet Spider comicbook actually is pretty good.
Kaine is basically the opposite of Peter. He's selfish, he wants no responsibility, he just wants to run away and live as normal a life as a spider-powered clone of Peter Parker can live. That goes about as well as you might expect when he hits Houston, trying to put as much distance between him and NYC as he can.
He gets dragged into affairs of a slave smuggling ring out of Mexico, and is slowly drawn into a life in Houston, where he will basically become their own Spider-Man, no matter how much he may want to be keeping a low profile.
The book still needs to build up a solid, familiar cast of friends and enemies, but Kaine is a fascinating character, since he is deliberately playing against what you expect to see, since he's from Peter, but NOT Peter, and doesn't want to be Peter. The book plays with those expectations, and has a number of mirrors deliberately held up to Spidey's way of doing things and origins. It sometimes gets a bit bogged down in the whole clone mess, but that's hard to avoid.
And you just have to love a book with meta commentary of Kaine fearing that everyone is coming after him, but no one cares about him one way or the other, which was very much how everyone figured this book would be received.
It's got a ways to go, since it's building a whole new world for the character, but it is off to a solid start, and I am looking forward to reading more about the other Spider-Man. And any superhero NOT in New York City is a breath of fresh air.
I'd still rather be reading about Mary Jane, the super-heroine though.
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