I’ve had two weeks and a few readings to digest Amazing Spider-Man 700 and the accompanying Avenging Spider-Man 15.1. Fellow Prairie Nerd Micah Choquette’s take
can be found here,, but with the release of the first issue of Superior Spider-Man coming up Wednesday, here are my thoughts on the Amazing finale:
I hate Marvel Comics.
OK, hate’s a strong word. Strongly dislike, we’ll say. I definitely have a major desire to find Dan Slott and put nasty-tasting things in his coffee. Chris Yost, too.
Seriously, though, the story was well-told. And Humberto Ramos’ art was quality work. My disappointment in the story wasn’t in how it was told or how it looked. My problem was simply in the story itself.
NOTE: Obligatory spoiler warning here, but if you’re reading this and haven’t read the aforementioned issues yet, you deserve to have them spoiled.
For those who need it, here’s a quick recap. Doctor Octopus managed to switch bodies with Peter Parker thanks to some ingenious technology. That left Spider-Man’s greatest villain in the superhero’s healthy body, and Parker stuck in the dying bad guy’s frail form. The expected end would be for Peter, who Marvel has pushed more recently as a genius, to figure things out and switch bodies back just before Doc Ock died.
Of course, where’s the drama in that? Nope, Marvel decided to kill off one of their most beloved heroes, similar to when they shot Steve Rogers (Captain America) in 2007.
Putting Otto Octavius, one of Marvel’s greatest villains, into the Spider-Man costume and killing off Parker was shocking to say the least. At a point in the issue, I accepted what was going to happen. You could see that Peter wasn’t going to escape this final, ultimate deathtrap that Doctor Octopus had set. Parker finally had been outsmarted by his nemesis. I held out hope for a while that maybe a sliver of his psyche would invade Octavius’ mind and the two would end up sharing Parker’s body (something I still think might happen in Superior Spider-Man), but in the end it seemed so final.
And pointless. That’s what infuriated me about the whole thing. Usually, when a comic company decides to kill off a major character, it’s at the end of a huge storyline that stretches through the company’s entire line or through a major arc in the character’s own books. When Rogers died, it was at the end of the Civil War storyline. When Professor X died (most recently), it was at the end of Avengers vs. X-Men.
With Peter Parker, the final storyline was just a few issues (yes, it technically started in issue 600, but the actual arc that ended it only ran three issues). It seemed rather rushed, which was good because it added to the sense of urgency for Peter but bad because killing a major character should be more than a short story arc.
And the stakes didn’t seem to be high enough. His life and the lives of some of his loved ones were on the line, but with the cost being Peter’s demise, you’d expect the sacrifice to save millions of lives, not just a handful.
But after seeing how things went down at the end, I had accepted that Peter’s sacrifice had led to the redemption of Otto Octavius. That his death wasn’t about saving millions this time; it was about saving one villain and making him a hero. Parker’s life flashed before his eyes, and Doc Ock had a front-row seat thanks to their mind-meld. Supposedly, seeing those memories had made Octavius see the hero he could be. It was kind of lame for that to be all Peter’s death meant, but I thought I could come to grips with it.
And then the Avenging Spider-Man 15.1 slapped me in the face. There were a few shreds of the redeemed Octavius, but for the most part the issue just brought across that everyone’s favorite wall-crawler was now inhabited by an egotistical jerk with seemingly no virtues whatsoever. So much for Peter making Otto see the light. The Spider-Man in Avenging 15.1 wasn't a good-guy version of Doc Ock trying to make Peter’s death mean something. It was a man who just wants to beat his archrival one final time by being a better Spider-Man than Parker was.
And we don’t really know what that means. By Octavius’ standards, that wouldn’t even equate to being a hero. Which is where my problem lies. Amazing Spider-Man 700 hinted at a heroic Otto Octavius. Avenging Spider-Man 15.1 didn’t show that. It just showed a villain ready to act like a hero to show he could be better at it than his archenemy was. This wasn’t a man who had found redemption; it was a man looking for one more win. And if Doctor Octopus isn’t redeemed, then Peter Parker’s death was meaningless, and the whole storyline was a waste of readers’ time.
At first I was ready to quit Spider-Man for the immediate future, but I’ve decided I’m going to give Superior Spider-Man a chance. I’m intrigued where Slott will take this, and I’m sure at some point things will be set right and Peter Parker will be everyone’s friendly neighborhood wall-crawler once again.
Heck, if I could make it through the Clone Saga, I can make it through this.
