Posted: 19 August 2018 at 4:52am | IP Logged | 6
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If you decide that your character is going to age, there are going to be changes. "Core elements" is an arbitrary notion. No two people are going to agree on what they are. Peter Parker should be a high-schooler or a student or in the school system could be one of them. But you miss the points of Dan's plots. First off, there are tons of different versions of Spider-Man around so that at any time you will always have a poor or a Peter P.arker Spider-Man. This is not the 60s anymore when you had only one version and you couldn't depart from the formula.
But even then, second point, Lee and Romita would have Spidey as an amnesiac working with Octopus for a number of issues. Those experiments just last longer and longer because while the average reader stayed for two years then they now stay for twenty.
Third point, by departing from the core elements, you can bring these core elements in focus. Everything Ock did as Spider-Man acted as a reminder of what Parker would do. Not only that but Ock himself kept comparing himself to Parker. This is clever from Dan's because whereas Spider-Man was the odd superhero in the 60s, he's now the standard and has been imitated endlessly. For instance, when Byrne had Spider-Man as a girl, it was certainly (John will correct me if I'm wrong) as a nod that originally Spider-Man was originally a boy posing as a man.
As for Parker being rich, this is just Dan answering to those fans who claim that as an genius adult, Parker shouldn't be written as a constant failure but should be like computer whiz-kids who launch their start-ups as an adult. Dan demonstrates that by prioritizing his Spider-Man life he jeopardizes his Parker life and this has nothing to do with whether he's a teen or an adult. All along Dan's tenure, and all along Spider-Man's existence, there have been fan commentary on what is proper or not for the character. Modern writers always make comments on their own as part of that continuing debate. Remember when Conway brought back Gwen Stacy to make the point that she was dead?
Maybe I see these things because I teach literature but the readers that made Dan's tenure a success can't be all lit teachers.
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