The Annual Comic Book Massive Crossover Event

By Kerey McKenna.
Part I of a Series.

In 2008, patient moviegoers who waited until after the credits rolled on the new superhero action comedy Iron Man were rewarded with a cameo by Samuel L. Jackson in an eye patch insinuating that he wanted to recruit Tony Stark into something called the “Avengers Initiative.”

It was a nice little Easter egg for comic book fans, a character they would know as Nick Fury, head of the fictional SHIELD intelligence/military organization, played by an actor wider audiences would recognize, seemingly joking, “Hey, maybe someday they’ll be a team of these superhero people.”

The writers could have left it as a nice little joke. Comic book fans were used to seeing these dropped into those rare comic book movies we got “back then.” Yeah sure Val Kilmer’s Batman might name drop Superman’s Metropolis, but nobody really expected them to meet up in a movie like they would in a comic book or a Saturday morning cartoon.

But then, in that same watershed year of 2008, Tony Stark had a cameo at the end of the Incredible Hulk film, dropping hints that “something” was being built.

These scenes turned out not to be little jokes for comic book fans, but promises. This time Marvel had creative control and a knack for creating films that kept audiences coming back for more. Each Marvel Movie was a piece of a shared universe building to a big crossover event. And after four years of blockbuster hits, that promise was kept with Avengers.

Marvel and its new parent company Disney had seemingly pulled off the impossible, not only launching and sustaining a string of hits that weren’t ashamed to be comic book movies, but translating another comic book institution to the big screen...THE MASSIVE CROSSOVER EVENT.

All signs indicate that Disney and Marvel are set to break box office records again with the next installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Infinity War. This latest “event” will feature an ensemble cast of Marvel heroes facing off against intergalactic tyrant Thanos as he seeks to collect the Infinity Gems, a collection of Marvel artifacts featured as MacGuffins in previous Marvel films, which, if collected, will grant control over the forces of reality.

Regardless of whether Thanos succeeds or fails, it’s clear that Disney’s own collection of powerful artifacts—its string of blockbuster superhero movies—has granted it control over the forces of cinematic reality.

To mark this weekend’s release of Infinity War, I want to delve into the concepts of shared universes and crossover events more deeply. In this part, I’ll explain what I mean by a shared universe. In Part II, I’ll cover the history of shared universes in movies, comics, and TV, and then in Part III, I’ll deal with the phenomenon of EVENT FATIGUE and touch on the future of crossover events.

What is a Shared Universe?

You and I, dear readers, are part of reality and thus we share one universe. Even as our individual biographies and outlooks differ we ultimately share certain commonalities. But when we read fiction, more often than not we are peering into separate universes, each with its own established themes, characters, and rules. To preserve genre conventions and authorial intent, the characters of a Jane Austen novel you finished last week aren’t going to wander into the courtroom of your John Grisham legal thriller you are thumbing through today. The exception that proves the rule however is the shared universe, when the book you read today, offers a different story and perspective set in the same world as the book you read last week.

A shared universe is when a creator or creators establish that fictional characters of separate stories inhabit the same world. This is different than simply sequels which follow or connect narratives from the same group of characters into what is hopefully a larger narrative. For example Agatha Christie wrote many stories about clever detectives solving murders involving eccentric affluent suspects in opulent settings like country manors or resorts in exotic locales. While some of her books follow the same characters like Ms. Marple or Hercule Poirot at different points in their respective lives, other books establish that all these detectives are in the same world. They have overlapping social circles with common acquaintances and even meet from time to time. And it could be argued that these multiple perspectives give a certain verisimilitude to her fictional world; it establishes that the world she created is not centered around an English spinster or an OCD Belgian, they are just two (of many) windows into a wider word.

A Shared Universe might be fairly simple way for one prose author to connect narratives that aren’t direct sequels, since they can drop names, allusions or even cameos of characters from previous work. Stephen King has been quite fond of this over the course of his career, featuring everything from casual allusions to shared landmarks like the Overlook Hotel or Shawshank Prison to his Dark Tower Saga, outright stating many of the supernatural elements in other works are linked to the same set of interdimensional beings intersecting with different parallel realities.

Coming up in Part II: The Shared Universe in comics, movies, and TV.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival, coming to Waltham, Massachusetts on May 12, 2018. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Be True to Your School

The Woods.
Written by James Tynion IV, Art by Michael Dialynas and Jason Gonzalez.
Comic Series Review by Kerey McKenna.

Although the young adult survival horror comic, The Woods, has been on my radar since its premiere, I had never gotten around to reading it. But with March’s release of the last installment, I finally downloaded and read the first volume, then the next, and the next, eventually binge reading all 9 of graphic novel trade editions in one weekend. Despite its sometimes disturbing imagery and emotional gut punches, I felt it was a journey that I—like the protagonists—had to complete.

The Woods is the story of Bay Point Preparatory High School in modern day Wisconsin. Unexpectedly, the school building, faculty, staff, and over 400 students are mysteriously teleported to a dense primordial jungle under an alien sky.

The series follows a band of six seniors as they rise to meet the challenge while wrestling with the same internal and interpersonal struggles that defined their lives back on Earth. But now they have to do it while running from lime green alien bears and other monstrosities lurking in the alien jungle.

The six seniors are:

Maria Ramirez: The ambitious (many would say overly ambitions) student body president that saw her position as the first step on the long path to the White House someday. It’s her duty (at least in her own mind) to step up to this new challenge as her fellow students (and some of the adults) are paralyzed with shock and fear. But will her headstrong nature turn off more potential allies and supporters than she can afford?

Sanami Ota: Captain of the field hockey team and daughter of a troubled home. Fortunately her parents are celebrities in the survivalist/doomsday prepper community, so even if they didn’t provide her a stable home life, she is well-instructed in wilderness survival skills.

Karen Jacobs: Sanami’s field hockey teammate and best friend. With her athleticism, grades, good looks and interpersonal skills she could probably do whatever she wants with her life. If only she could figure out what she wants to do.

Calder McCreedy: The school reprobate that was one more grand prank or one more confiscated pocket knife away from expulsion. His devil may care attitude and familiarity with knives could be keys to surviving in the forest, and an A+ paper on the tactics of Hannibal sacking Rome hint that there are hidden depths to this juvenile delinquent.

Benjamin Stone: Speaking of hidden depths, still waters run deep in linebacker Benjamin. The literal big man on campus, this well-liked gentle giant could probably get whatever he wanted in High School life. If only he had the courage to speak up about what his heart’s desire is.

Isaac Andrews: The exuberant, empathetic, and twee Isaac is the heart of the group that will try to make the best out of a rough situation. He adopts an ugly-cute monkey/bat creature from the forest, dubs him “Doctor Robot,” and in turn this strange alien creature becomes the team mascot. Isaac wants to see the good in others, like his best friend and crush...

Adrian Roth: Bespectacled, thin as a rail, book smart, and misanthropic he’s the walking personification of teenagers everywhere who went through a Nietzsche phase. Upon arriving on the mysterious world he feels an uncanny kinship with the place and gathers the others in an audacious plan to strike into the wilderness on their own and find answers to the event and maybe even a way home. But is his daring initiative his own or is this strange place getting into his head?

The Woods is a wonderful campfire tale of survival horror and the trials and travails of children forced to grow up in a harsh world. When I was a young reader, wilderness survival tales like Hatchet, Lord of the Flies, and Island of the Blue Dolphin were the reading of empowered children before teenage rebels against dystopia started a revolution in the genre.

The artwork is excellent. From the expressive faces and body language, the use of color to contrast the earth with the strange neon alien jungle, and the creative creature designs and cohesive action scenes, the art team more than does its job selling this story.

On the writing front the dialogue carries the day with no extraneous narration. The story reminds me of the early seasons of the TV series Lost, and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s about a group forced to band together to survive, a supernatural/possibly sentient setting, frequent flashbacks to slow feed new information about the protagonists’ back stories, and a lot of conflict based around what these people need to change about themselves—and need to retain—in order to survive.

However unlike Lost or The Walking Dead (show and comic) the creators here clearly had a plan in place and never felt the need to pad out the series with filler or repetitive story arcs. Over the course of the series there are new revelations about the nature of the woods, characters join or leave the main group, and there is drastic character growth all around. Each installment is organically built upon the last, advancing the greater plot towards a satisfying conclusion. The creators knew when to wrap things up, end the story, and walk away.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival, coming to Waltham, Massachusetts on May 12, 2018. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Hungry, Hungry Hippos in the Wild, Wild West…

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey.
Book Review by Kerey McKenna.

Alternative history fiction uses “what if?” questions as a jumping off point to launch engaging narratives in a world that could have been. What if the Roman Empire never fell? What if the seat of the British Empire became India? What if the US was governed as a constitutional monarchy?

The “what if?” for Sarah Gailey’s recent novella, River of Teeth, is what if somebody had the bright idea to let wild hippos loose in 19th century Mississippi? What if instead of longhorn cattle, America was getting its red meat and leather from these rotund amphibious behemoths? What if instead of horses, the stock characters of the Western—desperados, federal marshals, bounty hunters, cardsharps—all sat astride mighty hippos swimming through the bayou?

In the world of this novel, the Victorians had a robust breeding program for hippos, so much so that they cultivate specific breeds to differentiate those meant for food and those used for riding. Releasing them into the Mississippi delta just seemed like another grand American adventure, like building the continental railroad. At one time hogs were released into primordial forests to clear the undergrowth and turn them into fields before farmers moved in and culled the conveniently fattened pigs. Now, hippos would be released into the delta to gorge on swamp greenery before being harvested to feed and clothe the growing nation.

Things do not go as planned. The American hippos embrace the call of the wild and, like their African forebearers, become the most dangerous mammal around. With the new Cajun hippos breeding like crazy, the government tries to put the genie back in the bottle by constructing a large hippo-proof barrier to prevent the beasts from moving further up the Mississippi. A great hippo harvest is considered to offset some of the expenses. (So let me get this straight: the president wants to build a wall and get the hippos to pay for it?)

Being highly territorial, the artificial barrier does not improve the feral hippos’ temperaments as their numbers grow and there is only so much swamp to go around.

Now a Mr. Travers, the only robber baron daring enough set up ports of call and riverboat casinos in the heart of hippo territory, rules the delta as his own fiefdom. Anyone defying his rules is thrown into the river and the maws of the horrible hippos.

But hippo handler Winslow Houndstooth has decided to end the chokehold Travers and his feral hippos have on the delta once and for all.

He conceives a daring plan to evict the hippos and gathers an eccentric team to carry it out: his former ranch hand who crawled into the bottom of a bottle, a pleasantly plump French con woman, a demolitions expert of undetermined sex/gender, and the West’s deadliest contract killer, who happens to be 8 months pregnant. Each astride their own hippo companion and trained in the arts of anti-hippo combat, the plan soon goes sideways due to the indifferent forces of nature and the highly personal vendettas of humanity.

This is the weird Western I never knew I wanted.

The book, its world, and its logic are a functional mix of comedy, action, and horror all in a form that on paper shouldn’t work...much like a hippopotamus. Remember that the sweet animal with its twitchy little ears and ponderous appearance…

…can be highly aggressive, has a mouth full of teeth, and can propel itself surprisingly fast on land or water.

And it is a matter of record that in Africa hippos routinely rack up more kills of humans than lions do. However, despite their deadly power, hippos are aesthetically rather silly. And that’s the paradox the novel operates on, deadly and real results from ostensibly silly and bizarre aesthetics. A card game with an accused cheat on a riverboat ends with the malefactor thrown out the window to his death...by hippo. A Victorian lady stops a rampaging bull hippo...with a kung fu meteor hammer (a mace at the end of a swinging rope). Tales of murder, ambition, and revenge to rival any spaghetti Western, but told astride hippos swimming through the swamp instead of horses trotting through Monument Valley. The joke is to play everything completely straight but let the sheer presence of hippopotamus husbandry land the punch line.

Okay, so we have cowboys riding hippos, but is this really “alternate history?” Did the USA ever prepare to make the Mississippi delta a habitat for a horde of hungry hippopotami? Is this just weirdness for weirdness's sake? Such a scenario would be impossible, right? Well, no, this is a weird book in the particulars but the premise has its basis in actual history.

The colonization and settlement of North America did let loose a menagerie of foreign invasive species onto the continent. Pigs were released for food and to help make the land ready for farming, European strains of cattle became so prominent even what we call “buffalo” are more often a European hybrid, and the alien creatures known as “horses” let wild into the continent were a game changer for both colonists and natives. Sometimes animals were even just released on a whim like when a Shakespeare fan deliberately introduced starlings and every other European song bird that the bard mentioned. America is still feeling the ecological repercussions. So it shouldn’t surprise us that we almost added hippos to the mix, and not just escapees from zoos.

In the early 1900’s, the booming US feared that lean times were coming in the form of a meat shortage. To answer the “Meat Question,” the federal government and agricultural concerns considered new and bold solutions. Veterans of the Boer Wars (both British and Boer) advised them that hippos could be domesticated, provided hearty and succulent meat, and thrived in areas traditional grazing animals did not. Studies and hearings were held on the feasibility of stocking American swamps with hippo breeding stock. The matter was given more serious consideration and more publicity than the earlier offer of elephants famously made to President Lincoln by King Mongkut of Siam.

And just as Mongkut’s kind offer was politely declined by the Lincoln administration (robbing us of some truly epic scenes of Union elephantine heavy cavalry stomping out the secession), traditional agriculture initiatives won the day. Few of us will ever know the taste of hippo brisket or the embrace of supple hippo leather on our furniture.

The details of the Hippopotamus Plan and some of its more eccentric and adventurous proponents are covered in a great article for Atavist Magazine, “American Hippopotamus,” by Jon Mooallem and is cited by Sarah Gaily in the forward of her novella as a source of info and inspiration. But as she notes, she moved her time table a bit earlier in Western history, mostly for the style.

And I salute her for her choice. While well past its heyday as a genre, I don’t think Americans will ever be truly done with the mythic Wild West. I never would have sought out a story of revenge and cattle rustling in the Mississippi delta—with hippos. But we’ve had Westerns with giant spiders, aliens, time travelers, and robots, so I say hip, hip for hippopotami!

The next novella in the series, Taste of Marrow, just came out today. I look forward to reading it.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham, Massachusetts. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Murder and Math

The Irrationalist: The Tragic Murder of Rene Decartes.
Novel by Andrew Pessin.
Book Review by Kerey McKenna.

“The first [principle] was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.” –Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method

Seventeenth century intellectual Rene Descartes was a nerd’s nerd. And by that I mean he was the father of modern western thought, responsible for historic leaps in mathematics, science, and philosophy, from mathematical mainstays like the four quadrant grid, to the Cartesian mind/body dualism that paved the way for virtual realities like The Matrix and Ready Player One.

Descartes survived military service in the tumultuous Thirty Years War and lived to the ripe old age of fifty-three (remember, the average life expectancy was about forty back then). He ended his life as an adviser to the Swedish crown, beloved by all.

Well, perhaps not all. Perhaps he was murdered by one of his many enemies!

Yes, whether Rene Descartes succumbed to a) natural causes, b) complications from Three Musketeer-era medicine, or c) assassination by poison has been a point of contention among scholars for centuries and is now the subject of a new mystery novel, The Irrationalist, by Andrew Pessin.

In his first work of historical fiction, Pessin spins a tale of a troubled childhood, the trials and travails of the “greatest mind of the age,” and the mysteries surrounding his death in Stockholm in 1650.

When not following the doomed man himself, the narrative is from the perspective of Adrien Baillet, a young and inexperienced French Jesuit, dispatched by the powers that be to confirm that Descartes, a son of Catholic France, had not met with foul play in Protestant Sweden.

Did some rogue Protestant members of the Swedish court fear Descartes was on a mission to convert their monarch, Queen Christina, to Catholicism? Did his doctor keep on recommending bloodletting because of the medical limitations of the day or because he had reasons to make sure Descartes never left the sick bed. And why were two known enemies of Descartes, a disgruntled, estranged brother and a jealous mathematical rival stalking the streets of Stockholm looking to catch Descartes by surprise? The court librarian believes that Descartes was a member of one of Europe's secret societies, The Rosicrucians. He spins tales of plots and counterplots so outlandish that Adrian can only smile and nod politely, as you or I would if approached by a stranger on the street who explains to us that JFK was assassinated by Bigfoot. But maybe the librarian’s conspiracy theories aren’t as outlandish as they seem…

The death of such a luminary might endanger the tenuous peace between the two nations and as Adrien digs for the truth he starts to feel the pressure mount to drop the case. To the Swedes he is annoyance, while the French just want him to rubberstamp the official cause of death and come home. But like Descartes, the amateur detective is determined to set aside his presumptions and seek the ultimate truth.

I’m not sure if I can go into much more detail without giving away the mystery or the joy of meeting the characters and the history involved, but I had a lot of fun with The Irrationalist. It works great as historical fiction, giving a real sense of the time with a murder mystery as a great hook to pull the reader through the biography of one of the West's great thinkers. One doesn’t need to be overly familiar with Descartes’ work or the era because everything is laid out so well. I was also pleased that this wasn’t a mystery in the beach read tradition of The Da Vinci Code or the cheesy pulp tradition of National Treasure, where we find out the great thinkers of history spent their days hiding Easter eggs in art and monuments to set up a treasure hunt centuries later.

So if you’d like to learn a bit more about a figure key to western thought and want a good murder mystery while you do it than I would highly recommend The Irrationalist.

P.S. Full Disclosure: I had the pleasure of taking some philosophy courses from Andrew Pessin at Connecticut College (Go Camels!), back when I was a member of the Class of...I’m feeling old.

P.P.S. For more seventeenth century adventure, this time with time-traveling Americans gumming up the works, check out Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire series. See a review of the first installment, 1632, here on Nerds Who Read.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham, Massachusetts. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

It’s a mad house! A MAD HOUSE!

Tarzan on the Planet of the Apes.
Written by Tim Seeley & David Walker, with art by Fernando Dagnino & Sandra Molina.
Comic Book Review by Kerey McKenna.

Like a lot of moviegoers this past weekend, I went bananas for War for the Planet of the Apes, the third installment of the rebooted Planet of the Apes series starring Andy Serkis as the leader of a tribe of sentient apes destined to take over the world and eclipse mankind.

I’ve had a lot of fun with this series of movies, the first installment being a sci-fi “mad science gone wrong” thriller and “animal revenge” porn and the last two installments a riff on post-apocalyptic survivalism, but with the narrative weight placed with non-humans as the ragtag group of survivors.

To honor the series I was going to review La Planète des Singes (Planet of the Monkeys), the French novel that inspired the original 1968 and 1970 Charlton Heston films, but...well that would just be a film to book comparison and I don’t think there is anything in the book that wasn’t done in those movies or even the Tim Burton-helmed remake.

But do you know who hasn’t made it into any of the Planet of the Apes movies?...TARZAN!

Yeah, Tarzan! If apes rule the planet...could Tarzan do one better and rule the apes?

This is one of those bonkers inter-continuity mash-ups that happen when comic book rights fall into the same publishing house and the writers and artists feel compelled to make their new toys play together.

I say “mash-up,” rather than “crossover,” because to me, a crossover is a rather straightforward side effect of a shared universe—like when two or more Marvel superhero vigilantes meet each other in NYC—or narratives with enough shared ground they might as well exist in the same universe—like when NBC’s police procedural Law & Order, based in NYC, found itself tangled up in a case leading to Baltimore, the jurisdiction of Homicide: Life on the Streets.

Mash-up implies you are taking characters, settings, and/or genres that don’t seem like a natural fit, banging them together, and seeing what you get. Take for example the most recent King Kong movie, Kong: Skull Island, which took a giant monster movie and mashed it up with a Vietnam movie…and it worked!

But that’s a different ape and a different jungle. Getting back to Tarzan and Planet of the Apes...

Planet of the Apes posits that chimpanzees and the other non-human great apes might one day develop into their own society of urban dwelling intellectuals while humans revert to a feral state. Tarzan posits that a human removed from civilization would have to be feral and have to survive by wits as well as brawn, but the result would be something more than animal but different than “A Man.”

So how do we get Tarzan and the Apes together to settle the matter?

The jumping off point is the moment in the classic apes series when Charlton Heston’s character blows up the earth with a leftover doomsday weapon that was hidden Beneath the Planet of the Apes. That was Heston the actor using his clout in an attempt to ensure that there wouldn’t be any more of these silly movies. But the studio wanted more so they did the time warp and we got Escape from the Planet of the Apes. I will let the movie's original trailer speak for itself:

In our comic, instead of time traveling back to 1970’s America, two talking chimpanzees from the first movie, Cornelius and Zira, crash land their spaceship in Nineteenth Century Africa...arriving just in time to raise a human foundling child, Tarzan, as an adoptive brother to their own child Caesar.

While they’re in nurture mode, the chimpanzees from the future go about spreading their knowledge to the native apes: how to speak English, how to build really awesome tree forts. But the ascending apes soon come into conflict with colonialist invaders who want to capture them to use as slave labor. So we get some really awesome action scenes of Tarzan and Caesar fighting off great white hunters and slavers.

To embed Caesar and Tarzan in this war reveals parallels between the Tarzan narrative and the Planet narrative that go deeper than “they both have apes”. Both deal with the nature of “savagery” and “civilization,” and how little distance actually lies between the two. Our dual protagonists, Caesar and Tarzan, are both amalgams of savagery and civility. Their foes meanwhile, the human invaders, commit savage atrocities in the name of spreading “Civilization” to the wilderness.

Then things get really bizarre: the book embraces two of the strangest ideas of their respective franchises, the time travel of the Planet of the Apes movies and the Hollow Earth of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s pulp novels. Any continuing ruminations and capacities for savagery or nobility in apes and humans are continually eclipsed by ever more outlandish sci-fi pulp action set pieces.

We find the apes’ time-traveling ship has ripped holes in the space-time continuum, allowing strange creatures to escape from Hollow Earth. So now we get to see Tarzan and Caesar fight DINOSAURS. A battle that is the first for the Apes series but actually not unheard of in Tarzan’s adventures.

So instead of continuing with a conflict that speaks to a primal theme in both works, we get this scene of savage pulp action. Not content to pick one conflict or central idea, the book keeps digging even further into the lore of both Edgar Rice Burroughs and the original Apes movies with time travel paradoxes and trips to the hollow earth and killer telepathic mutants. Two kinds of telepathic mutants to be specific, one type from each franchise. The book gets so cluttered that by its third act it is introducing new fantastical factions and locations faster than anything really gets a chance to make an impact.

By the end, the whole thing is a big pulpy mess...like a juice bar run by a dozen chimps. But on the one hand, that does sound kind of fun; there are times this book is definitely a fun read. And I can’t say with a straight face that the creators should have shown narrative restraint in such an august project as Tarzan on The Planet of the Apes. The creative team can be accused of excess but never of negligence. Even though the ever escalating action is narratively and thematically jumbled, the artwork is well-crafted and the action scenes strike a balance between a lot happening and keeping track of the action and characters.

The writers, while stronger in the earlier chapters of the series, do try valiantly to weave all this chaos back into the theme of “civilization vs. savagery.” But I think they had too many rings running in the circus to coherently make the point.

If you can appreciate the fun of trying to team these two series up, and you consider yourself a fan of the jungle pop genre or a completist for either franchise, then this might be worth a look. Tarzan fans can tell you about the times Tarzan fought Nazis; Apes fans can tell you about the time the Apes were defeated by a hip hop star from Boston. These are fan bases that are used to the bizarre. But even for them, I can promise that this series will stand out as something unique.

I can also promise that this isn’t the worst Planet of the Apes cash-in imaginable.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham, Massachusetts. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Climbing the Walls Part II: Other Web Slingers of Marvel

by Kerey McKenna.

Spiderman: Homecoming opened to a well-deserved first place at the box office last weekend. It's fun and I would certainly recommend it for some light summer entertainment.

As I noted in Part I of "Climbing the Walls," Peter Parker isn’t the only person to take on the great responsibility of donning a spider mask. Over the years, there have been female versions of the character (Jessica Drew: Spiderwoman, May Day Parker: Spider-Girl), Peter Parker clones (Ben Reilly: The Scarlet Spider), former adversaries turned to good (Doctor Otto Octavius: The Superior Spiderman), and even a Japanese Spiderman (Takuya Yamashiro: Supaidāman). In this part I wrap things up with two alternative spiders that are relatively new to the scene. Both have monthly comics still in print: Miles Morales and Spider-Gwen.

Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spiderman

In the early aughts Marvel created the “Ultimate line of comics” that would re-introduce flagship characters like Spiderman, the X-men, and the Avengers (re-dubbed the Ultimates) to a new, contemporary continuity less bogged down in decades of backstory. And because the Ultimate line wasn’t replacing the regular line and continuity, creative teams were encouraged to try new spins on classic characters in appearance, temperament, and origin.

Also, because there was greater creative liberty and the emphasis was on keeping the continuity streamlined (a losing battle, but they tried valiantly), death in the ultimate universe tended to be more permanent than in regular Marvel Books. So in 2011, Ultimate Spiderman Peter Parker was killed in action defending New York City.

Manhattan is apparently full of labs haphazardly irradiating spiders, because a new teen answers the call: Miles Morales. Of Afro-Caribbean American descent, Miles was able to put contemporary spin on life as a teen in metropolitan NYC.

Initially, the premise drew controversy from the portion of the fan base averse to change and willing to sacrifice at least two spider babies to preserve Spiderman as an eternal twentysomething. They were joined by culture commentators, many of whom hadn’t picked up a comic in years, or ever. The culture commentators assumed that a minority character taking up the mantle of a traditional white male protagonist is part of a sinister plot to do...something. Honestly that whole can of worms is probably a column in and of itself but suffice it to say I wasn’t particularly impressed with the “I’m not racist but...there can’t be a black spider-man” op-eds. The job for irrational hatred of Spiderman is filled quite ably by J. Jonah Jameson thank you very much...

The Ultimate Universe has run its course. Its role as the streamlined version of Marvel’s characters has been taken over by (more profitable) movie and TV projects. Yet despite the backlash from the culture critics, Miles has won over enough of the fan base that he is one of the few surviving legacies of Ultimate, long after it was discontinued.

Now that Miles occupies the same universe and NYC as a grown-up Peter Parker, Marvel might finally be able to strike a balance between teenage Spiderman stories and stories of a spiderman that is growing up and assuming more adult responsibilities. Previously Peter has been ping ponged between the two. I say let Peter Parker stay grown up (at least outside the movies) and leave the high school drama to Miles Morales and his new circle of friends, allies, and enemies.

Gwen Stacy: Spider-Gwen

Second only to the death of his beloved Uncle Ben, the tragedy of Gwen Stacy weighs heavily on Peter Parker’s conscience. Daughter of police chief Stacy, Gwen was a close friend of Peter and a rival to Mary Jane Watson for his affections. The love triangle came to a sudden and tragic end when Spiderman’s enemy the Green Goblin held Gwen hostage on top of the George Washington Bridge, threw her off, and Spiderman was unable to rescue her.

This death hung over Spiderman and his franchise for decades. Comics have teased at Gwen Stacy clones, or long lost children and mysterious resurrections. When Sam Raimi brought Spiderman to the big screen, he sent chills down the spines of long term fans by placing Mary Jane in the same precarious standoff at the bridge. Although Spiderman 3 introduced Gwen to moviegoers, The Amazing Spider-Man reboot movies went through with her death, surprising almost no one, and carrying almost no narrative weight.

But what if the script was flipped? What if Gwen Stacy was the friendly neighborhood webslinger and her friend Peter Parker was the Martyr?

In the Spider-Gwen universe, it is teenage Gwen Stacy who is bitten by the radioactive spider that fateful day, becoming “The Amazing Spider-Woman,” and Peter Parker who dies as a result of his ties to her super-heroics. Originally created as a one-off side character for the Spider-verse event, Spider-Gwen became a fan favorite and has been given her own regular series and fairly regular visits back into the mainstream Marvel Universe.

I get a kick out of Spider-Gwen because it’s constantly playing with the Marvel universe. Beyond who wound up with spider powers, Spider-Gwen’s alternate world isn’t a simple gender flipped or “evil” version of the Marvel universe. Its zigs and zags between similarity and difference are constantly playing with the readers’ expectations. Instead of the protector of Hell’s Kitchen, blind lawyer Matt “Daredevil” Murdock is its crime lord, the Kingpin. Yet Foggy Nelson, whom Marvel audiences would know as Matt’s partner, is still the same character: an honest attorney. Frank Castle still seeks to punish criminals but does so as a loose-cannon cop instead of a vigilante loosing cannon fire into the streets.

And Gwen herself is given a distinct identity beyond “Peter’s girlfriend who died tragically.” She’s part of an all-girl rock band with Mary Jane Watson. Although she doesn’t have the hard science chops of Peter or Miles, growing up as the daughter of a cop has given her insight into investigative skills and police procedure. Gwen’s “active wear” and different color palette are a distinctive twist on the spider costume that seems to be resonating with fans better than May Day Parker’s (which was a contemporary 90’s Spiderman costume but “filled out” in certain places).

 

So that’s my list, far from exhaustive, of other characters to spin a web of any size or capture crooks just like flies. Congratulations to Tom Holland and the Homecoming Team, but if ten years down the road, the powers that be at Marvel, Disney, and Sony decide they need another reboot, maybe they should keep one of these versions in mind.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham, Massachusetts. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Note: all art used belongs to its respective owners.

Climbing the Walls: Other Web Slingers of Marvel

by Kerey McKenna.

Peter Parker has been swinging from web lines since 1962. With Spiderman: Homecoming, Tom Holland returns as our third big screen iteration of Peter. 2001’s Sam Raimi-helmed movie starring Tobey MaGuire helped launch the millennial superhero boom and James Garfield admirably tried to recharge the franchise in two films that failed to launch a Spider-centric universe for Sony.

But Peter Parker isn’t the only person to take on the great responsibility of donning a spider mask over the years, at least in the comics. Heck, back in 2014, Marvel even had a great big event comic called “The Spider-verse,” consisting of a crossover of the alternative versions of Peter Parker and other webslingers readers had seen pop up over the years; others were created especially for the event. Now, alternative versions of Peter Parker would be a whole article in and of itself and be full of entries like Zombie Peter Parker, Film Noir Peter Parker, Peter Porker the Spider-ham, and so on ad infinitum. But since Spiderman: Homecoming is already giving us the latest version of Peter Parker, I thought it would be fun to share with you some notable characters other than Peter Parker to spin webs. And I mean other than Peter Parker. No alternate universe doppelgangers.

Jessica Drew: Spiderwoman

Premiering in 1978, Spiderwoman was Marvel Comics attempt to stake a claim on the name “Spiderwoman” so other publishers couldn’t try to ride the coattails of its breakout character.

Feeling that female sidekicks of popular male characters had already been done to death over at DC with Supergirl, Batgirl, and Mary Marvel, the editors didn’t want this new character to be tied down to the Peter Parker Spiderman. Her costume is very distinct from his, her spider powers have a different origin, and instead of street crime in one city she tended to be a globetrotting espionage agent, even working with SHIELD to thwart the machinations of HYDRA (And for more about the history of Hydra and how they bent Captain America to their will, check out my post Captain America: Hail Who?)

Given no directive but to publish books every once in a while to protect the copyright, she benefited from a sort of benign neglect allowing some of Marvel’s greatest creators the narrative freedom to tell some really out there but exciting stories.

Takuya Yamashiro: Supaidāman

Supaidāman, or Japanese Spiderman, is an interesting example of cross-cultural exchange between the USA and Japan. Produced for Japanese television entirely for a Japanese market and sensibilities, it’s fascinating to see what was translated directly from the original American version and what was added for the adaption. His suit and iconic theme song translate very well. Although his secret identity is motorsport athlete Takuya Yamashiro instead of scientist/photojournalist Peter Parker, Takuya resembles Peter in his struggle with the complications of upholding the responsibilities of both his mild-mannered alter ego and his superhero persona.

However the series makes additions to the mythos that seem very out of place to an American viewer. Instead of the Sinister Six, Supaidaman’s main antagonist is the “Iron Cross Army,” and our hero has custom vehicles like a motorcycle, car, and giant robot (none of which really have spider iconography in their designs). Why does Supaidāman need a giant robot? To fight giant Godzilla-sized monsters of course. These are a lot of conventions of Japanese superheroes that the US didn’t become familiar with until footage from a long running series was harvested to create Power Rangers for the western market in the 90’s.

Ben Reilly: The Scarlet Spider

Okay, I said no alternate universe doppelgangers of Peter Parker. But I didn’t say anything about clones now, did I?

The Scarlet Spider was the product of a mid-90’s Spider-Man “Clone Saga” arc that got out of hand. In an earlier classic Spiderman tale, a mad scientist created a clone of Spiderman who battled Peter to a standstill before joining the side of the angels but seemingly perished when the scientist’s lab collapsed on itself. But what if the clone didn’t die?!

The Clone Saga posited that he survived and had Peter's memories implanted into him, and therefore Peter’s sense of responsibility to protect New York City. Creating the civilian identity Ben Reilly (naming himself after his beloved Uncle Ben and adopting his mother’s maiden name), he swung through Manhattan as “The Scarlet Spider.”

The original idea for the clone saga had a lot going for it, and the original plan for the endgame was that Ben Reilly would take up the mantle of Spiderman, allowing Peter Parker to retire and settle down with Mary Jane, who was pregnant with their child at the time. But when the concept started selling through the roof, the writers were given editorial mandates to keep stretching it out. Furthermore, a rotating creative team on the Spiderman books couldn’t seem to make up its mind if Ben would assume the title of Spider-man or not. Or if Ben Reilly was actually the original Peter Parker returning to take back his life from the well-meaning clone. The whole thing became a convoluted mess.

Eventually the clone saga came to an end with no major changes to the status quo. In fact, narratively the restoration of normalcy was quite brutal, with the clone dying and MJ miscarrying her child.

The Scarlet Spider costume is one of my favorite of the 90’s-style redesigns. Doing away with the intricate black webbing probably saved the artists a lot of time and I think if the 90’s style (hey give them a jacket or a hoodie) aesthetic is going to work on anyone it would be a “street level” superhero like Spiderman. I also believe Peter Parker’s first homemade suit in the films Captain America: Civil War and Spider-man: Homecoming owes a debt to the Scarlet Spider.

May “May Day” Parker: Spider-Girl

Okay, remember when I said Mary Jane Watson was pregnant with Spiderman’s child in the 90’s? Well what if the resolution to that hadn’t been a huge backpedal that just left everybody back at square one?!

Spider-Girl posits that the writers’ original intention won out and Spiderman retired from superheroics to settle down with Mary Jane and raise their daughter May “May Day” Parker, seemingly an average girl until she reaches sixteen and develops spider powers of her own. Against the initial wishes of her father, May takes up his web-spinners and becomes “The Amazing Spider-girl”

Unlike other properties that imagined the successors of their hero in some post-apocalyptic wasteland or Blade Runner-inspired urban dystopia like DC’s Batman Beyond or Marvel’s own Spiderman 2099, the Spider-Girl series wasn’t interested in making a cyberpunk reimagining of their character and didn’t try to visually distinguish the far-distant early 2010’s from the late 90’s. As I write this in 2017, it’s clear that the creators were quite forward-thinking not to assume we’d be dressing like the Jetsons.

Spider-Girl took the drama of the spider saga back to high school, this time through the lens of a character not driven by personal tragedy, but by the desire to uphold the family legacy. And it allowed the characters of Peter Parker and MJ to mature as people and take their marriage to a logical next step, something subsequent Spiderman creative teams were so afraid of they notoriously...ahem...HAD SPIDERMAN MAKE A DEAL WITH THE LITERAL DEVIL TO ERASE THE PARKER/WATSON MARRIAGE AND ANY RESULTING CHILDREN FROM CONTINUITY.

Doctor Otto Octavius: The Superior Spiderman

What Doctor Otto Octavius? As in Doctor Octopus? One of Spiderman’s most iconic enemies, how could he be Spiderman? Is this another crazy “what if?” story from a parallel universe or dream sequence?

Surprisingly, no. But the story is still pretty crazy. In 2013 Otto Octavius pulls off his greatest crime yet, a body swap, stealing Peter Parker’s body, memories, and identity and leaving Peter’s mind in his own elderly, decrepit, and dying form. Like a malicious Freaky Friday. But as the transfer becomes final, and Spiderman dies in Dr. Octopus’s body, something amazing happens: Otto, accessing Peter Parker’s memories, finally understands why Spiderman was always foiling his plans over the years. He decides that with his “Powers” must come the “Responsibility” to become the best Spiderman possible, a Superior Spiderman.

It’s a bonkers premise and eventually the status quo is restored but it was a fun ride while it lasted. Doctor Octopus's attempts are at turns reasonable (going back to school to get Peter a doctorate) and at other turns clearly the thinking of a megalomaniac mad scientist (creating a swarm of spider robot drones to keep constant surveillance on NYC).

The villain and hero body swap is a stock plot device for an episode in a sci-fi action adventure series, but the Superior Spider-man arc gave the premise much more than a single episode to explore some of the potential of the premise. What happens when a super villain tries to turn over a new leaf? Does Spiderman still work as a character if he’s an arrogant tech millionaire like Iron Man, or for that matter, a ruthless proactive vigilante like Batman?

Eventually the status quo was restored but not before Otto had burned some bridges and also, perhaps, opened some doors for Spiderman and Peter Parker to develop and mature. With his new doctorate and proof-of-concept that he can do more with his mechanical skills than keep his web shooters in working order, Peter founds a tech start up and finally gets out of the struggling photo-journalist rut. And he can put those resources to good use helping a rookie friendly neighborhood spiderman.

More about that in Part II.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham, Massachusetts. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Note: all art used belongs to its respective owners.