Spoilers behind the cut.
Seriously, if you look at this and haven't read Amazing Spider-Man #512 the storyline will be spoiled for you. I can't even discuss it without spoiling it. You have been warned.
Okay, uhm... Is this for real? These guys seem to think this is for real. Are they right? Jeff Lester over at The Savage Critic is treating it like this is real and not a gigantic hoax. Is this an actual, honest to God J. Michael Straczynski storyline in Amazing Spider-Man?
To be honest, I haven't been reading Spider-Man faithfully for a long while now: the last Spider-Man book I bought was the trade paperbacks of Ultimate Spider-Man for the Mark Bagley art, and I stopped reading them for the Bendis writing. I'm not a Spidey fanatic: I'm not like the guys on that message board who are absolutely frothing at the mouth here. I'm not invested in Gwen Stacy, or the storyline involving her death at the hands of the Green Goblin, enough to get upset by this.
It does sound kind of moronic, though. I've always wondered that Norman Osborn got anyone to sleep with him in the first place in order to create Harry: if the story was really about how Harry was in fact an artificially-aged clone of Norman that came out messed up because the cloning process didn't work right, I could believe that a lot more readily than the idea that a middle-aged Norman Osborn could get someone to have sex with him without rohypnol or some Goblin version of it. Add in some teenaged kids born from the illicit union between Gwen and Norman and we're in full-bore lunacy land.
Part of me is thinking this has to be some kind of clone scam. It has to be J. Michael Straczynski poking fun at the Clone Saga in some sly fashion by having Norman have spent his time in Europe raising clones made with his DNA and that of Gwen. Maybe he even teamed up with the Jackal... he knows how to make clones and fast-age them, that might make some kind of insane sense.
What does it say about this comic book that I find the idea I just postulated as more plausible than the one supposedly being introduced in the book? Is it just me? Is this a great idea or just really dumb? Someone help me out. Like I said, I'm not tremendously emotionally invested in Spider-Man, never was, really. But if you just read my long Crisis post you'll have read what I said about Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol and how it went in a totally new direction without invalidating the past, and I think Straczynski had been on a pretty good track towards doing that up until now (I've been picking the book up here and there, was considering subscribing to it for his characterization of Peter Parker) with his having brought Aunt May into the fold, identity wise, and his working on Pete and Mary Jane's relationship. This, however... it just seems dumb, ultimately. It steals a lot of thunder from old storylines, makes you question the motivation of Mary Jane in her subsequent post-Gwen's death actions towards Peter, makes you wonder if Gwen was brain damaged in some fashion... I don't know, maybe I'm missing the genius here. I'm sure one of you can explain this to me so that I understand what a good idea this is, this total disregard of some thirty years of Spider-Man comic books that doesn't even make a whole lot of sense if you think about it for ten seconds.
I could be wrong though. Maybe it's a brilliant idea.
Posted by Matt Rossi at October 6, 2004 2:43 AM