Panel(s) of the Day #823 (Ditko!)

13 Comments

1. Hey @Daniel Slott

   Your story says that Peter was wrong to go out to get Uncle Ben’s murder.

   That as a child he should have been more mature than the adult.

   That he’s not allowed to have his own emotional reaction.

   And that it punishes him for having a human reaction.

   It undermines everything about who the character is.

   PS

   Don’t you have anything better to do than troll forums about stories that are several years old already?

2. So… Alex just earned the title of “Credible Hulk”… because…damn!

3. *slow clap for Alex*

4. @Alex Evangeli

   PREACH!

5. @ Daniel Slott

   Part 3

   As you can see I’ve put your story into context and still found it a travesty.

   I’ve not got my own ‘weird version’ of the story in my head I wrote everything with the pages directly in front of me.

   I read it in context.

   Frankly were I to read it in the context I’d want I’d have come to a different conclusion. I don’t LIKE these characters being grossly misrepresented and I wish it weren’t the case. I wish:

   Ben Reilly hadn’t been a super villain

   Doc Ock hadn’t attempted to rape Mary Jane

   Norman Osborn hadn’t become a low rent Chameleon and then Carnage

   Mary Jane hadn’t been so idiotic during Superior Spider-Man

   Ashley Kafka hadn’t claimed Massacre was irredeemable and then unceremoniously killed off

   Mayday hadn’t lost her father, then her costume, then her name, and by extension her entire core concept

   I wish I could view those things through the lens I’d like them to be. But I can’t.

6. Part 2

   The fact that May forgives him due to his youth is not an excuse because she didn’t say she realises she was WRONG for feeling disappointed in him in the first place. And even if she did it’s still morally repugnant and beyond out of character for Aunt May to use the death of her husband/Peter’s father to guilt trip him the way she did. That is simply not something May Parker would ever have done in that situation.

   Not to mention the framing of the issue adds to Peter’s guilt and makes his act of catching the burglar a failure of his responsibilities. The message of the story, as you corroborated in your comment, I that Peter SHOULD have been with May after Ben died and SHOULDN’T have stopped the burglar just like he SHOULD be with Betty now instead of stopping her assaulter.

   This is provably ridiculous. It actively go against the intent and message of AF #15 (and ASM #50 for that matter. Pursuing the burglar was when Peter became Spidey for real, it was the first time he used his powers the way he should’ve been all along. In catching the burglar he prevented more dead Uncle Ben’s in the world. In allowing Betty’s assaulter to walk free he’s ALLOWING him to potentially harm more women. May and Betty’s feelings are not more important than that. He couldn’t help Betty at all and for May he could’ve slightly eased her pain. But how much more pain would she have felt had Ben’s killer gotten away? That her husband died and she couldn’t even be comforted by knowing he faced a comeuppance for that?

   In catching the guilty parties Peter OBVIOUSLY contributes more net good to the world than if he had waited with all of Betty’s other friends or with May. THAT was the right call to make, THAT was the greater good, the higher responsibility his powers oblige him to serve. Maybe that comes at the price of emotionally hurting the ones he loves, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t right for him to have prioritized the burglar over May and wrong of him to prioritize Betty over her attacker

7. @Daniel Slott

   I do not know if you are the real Dan Slott or not. However, your actions are not out of the ordinary for the genuine article and so I’ll be responding as though you are the real deal.

   Mr. Slott

   Whether it was Hornacek critique or any one else’s who’s echoed his sentiments, your response demonstrates how you have missed their point utterly and also being disingenuous about your own work.

   That’s not my opinion by the way. It’s the cold hard facts of the matter. Let’s dive deeper.

   You claim from May’s POV the situation between AF #15 and ASM #665 that shared a lot of moments. This is true but it’s a disingenuous point as the context was wildly different. For the sake of argument let’s agree Peter was 15 in the former issue and 25 in the latter (I know the math doesn’t exactly line up).

   There is a world of difference between a teenager coming home to find his father’s been murdered and running away upset and a 25 year old adult man not waiting at a hospital during his friend’s operation because he’s working a project at his flexi-hour job.

   It’s a false equivalency because your father is more important than your friend, being murdered (in your home no less) is worse than being operated upon and being absent when you are an emotionally immature teenager is more excusable than when you are an adult.

   Moving on, you claim Aunt May wasn’t ashamed of Peter (merely disappointed) the night Ben died and that she told him it was okay because of his youth.

   This is true but once more you are seriously missing the point.

   The detractors of the scene are arguing it’s both incredibly out of character and more importantly wholly unbelievable for Aunt May to have ever felt disappointed in Peter in the first place. May is Peter’s mother and even if we low ball her age she would’ve been at least in her late 40s the night Ben died (probably older). If you are a 45 year old mother and your 15 year old son ran away upon hearing his father was murdered, you wouldn’t feel disappointment that he wasn’t there for YOU.

   You are the adult, the parent, the mother, your job is to be there for THEM.

   Unless you were a seriously messed up person (which May wasn’t) no parent would EVER react the way you wrote May. It’s an incredibly basic facet of human nature, you don’t need a psychology degree to grasp this fact, even though hard psychology would corroborate what I just said.

8. Daniel Slott wrote the character to fit his own sour view of humanity.

9. @Daniel Slott – Sorry, I’m not buying it. The Aunt May that had been portrayed for ~40 years up until that point would *never* tell Peter that she was disappointed (no idea if she says “ashamed” or “disappointed” – it’s been years since I read that story and I’ve tried to block it out of my mind since then) in him for running off the night Ben was killed. Her whole world was shattered that night, but so was Peter’s, and she knew that. May *always* puts Peter’s well-being ahead of her own, and the idea that she would ever feel disappointed in him for what he did that night, let alone *tell* that to him, shows a fundamental lack of understanding in the character.

   He was a 15-year-old boy whose only father figure had just died, and she’s a woman that has lived a long life. Thinking that May would think that about a child is not the character, nor how a rational parent-figure would think about their “child”.

   Just my opinion, but I don’t feel like I’m alone here. I’ve rarely seen anyone saying “You know, I think May was right in that issue”. And yet I have heard many people say she is written so out of character in that issue.

10. @Daniel Slott-New number, who dis?

11. @Daniel Slott: Thanks for swinging by!

12. It’s almost like Aunt May has NEVER hidden things from Peter, never put on a brave face, never told him what she thinks he’d want or need to hear. It’s almost like we haven’t seen her do those exact kinds of things repeatedly through 50+ years of Spider-Man comics from Stan’s day all the way up to now.

    “The Crossroads” issue was where Aunt May was facing a situation that shared a lot of moments from the fateful night of AF #15. Betty was hurt and in the hospital. ALL of her friends were there for her, except Peter. And we, the reader, knew why Peter was missing– because he was being driven by guilt, because he’d been brusque with Betty before, hadn’t accompanied her, and she’d been hurt because of it– and as Spider-Man he was going after that person who’d hurt her.

    But from Aunt May’s point of view, Peter was once again missing on a night when his family and friends needed him the most.

    She doesn’t say she was “ashamed”. That’s not the language she uses.

    She says she was “disappointed in him”.

    And she goes on to say that “it’s all right. You were a boy then. You’re a man now. Don’t be sorry about this too. There’s still time.”

    She CARES about Peter in that scene. She wants was best for Betty and what’s best for Peter too. She doesn’t want him to act the way he did when he was 15. She wants him to be the man she knows he is. She wants him to do the right thing and be there for Betty. To be there because not only does Betty need him there, but because Aunt May knows that Peter will regret NOT being there. This isn’t Aunt May being cruel. It’s Aunt May saying all of this out of love. And she SUCCEEDS. She REACHES Peter and gets him to make the right call. She’s being the Aunt May– the PARENT– that he needs at that moment– the way we ALL need a parent’s advice at times, no matter how old we are now. Or sometimes BECAUSE of how old we are now.

    When you guys actually read the stories that I worked on with my co-creators, they’re never the weird versions that a lot of naysayers make them out to be. When they’re summarized and mischaracterized over time, I can get how those distorted versions can become favorite punching bags to go back to time and time again, but they’re rarely what a number of you paint them to be when you go back and actually read them in context and not through a lens of what you’d like them to be.

13. “You’ve always been fine! Best nephew a person could wish for …”

    But … but … that Dan Slott issue where May told Peter that she was ashamed of how he ran away the night Ben was killed. Surely Slott must have read this issue and known May said this about Peter!