“Sins Past” Part Four
Writer: J. Michael Straczynski
Artists: Mike Deodato Jr (p), Jose Pimentel (i)
Publisher: Marvel
It’s disgusting. Horrible. Very nasty indeed.
Yes, this is the worst Spider-Man art I’ve seen in a long while. Mike Deodato and Jose Pimentel did a pretty good job of the previous, more action-packed, issue but this issue looks awful. Perhaps it’s because they’re an art team unsuited to what is basically twenty-two pages of talking heads, but this is not their best work. Nasty cross-hatching and oddly-placed shading, characters who change appearance every other panel, a Norman Osborn who looks just like Richard Nixon and not like…er…Norman Osborn, these are just some of the cock-ups we get treated to this issue. I’m not sure how John Romita Jr would have managed this storyline, but I doubt it would have been worse than this mess. What’s most frustrating is that it looked like the art team were finally starting to hit their stride as of last issue. Oh well…
So it’s left to Straczynski to save the day, which he does. It’s difficult to write about this comic without commenting on the utter Fanboy Frenzy that’s greeted it. There have been calls to boycott the series, even to boycott Marvel completely. I’d guess that public burnings of this issue aren’t too far behind. All because a character who hasn’t been in the comic for thirty years gets some character development in a flashback. What’s interesting is how the fans are reacting in exactly the same way that Peter does to these revelations. For thirty years Gwen has been untouched and virginal in Peter’s mind, and apparently that bled into the minds of the readership too, to the extent that any development of her character would be viewed negatively. That Straczynski chose to go with something as extreme as an early sexual encounter with Norman Osborn and a subsequent pregnancy leads me to suspect that he knew this and did it quite deliberately. We’ve also got at least two more issues to go in this storyline, so it’s quite likely that there’s more information on the way, which makes the reactions to this issue somewhat baffling. What makes it funny is that this “revelation” has been rather obvious for months. And at the end of the day, Gwen Stacy is Marvel’s character, and they can do anything they like to her as long as they craft an interesting story as they do it, which I think they do here.
What Gwen and Norman do may be out of character for her, but that’s explicitly stated a number of times in the comic itself. I certainly don’t have a problem with it as many, many other Marvel characters have done crazy things under the influence of mind control. Wolverine, for instance, is about to murder the entire Marvel Universe because of some crafty brainwashing at the hands of…er…the Hand. Gwen’s actions seem perfectly acceptable to me within the framework of the fictional universe she inhabits. And you know, this stuff happens in real life too, so how so many people can cry “foul” I don’t know. There are some continuity glitches, but those are hardly book-burning offences. Again, look at this week’s Wolverine #20 for a continuity glitcherama.
I saw all this coming a mile off, but it’s still an interesting twist, and I think that Straczynski does a good job of playing this in a mature manner. What he lacks as a writer of mysteries, he makes up for as a character writer, and I think he deserves a great deal of credit for what he’s done with this issue. It’s not sensationalist or exploitative, but mature and sadly, all-too believable. If anything undermines what’s going on here, it’s not that Gwen has been tarnished, but that the art is not good enough to portray the story well.
Go on then, commence the hate-mail.
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