CSBG Archive
John Seavey’s Storytelling Engines: Spider-Man, Part Three
Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.
Storytelling Engines: Spider-Man, Part Three
(or “Is It Just Me, Or Does My Life Seem Twice As Hectic Lately?”)
(or “It’s Called ‘The Night Gwen Stacy Died’”)So as we discussed last time, the Amazing Spider-Man (and indeed, comics in general) took on a major change with the death of Gwen Stacy–there’d always been an element of soap-opera to them, particularly the Marvel books, but from then on, that element became more pronounced. Changes to the status quo bound readers to the books more tightly, even as they made writers’ jobs more difficult. With changes in status quo, it became more important to remember the “position” of the main character, his/her supporting cast, the major villains, et cetera…because this new breed of comic brought with it a new, more engaged reader who paid extremely close attention to the continuing changes, sometimes (heck, often) moreso than the writer, and they made their displeasure known when someone screwed up.
All of which makes ‘Spectacular Spider-Man’ a different sort of spin-off than the old ‘Superman’ or ‘Batman’ comics. After all, when ‘Detective’ and ‘Action’ begat ‘Superman’ and ‘Batman’, there wasn’t a whole lot to keep track of. Superman worked at the Daily Planet, Batman was millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, and everything else changed once in a blue moon. But Peter? He worked at the Bugle one day, the Globe the next. His romantic interests changed from year to year, his college career moved on towards graduation and post-degree work, and his villains…sometimes died. Suddenly, writers needed to co-ordinate all this stuff. (They also had to work in ‘Marvel Team-Up’ as well, but we’ve discussed that in a previous column.)
So how do they handle this? For starters, they create a new supporting cast and setting. Peter’s graduate studies give Gerry Conway the chance to center the “other” Spider-Man title on campus, and we get a set of “co-workers”, fellow teaching assistants that Conway can use in storylines without having to pull characters out of the main series. (After all, every Harry Osborn-based story you do in Spectacular is one less you can do in Amazing.) There’s a downside to this, though; when you introduce a new setting and supporting cast, invariably some of the fans of the old setting and supporting cast lose interest. Which is why we continue to get glimpses of Flash, JJJ, Aunt May, MJ, and the rest frequently enough to keep readers involved. It’s really not a full storytelling engine–just half of one. A delicate balancing act is required to keep it all working.
Another change is in the rogues’ gallery. Whether by accident or design, there are very few of Spider-Man’s “classic” villains on display in the first seventy-four issues of Spectacular Spider-Man. More often, they either use obscure Spidey villains like the Gibbon or the Beetle, bring in villains from other books like Moonstone or Boomerang, or create new villains (to varying degrees of success…Belladonna works, the Hypno-Hustler doesn’t.) Again, the writers have to spread plotlines between two books, and since villains are the originators of plotlines, that means spreading the villains around as well.
Or does it? Beyond the scope of the volumes currently in print in the Essentials series, someone hits on the bright idea to end all bright ideas–if people are reading the series to see the changes in the status quo, and if we’re co-ordinating these changes between the two series, then why not start doing multi-part stories that cross between the two books? And once you’ve started doing it that way, why ever stop? It’s great marketing. Anyone who enjoys one book has to buy the other book as well to follow the story, whether they like it or not. And once you’ve done it with two books, why not three? Or four? There is an upper limit to this economic logic, of course. Even the X-Men don’t seem able to sustain more than five or six interconnected titles a month(Spider-Man topped out at four in the mid-90s, with a quarterly title added in.) But it’s a very seductive reasoning for the people who sell comics, and for the people who write them too. After all, one storytelling engine is easier to come up with than two…
…and much easier than one-and-a-half.
8 Comments
Rohan Williams
May 15, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Interesting stuff, John. I’ve always thought that writing one of the ‘secondary’ Spidey books, while still fun, would be like trying to write a spin-off of ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ or whatever soap operas you have over there, except, unlike most spin-offs, the main character remains the same. Pretty tricky, no?
Graeme Burk
May 16, 2007 at 5:46 am
As a kid, though I doubt I’d ever realized this, I tended to gravitate to Spectacular Spider-Man* slightly more. I don’t know why, but I suspect it was a slightly more accessible Spider-Man comic since it had its own focus
In fact, my first taste of Frank Miller was the Daredevil team-up in Spectacular (where Spider-Man was now blind).
* We should really give the proper title– it’s actually “Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man” which I felt, and still feel, is a really cool title because it had Peter Parker’s name in it.
Graeme Burk
May 16, 2007 at 5:54 am
Also, I do think while you’re mostly right that it was ASM and PPTSSM that really started the trend of consciously differentiating two titles with the same characters, the Batman books in the 60s and 70s had very different styles to them, albeit for a different reason– they had different artists and writers (and occasionally different editors!) working on them.
In the 60s, and the Batman Showcase really shows this, the stories being told in Detective with Carmine Infantino on art seem ten times more sophisticated than whatever artist was ghosting for Bob Kane on Batman. And in the 70s, Batman was generally fronted by Denny O’Neil and David V Reed and various artists like Neal Adams and Irv Novick and others while Detective tended to be a bit more experimental, with teams like Goodwin and Chaykin and Englehart and Rogers.
Rohan Williams
May 16, 2007 at 6:44 am
I’m not sure if that’s fair, though, Graeme (at least regarding the 60s), because Detective (at least from what I’ve seen in the Showcase) had more than its fair share of artists ghosting for Bob Kane as well. Infantino’s work was a lot more infrequent than I expected it to be in the first volume, so the stories of that caliber only come along once in a blue moon.
I take it there’s more of an Infantino presence in later issues? Interesting point with the 70s stuff, too– I’ve never really paid attention to which stories from that era came out of which books, so that’s cool to know!
David C
May 16, 2007 at 6:48 am
“We should really give the proper title”
True – also to avoid confusion with this short-lived Spider-Man magazine-format title:
http://comics.org/series.lasso?SeriesID=1873
fourth worlder
May 16, 2007 at 11:08 pm
Oh lord, the Hypno Hustler. I’d forgotten about him. Do you have an image? Was he as bad as I remember?
Said it before, say it again, those mid-seventies Spidermans sucked.
Joe Gualtieri
May 17, 2007 at 1:55 am
Come on, the Hypno Hustler is brilliant! One of Spidey’s greatest villains also made his debut during Stern’s Spectacular run without a mention above– Roderick Kingsley, though he didn’t come into his own until Stern was “promoted.”
John Seavey
May 17, 2007 at 6:36 am
I didn’t mention Kingsley because he didn’t become the Hobgoblin until much later–but yes, Stern was on top form when he decided to make him into the Hobgoblin. It makes perfect sense; Roderick Kingsley is introduced as an unscrupulous fashion designer who steals other people’s fashions and sells them as his own, and the logical extension of that is the Hobgoblin. Brilliant.
Roger Stern doesn’t promote himself much, but he’s every bit as good as any A-list writer out there. The only difference is, he doesn’t set out to “shake things up” every time he writes a book; he just writes good stories with the set-up he’s given. (To use my own parlance for a moment, he uses the storytelling engine he’s got instead of reworking it.)