I think this the weakest of Dave's videos in the series. He goes into Conquest's Laws, and while I don't think that's wrong I think it shortsighted for the constructive point Dave was trying very earnestly to make, but more on that for the amazing epilogue. Dave's point, ultimately, is that the corporate buyouts of IPs will inevitably lead to the bastardization and commercialization of the things that us nerds and geeks love so much. And, regardless of how negative Dave gets, he views that as a tragedy. He mourns. There is something to nerddom and geekdom that goes beyond the materialism that it so often gets bogged down in. It's hard for me to sum up, though. I sit in my room surrounded by RPG books and comics, so I definitely count as a geek. So I'll give you my story with my favorite superhero: Spider-Man.
I first saw a picture of Spider-Man when I was four years old. It's one of the few genuinely positive memories I have from my childhood: the red and blue suit just jumped out at me, and I found that I wanted to know why someone would wear something that.... colorful.
And then I found this piece of beauty:
I watched it out of order from the ages of seven to.... oh jeez I'm still watching it today. I had to piece the timeline together, episode by episode. And I managed it, actually. The overall arc of the show was seeing Peter Parker grow up from an isolated loner to a leader, the Uncle Ben of superheroes. I've written a bit on the show, so I won't go into it more, although you can go here to read it. The point is, the ideas of accepting responsibility and the world as it was, not as I wanted it to be, were shown by the show. They dressed up these themes in a bright and somewhat silly package and when I grabbed for the bright and sillly package I got the themes.
Once I realized there were comics I got them... and found Ben Reilly. Mary Jane and Peter were married, and he wasn't Spider-Man, and the clone was Spidey now? Something about it didn't feel right, but I found Ben to be an interesting take on the problem of Spider-Man, and so that was... good enough.
And then he vanished? I wasn't a regular buyer at the time, so I had no idea what happened. And, at the age of ten, I couldn't just get on the internet and find out. I looked for a few months to try and get some sort of an answer, but couldn't find anything in any source. Where the hell had Ben gone?
So I 411'd Marvel Comics, and called the editor, Ralph Macchio.
Yes, I did this, at ten.
Ralph was quite surprised to have a child on the phone. I got to the point, and finally found out that Ben was dead. Dead! And I was told that he had died to save Peter from a situation that he very clearly did not need to be saved from. Peter's spider-sense very much so would have been able to save him from the situation that Ben died to protect him from. And I said so. Loudly. At ten. To Ralph Macchio, the man who was "responsible" for the change. Mr. Macchio showed incredible restraint with me, trying to tell me he disagreed with my assessment... but it's hard to argue with a ten year old who had seen Spidey jump through tires while mouthing off. Something in Mr. Macchio's voice, however, caused me to relent.
You see, he hesitated. And sounded a bit embarrassed.
At ten? I'd never heard this tone of voice before. I knew I was missing something. So I relented. I wasn't happy, but I could tell that I was missing pieces of the picture and needed to think on it. So, like I usually do, I sat and thought on it, for years and years. At thirty four I know exactly what that tone of voice was. Mr. Macchio was trying to be a company man at that moment. He had his marching orders and needed to hold the line. That's not a judgment on his character. He had a job and he needed to get it done.
I continued to call Mr. Macchio for years afterwards, up until I was seventeen or so, when he retired. This was during the legendary Ultimate Spider-man run, where Bendis and Macchio more or less had free reign. Mr. Macchio sent me a copy of Bendis's script for Ultimate Spider-Man #11. Which I drew my own version for. And then sent back to Ralph Macchio at Marvel comics. He and I talked over the phone about it, and he gave me critiques that abide with me to this day. As I got older he and I had deeper conversations, where I learned a bit about how the comic business actually worked. If you could get a good story out that was fantastic, but the editorial and corporate mandates came first, at all times. Mr. Macchio did not break this news to me directly, but gently, over the months and years of our conversations. Looking back I am in awe of just have gentle Mr. Macchio was with me, and how callous I was, by sheer accident of being young. He put up with a lot, and I benefited from his patience and gentleness.
And then came Spider-Man: Reign. I don't know how controversial this is, but this is my favorite Spider-Man story. Period. There were things on going in my life, at that point, that I badly needed from this story. And thank God I got it, because I don't know where I'd be today if not for the tale of Peter Parker falling apart because he'd killed his wife... and then being able to move past it. My parents were on the verge of divorce, Lyme's disease had practically wiped out my ability to tell reality from hallucination, and I had either been blacklisted by my friends or lost them due to the stresses of their own lives. And this story, as controversial as it may be, reminded me that even though I was down I was never truly out.
It is the only comic I have held onto from that time, coming up on twenty years later.
At the other end of stories of that time was Civil War. By now I had gotten a good whiff of what corporate interference smelled liked from Mr. Macchio, and so I approached this story very differently than I had before. This was obviously corporately mandated. Corporate had written the story and Mark Millar had been tasked to make it not awful. And he kinda succeeded? Unlike most of the fans I knew at the time, I liked that Spidey had unmasked. JMS had taken his company mandate and worked it into a legit story, showing Peter's growing reliance upon Stark and the system Stark represented. It was pretty clear this wasn't what JMS had necessarily wanted to do, but he wrote the hell out of it.
And that definitely applies Back in Black. Was it corporately mandated? Probably. JMS was not one to just make up events and throw huge waves at the rest of the Marvel line, The Other event being the notable exception to what was actually a pretty quiet and introspective run. But JMS took the idea of Peter having nothing to lose anymore and pushed it as far as a good writer could ever be expected to push it. I freaking loved it.
And then I had an idea. I called Mr. Macchio and pitched it to him. What if Peter was reunited with his daughter May? What if Osborn had her, this whole time, only for Stark to seize all his assets... and thus May? I outlined a three issue arc, where Peter went after the Thunderbolts (who Osborn was in charge of at the time), shooting flaming webbing in Venom's face to knock him out of commission... and then being captured by Stark. And shown the truth. And May, Peter's own daughter, rejected him. She didn't know her dad! And Mr. Stark was a hell of a lot nicer than Osborn! So Peter kidnapped his own daughter away from Stark and brought her back to the New Avengers, distraught over being rejected. The three parter ended with Luke Cage helping Peter to grieve the events, and Peter decided he was going to stick it out with May until she was old enough to understand what had happened. I pitched this story to Mr. Macchio, over the phone. And he told me in that same company-line voice that they had figured out another direction to take Spidey. I told him I couldn't wait to see what it was.
 |
| And then Marvel had Spider-Man sell his marriage to the devil. So he could save Aunt May. |
See, most folks? They saw this as the corporate interference it was. I did too, but I had made a pitch at Marvel, no matter how silly that may sound. And I know that my pitch was probably going to be rejected, even if it was good enough. I was a seventeen year old nobody talking to an editor who had very generously lent his time to me. But this? This horseshit?
I could feel JMS's heartbreak. He had spent the whole run rebuilding Spider-Man into a mature man. He was becoming the Uncle Ben of Marvel. And it was beautiful. To have Quesada come in and trample all that JMS had done, and to force JMS to write it...
At that point I realized it wasn't a fluke. Ben Reilly had been born and killed out of the same corporate urge. It wasn't a flaw in the system, it was the system. Marvel was trying to sell a product, not a story. They wanted content, not character, and definitely not art! Up until this point I had wanted to become a comic book artist and writer. It had been a dream of mine since seven. I had worked as hard as I could. I wasn't very good and I don't think I would have made it, now that I look back at it. But did I know that at the time? No, but it was my dream. I wanted to write and draw Spider-Man, and had wanted that so badly I could barely see straight.
And that dream died with One More Day. Because Marvel owned Spider-Man. And I knew I couldn't work with Marvel.
Mr. Macchio left around this time. To this day I wonder if One More Day hadn't broken him too.
The cold hard truth was this: to Marvel Spider-Man wasn't a character. He didn’t have a history. He didn’t have a personality. He hadn’t grown or changed, because that’s what characters do, and Marvel doesn’t want that, even now. Marvel regards Spider-Man as a property. And Marvel can dictate what could happen with that property. If someone was willing to work with them to manage Spider-Man as Marvel would like all well and good, but if Marvel didn't want to sell the artist’s vision it was done. It didn't matter how good the story might be. How true. How good. Those things don’t matter to Marvel. Not above making money by selling their product. The relationship between corporations and the geek/nerd is not a symbiotic one, but parasitic.
Corporations do not care about meaning, they care about money, and if you make them big enough they will farm you for that money, however they can do it. Your own meaning can be torched for all they care, the money must keep flowing.
And that's it. Sorry.
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