Superior Spider-Man

I'm all for a good redemption story.  I have several stories completely fleshed out in my mind where really lame super villains accidentally become heroes, earn the ire of the rest of their super villain community members, and have to start defending themselves all while the public starts to embrace them.  The best part is, with clever writing, there's really no type of villain you couldn't do this kind of story with.  They've had Magneto become a member of the X-Men multiple times now.  Dr. Doom served with the Fantastic Four.  Hawkeye, Black Widow, Wonder Man, Rogue, Emma Frost, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, The Swordsman, Captain Marvel (the space alien one, not the kid who becomes an adult, the woman who turns into light, or the woman who has the powers of the space alien one), Vision, and most of the early Thunderbolts all started out as villains but earned their heroic stripes.  Granted, it's harder to do with unrepentant killers, but hey, Magneto pulled it off.

You could easily tell a similar story with villains ranking all the way up from Ultron (oh wait, there was a good one once already) or Kang (oh, right, Iron Lad) down to some d-grade shlub like Batroc Ze Leapair, the Shocker, Stilt-Man, or Dr. Sun.

Okay, maybe not Dr. Sun.

However, when they do this kind of story at the expense of a hero's story or as a gimmick, I always feel a bit offended.  It's like the company is just trying to think of excuses to say "BUT WITH A TWIST" or just jerk people around when you know that, in the long run, the story just won't matter.



Sometimes you get something really well done out of it, such as Brubaker's twist of turning Bucky into Captain America, even though we all knew he wasn't going to stay dead and the story of Cap's return was a rather massive disappointment, even though any story with the following should be the greatest story ever written by man:

When they announced that Peter Parker was going to "die" and that Doctor Octopus was going to be taking up residence in his body, here's the first thing that went through my brain:  "Pft, yeah, right, that'll last a year, tops."  That's how jaded I am now to comics, I'm now just trying to predict when it'll go back to how it used to be.

Plus, you know, it's Doctor Octopus.  The guy got a huge push through Marvel just a couple of years ago to establish him as a downright respectable villain (pitting him against the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, and the Avengers Academy) and gave him a huge "conquer the world" plan...but still.  It's a gimmick.  It's hokey, it's shameless, and considering in the first issues he's trying to hook up with Mary Jane Watson using Peter's memories of her (and even deliberately recalling every "intimate moment" they had together and reliving them over and over again), it was coming off dangerously like an attempt at some twisted kind of sexual abuse.  I'm pretty sure that if you sleep with a guy's ex while inhabiting the guy's body and she thinks you're him...that's rape on some kind of level.

But I finally sat down and started reading through the series as a whole, because it turns out I've actually liked how the "Superior Spider-Ock" has been appearing in other comics.  In a crossover with the time-tossed young X-Men, he comments on their behavior as heroes.  While being a total jerk in some books, you do also get the sense the man is attempting to be a hero...so I took a look.

What do I think?

...honestly, I think the writer took what would've been a shameless gimmick (have a guy pretend to be someone else like half of Nicholas Cage and John Travolta in Face/Off) and made it interesting.  He managed to keep the connections to Peter Parker's old cast, started to weave an intricate mystery into the mix while adding a growing background threat, and yet also introduced some new and interesting characters into the mix while also giving us a new look into the mind of Otto Octavius.

Watching a villain who attempted to take over the world become passionate about being what he feels is the best hero he can be is probably something someone could write their psych major thesis on, but watching the lines that Otto Octavius refuses to cross in his new life are fascinating to follow.  For instance, Otto has a particularly tender soft spot for children that need help, allowing for two interesting moments:  First, when he realizes that the Vulture has hired children to perform his crimes for him, second when he relents on an attack against anti-hero Cardiac when he realizes the man's criminal actions were all to save a small girl who needs medical attention.  There's also the moments where you see what lines Peter Parker refused to cross, and whether Otto is willing to not only step over them, but wipe out the line under his heel because there simply isn't a need to have that marker any longer.

Of course, Otto Octavius is a man with an ego so large that I wouldn't be surprised if a particular Living Planet wasn't named after it, so while he does believe he's doing the right thing in a way that's better than Peter could ever do it, you do see the moments that he lets the cracks in his plan show, or when he starts to go over the top and needs to reign himself in.  It also isn't long before everybody's questioning the new methods of the "no longer friendly" Spider-Man, from Peter's close friends to his allies in the Avengers. Watching the other characters start to put together the pieces and deduce that something is genuinely wrong (and which characters are in a place to be able to do something about it) is also a great story on its own.

While I still feel it was one massive gimmick story (as evidenced by the fact that Peter Parker is back in his own body this month), I do have to give the writing team credit for taking what could've gone over extremely poorly (see: Clone Saga) and made it into a book that I think stood well on its own.

I recommend picking it up, if just to see a second layer to a complex super villain and see just how close a man can make it to being something greater than he was, and when a decision needs to be made about which one, the tragic figure redeeming himself (at any cost) or the tragic figure who struggled to be a hero, is truly the superior figure.