"Seems Like The Same Old Day For Spidey" in Amazing Spider-Man #556, by Zeb Wells (writer), Chris Bachalo (penciler/colorist), Tim Townsend (inker), Antonio Fabela (colorist), Cory Petit (letterer)
Oh boy, Brand New Day. An alien bursting out of the chest of the rotting corpse that was One More Day. With his marriage safely erased from existence, Peter Parker was free to unsuccessfully date several new characters, shuffle through various jobs, and frequently be treated as pretty much a complete loser. As opposed to someone who mostly has his life together, but has just a little too much on his plate, which is how I would have generally described him prior to this.
The first 2.5 years, the book had a core group of creators who took turns on arcs, while it shipped three times a month. Some decent names in there, between Mark Waid, Marcos Martin, Emma Rios, Roger Stern, Joe Kelly, among others. As far as I was concerned, it made it much easier to just pick and choose arcs. I stopped approaching it as "I'm going to buy Spider-Man comics," and turned towards, "I'm going to buy comics about Spider-Man by these specific people."
(My growing awareness about specific creators as a result of being on the Internet reading and writing about comics factored in as well. I was at least developing a group of writers and artist to avoid like the plague, and a smaller subset of people to keep an eye out for).
Dan Slott took over writing duties full-time in the fall of 2010, and is just now relinquishing them. It's been a decade, give or take a month, since the story above came out. In all that time, I bought 22 issues of Amazing Spider-Man, almost all of those prior to July of 2010. Almost all of those were by either Dan Slott & Marcos Martin, Zeb Wells & Chris Bachalo, or Roger Stern & Lee Weeks stories. I still have about a dozen of them. None of the ones I kept really required Peter Parker to be single to function as a story.
2 comments:
Oh yes...the giant steaming turd of the destruction of Peter'a live, for...well, for no good reason that I could wver see.
I have never really understood the way that new writers seem to feel the need to stomp all over whatever character building a previous writer had accomplished.
I suppose they want their turn to build the character back up, do the definitive version. Or else they all liked Frank Miller's Born Again, and think tearing the character down is the way to go for a memorable stretch. Or both.
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