Powerless
Release: September 6, 2000
Cover: November 2000
$2.99
Story: Bill Jemas and Brian Michael Bendis
Script: Brian Michael Bendis
Pencils: Mark Bagley
Inks: Art Thibert
48 pages
I want to pause our main reading to jump forward into the future again, to the year 2000 and a new modern take on Spider-Man’s origin called Ultimate Spider-Man. This takes an 11 page story and spreads it over 135 pages and 5 issues. I’d like to look at exactly where that factor of 12 in the page count comes from. And also consider what changes the writers felt they need to make and why they made them. I agree the original story skimped on some details, but 124 pages worth of details?!?
This first issue is 48 pages long and covers the ground of about 3 pages of the original Spider-Man story. Why so much longer?
Part of the answer lies in focus. The original story was Peter Parker’s story and his story alone. Any characters we met, we met in relation to Peter. Peter was in every scene and most panels. Peter’s story never paused to make way for another character’s plot.
Here, it does. The big one is the character of Norman Osborn. We’ll eventually meet him in the original series and then (SPOILER) later learn he is Spider-Man’s nemesis Green Goblin. These first 5 issues want to tell Green Goblin’s origin as well as Spider-Man’s. They also want to tie the origins together. They reveal it is Osborn’s experiments that lead indirectly to Spider-Man’s powers. Those same experiments create the Green Goblin.
Tying the hero’s origin into the villain’s is an oddly common trope in modern retellings, particularly film adaptations. For example, both modern FF film reboots made the poor decision to tie Doom’s origin into that of the FF’s origin.
I prefer the focus found in the original story. Let other characters’ stories be told later.
In any event, 13 story pages of this comic are dedicated to telling Norman Osborn’s origin, which is really an unconnected story.
The first 4 pages of the issue double as our introduction to Norman Osborn and the spider. The original dedicates 2 panels to introducing the spider. We see a distinction here in that the original had radiation experiments, and now genetic manipulation is what’s going on. That’s a testament to what sci-fi topics are hotter in 1962 vice the year 2000.
The next 9 pages focus on the fact that Peter gets picked on by his fellow students. We see other kids throw food at him at the mall. We see them trip him in the school hallway. We see the coach make fun of him in gym class.
The original demonstrates his isolation with more subtlety. We see some light mocking from peers. We see a girl reject him unkindly when asked out. We see peers reject him unkindly when he invites them to a science exhibit. The creators here instead choose to show him actively bullied. In the original, it was more that he was ignored by his peers. Here, picking on him is a focus of their attention. Either way, it’s no less cruel. But I think the original creators found the right level of peer rejection, and the modern creators pushed it into cartoonishness.
These pages also introduce his classmates. We get random dialogue from various people who we will meet better later. Capturing humanistic dialogue is one of Bendis’ great strengths. It’s here we meet this new version of Flash Thompson, Peter’s prime bully. In the original comic, he was presented as a dreamboat who gets the girls instead of Peter. He is presented now as a star athlete. We also meet his two friends, Mary Jane and Harry. This is notable because it seemed pretty clear in the original that he had no friends. There wasn’t even a notion of a nerds table or science club. Peter seemed utterly alone. He had his aunt and uncle, but that’s not enough for a teenager. He needs a peer support system. And this comic gives it to him. Harry doesn’t seem to be a very good friend, but it’s more than Peter had in the original. And Mary Jane does seem like somebody who could be very close to Peter.
Mary Jane and Harry are both based on characters from the original Spider-Man comics, but they’re characters Peter will meet in college, years after the original story. This support network is a significant change. Its absence helps us sympathise with Peter in the original comic when he is being awful. In this telling, he has less excuse for becoming such a jerk, except that he is a teenager going through standard teenager stuff plus a bit of weirdness.
We also meet Uncle Ben in the mall scene, but the next two pages introduce Aunt May and give a better glimpse into the relationship with Peter, a relationship the original conveyed in two panels. They briefly mention Peter’s father in this scene, implying he is dead. The original gave no mention of Peter’s parents. It treated his aunt and uncle as his parents and said no more about it.
The scene also makes explicit mention of the internet. This comes from Bill Jemas’ notes, which are printed in the back of a hardcover collection I have. Jemas is the president of Marvel and conceived this story in outline, but then gave the outline to Bendis to flesh out; Bendis (thankfully) threw away a lot of the outline, but kept a couple scenes, including this one. Jemas was very clear that he wanted this modernized and a lot of his ideas are about inserting modern technology and references; this comes up repeatedly in his short outline. While they do no harm, I don’t think it has the positive effect on the story Jemas’ insistent notes suggest it does.
Aunt May and Uncle Ben get more development here. They have 2 pages dedicated to them when Peter isn’t present, with their own story going on. They are basically props in the original, there to be a source of love for Peter, and then a source of tragedy.
The next two pages show Peter and Harry in his lab. We learn Peter’s parents were killed in a plane crash (this is from the original comics, but it was revealed way later); we also learn his dad was a scientist, and that he had been working on a molecular adhesive before he died. This is how this series will address the plot hole of how Peter invented the webbing: that most of the work was done by his father. I think it was a plot hole worth addressing, and I like Bendis’ take on it. The Raimi Spider-Man movie will avoid the plot issue entirely by giving him organic webshooters. The Amazing Spider-Man film will let Peter build the shooters (pretty straightforward) but have the webbing come from Oscorp. The Homecoming film will note he designed the webbing, but not dwell on it, the truest to the original comics.
We then get 2 pages showing the strained relationship between Norman and Harry. Harry also gets to have his own arc set up in this issue.
The next 5 pages tell the story of the spider bite, accomplished in 3 panels in the original. This includes Peter fainting from the bite and being taken home. In the original, he just needed to step outside. We also see the spider get killed here. The original neglects to show its fate, a fact later writers will play off. The accident happens at Osborn Industries, tying Peter’s origin in with Norman Osborn. Peter’s classmates are all there as it is a school trip. The Raimi film will follow suit, having the incident happen on a school field trip to Oscorp. The 2012 reboot will do the same.
In the next 2 pages, we see Norman react to the incident by firing the floor manager, failing to acknowledge what we know from the opening scene: it was his own carelessness that led to the spider’s escape. The next page is a May/Ben scene, where they discuss the incident.
In the original, Peter discovers his powers immediately when a car almost hits him. Here, the discovery is gradual, beginning with fainting and spasms on Peter’s part. We get 6 pages of Peter’s body displaying some unusual reactions. When the car scene comes, it won’t be an accident like in the original. It will be one of Norman’s goons gunning for Peter. The subsequent 2 pages set that up.
We then have a 1-page Peter/May/Ben scene, another happy family eating dinner. This doesn’t serve a necessary purpose, just to emphasize the happy home life. The next 4 pages feature Peter beginning to figure out how the spider affected him. However, the day he spends in the lab is a day he skipped school, which leads to a 2 page fight with May and Ben. There was no tension like this on display in the original. Even as Peter was displayed as angsty, that angst didn’t extend into his household.
In the final 3 pages of the issue, Peter learns he can crawl walls, a place the original story got to by the beginning of page 4.
This is what has come to be known as decompression. A modern storytelling technique where comics just spend more pages on things than they did back when. By the end of the 48-page first issue, our hero has no name, no costume, no desire to fight crime. He literally learns he can climb walls on the very last page.
On another note, I love this comic.
Some personal context. I started reading Spider-Man in 1992 with Amazing Spider-Man #362. Mark Bagley was the artist, and his take on Spider-Man–impossibly thin yet weirdly muscular, and able to dexterously contort his body into strange poses–is thus very etched in my mind. He has a new, even better, take for this series. He is a great storyteller and is able to capture characters’ facial expressions in this series. It’s not something we’d seen before from him, but Bendis is a dialogue-heavy writer, so a lot of scenes call for flipping back and forth between character faces, with only subtle changes to expression.
Those first 7 years of Spider-Man comics I read were generally not very good. I started during the “Carnage” saga. The first great story I read was Spider-Man’s anniversary issue, which featured a touching Lizard story. Then it got into stuff about his dead parents returning, then the infamous “Clone Saga”. There was a lot I liked, particularly Bagley’s art and the scripting of J.M. Demateiss. But a lot of it was a mess. And it got worse following the Clone Saga, with 1998 having some of the worst Spider-Man comics ever told, particularly the abysmal “Gathering of Five” saga.
Also released that year was Spider-Man: Chapter One. The concept was to revamp and modernize Spider-Man’s origin. A concept almost identical to the Ultimate Spider-Man concept from 2 years later. However, we are not choosing to discuss Chapter One in this column, and will hopefully never speak of it again.
Somehow, I’d grown fond of the character of Spider-Man, despite the quality of my first 7 years of Spider-Man comics. But this cemented it. This was the character I knew was in the background somewhere. I loved the first issue. Back then, I would pick up new comics every Wednesday from the comic store. The first thing I did was order the week’s haul in the order I planned to read them. Other customers would do the same, and we could compare stacks. Ultimate Spider-Man always went on top when it came out. It was my favorite comic to follow monthly.
We’ll go through 4 more issues of it here, enough to cover the material based off the story from Amazing Fantasy #15.
Rating: ★★★★½ (out of 5), 85/100
Characters:
- Norman Osborn
- Justin (Norman’s assistant)
- Peter Parker
- King Kong
- Uncle Ben
- Mary Jane
- Harry Osborn
- Flash Thompson
- Aunt May
- Shaw
Minor characters:
- Principal
- Coach
Story notes:
- Begins with Norman recounting myth of Arachne
- Norman and Justin responsible for spider’s escape
- Scene at Westwood Mall food court in Queens.
- Norman’s lawyer named Joe
- Norman’s wife named Martha
- Norman’s company is Osborn Industries, Inc.
- Not sure who the teacher is referring to as “Harlan”. Seems like Flash or Kong.
- Peter is 15
- One unnamed girl will later be revealed to be Liz Allan.
Next post: POSTLUDE: Ultimate Spider-Man #2
Next in order: Journey Into Mystery #83, Story A
Previous: Amazing Fantasy #15, Story A
