Pics of Doctor Octopus from Spider-Man Life Story

Spider-Man: Life Story (2019) #3, Cover Art By Chip Zdarsky

Oh yeah, forgot to show off my little haul from Monday.

So long story short, I got a few gift cards from the Writers Guild as a thank you for all the work I put into creating and launching our very first, national short story contest.

Both gift cards were for McNally and, since I wanted to get out of the house, I ran over there and bought myself these beauties!

Except for Issue 4 of I Am Iron Man, that I bought at my local comic book store.

Sadly, no Epic Collection trade for She-Hulk, but there is a copy at said local comic store, so I'll pick that up later this summer.

The earlier Grue post has reminded me of an observation I had a while ago but never got around to hammering out- basically no superheroes actually featured in a parahumans story maintain a secret identity in the classic bifurcated sense. There's anonymity, sure, and as seen in the Dauntless interlude there are cover stories that their neighbors hear about their day job, but with the exception of pointed edge cases like Alexandria and Brandish, the professionalization of heroism is near total. None of these people are juggling a day job. Examples of the classic dual identity situation are actually slightly more common among the villains- Purity has a day job as an interior decorator, and Kaiser and Coil are in charge of their respective companies- but of course all of those are kinda "set-your-own-hours" kinds of situations. Kaiser's got people and Coil's literally got a power custom made to grease the wheels on two-timing in that way. The majority are full-time gangsters or mercenaries. Taylor's pre-Leviathan juggling of school and supervillainy is actually the main example of anyone trying to do it and the course that ultimately takes is instructional as to why she's the only one. Taylor mentions that people joke about her iterant teacher Mr. Quinlan secretly being a cape, but a lot of the book is spent quietly putting the torch to the idea that that kind of balance is tenable. Like at a minimum people would notice that you're running off all the time, there's a whole shell-game played with pulling random kids out of class at Arcadia to obfuscate which ones are actually the superheroes.

Flash trying to catch Peter out in a lie: “so, how did you meet Tony Stark and become his intern then?”

Peter: “It all started one morning. I got up to go to school when my aunt called for me. She said she hates me and was jealous of how petite and pretty I was so she sold me for drug money.

I groaned and threw my hair into a messy bun. No one understands me, I’m not like other girls. Then, walking downstairs, I met my new owner. It was Tony Stark. His brown orbs met mine-“

Flash: “ok please stfu”

ATSV Miles: swinging through the city is great but i hate getting hit by drones and birds

Comic Miles: and the missiles, so irritating lol

ATSV Miles: ????

*Over the Alchemax building's intercom* “ I’ve come to make an announcement. Tyler Stone’s a bitch-ass mothershocker. He hit on my shocking fiancé. That’s right, he-“

O’hara Migu from the manga, with his ATSV movie design. I was looking for in-character things for him to do while I was learning how to draw his weird face, and I ended up with a typical interaction between Miguel and his boss at Alchemax.

I actually own an old physical copy of an issue from the original comic run from the 1992. It's the one where he's running around butt-naked and wants to die, then hang-glides off a roof and attacks a robot cowboy. I also realized recently that I can read the rest of the comics, because the internet exists and I don't have to hunt down physical copies of anything anymore. It has been hilarious to find out Miguel is as rude and bitchy in his comics as he is in the movie. 

Comic Miguel's FutureReddit threads be like:

"My boss keeps anglicizing my name and hitting on my fiancé. Where should I hide the body?"

Also, I really appreciate the multiple artists in the 1992 run deciding to make Tyler Stone ugly as fuck for no reason.

Restorative or Transformative?: Homoerotic Subtext, The Closet, and Ciphers in Pop Culture. The nature of commercial art is that it’s sometimes bad and inconsistent. Notably it’s also misogynistic. One way in which audiences try to reconcile massive plot holes or gaps in character motivation is by reading secrets or hidden information into a plot.

Commonly, male characters are interpreted as closeted gay or bisexual to reconcile the absence of women from commercial narratives with the generally stunted and poorly-written male characters that form the focus on said texts. This reading has become especially common among a non-heterosexual milieu. Rather than transforming the original text into some radically different new form, this closeted interpretation seeks to make the original text stand on its own as a story rather than a Swiss cheese of dumb writing decisions.

This interpretation only works for a specific type of pop, usually genre fiction. Any story in which tortured male leads eschew women in favour of male-male bonds (because female characters are constantly killed off, written sparsely, or written out, because the production team keeps casting their male buddies, because actors demand to keep having scenes with their bros, whatever) can become a sounder structure if you put one of them in a closet.

The gay interpretation is the natural consequence of shoddy misogynistic writing from ventures like Supernatural, Naruto, all the biggest hits. It’s also the natural consequence of more benignly misogynistic writing like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The Lord of the Rings, where women aren’t necessarily rejected but are simply absent from the worlds of the protagonists. When the emotional crux of the story falls on male-male interactions, this reads as romantic because society at large priorities (definitively heterosexual) romance as the pinnacle of human connection. Two forces are in conflict, the primacy of heterosexuality (read as: romance) and the primacy of men.

Anyway. All that is to say that the typical gay or bisexual reading of male characters in pop fiction comes from a very real place. But, in some places, that’s the default interpretation. Angst, insecurity, secrets, double lives, fatigue, disappointment, restrained passion, stunted personal growth, anyone living in the closet can tell you that it impacts and defines your whole life to know that you live in a way fundamentally incompatible with The Proper Way that life is structured around down to tax law and superstore prices (which assume a heterosexual nuclear family unit). Characters in fiction also tend to have personal problems because that makes them interesting and tasty.

If you’ve grown up on stories with the specific type of misogyny that can be papered over with a closeted interpretation of the male leads, carrying this interpretation over to any male character will make sense more often than not. Even a bit of angst or insecurity? Well of course that makes sense if a character is closeted.

Except that’s hurt a normal part of fiction, and sometimes the closeted interpretation takes away from the point of a character. If a male character is on another axis of marginalization, the closeted interpretation imposed by the slash reading community downplays or trivializes the effects of that marginalization in the plot by overwriting it with another type of marginalization. Alternately, sometimes a character’s heterosexuality is a part of the story. There are some sorts of critiques or investigations of misogyny or masculinity that don’t work if the character has an ‘opt out’ of the cisheteropatriarchal perspective. Not that gay/bisexual men aren’t except from misogyny, but misogyny masculinity and heterosexuality are so tightly linked that it sort of defeats the point if you interpret that character outside of heterosexuality.

All that is to say—the closet interpretation is a quick and easy spice to apply to the weaker parts of action-adventure genre fiction to make it taste better. It draws from a large enough sample of art that it’s pretty widely applicable. Because of that, it’s part of some people’s [my] default interpretation package just because the semi-dull macho show at least gets less dull if you imagine there’s a reason for there to be no girls besides simple hatred. That then forms its own problem where the interpretation that works with your average genre work gets then blanket-applied to all genre works and obscures the places where the closet interpretation doesn’t fix the work, and actually makes it less interesting.

So I just watched Across the Spiderverse

A follow-up to my Miguel as Miguel Rivera's great-grandson post:

Just thinking about one of the Spiders from either the later half of the 20th century or the early 21st century playing some Ernesto de la Cruz music and Miguel bolts his ass down the hall to rip the device apart and then he storms away with no explanation.

Everyone now knows he hates Ernesto de la Cruz, but no one knows why. So people come up with wild theories, anything from de la Cruz being a time-traveling musical villain in his dimension to Miguel having a failed music career and being jealous of "the greatest musician ever". Those whose dimensions are after de la Cruz got exposed stay quiet bc the theories are funnier than just assuming Miguel really hates this specific murderous fraud from well over a century ago.

Meanwhile, Miguel just stomps his way back to his hidey hole and plays his bisabuelo's music (especially his covers of Hector's songs) loudly to calm down. Then he calls him and they talk about their hatred of Ernesto de la Cruz 🥰, he loves talking shit with his 100-year-old bisabuelo lol

Okay but like Peter Parker reincarnated as dick grayson angst

Spider-Man: Life Story (2019) #3 Aco Variant Cover

ok ok ok, to whom this may concern, pretty please point me in the direction of any and all Margo lore because I need, not want, need to understand every feasible aspect of her life, right now.

like, is she a hero in her home dimension? how does that work if she's a VR avatar? did she develop her own VR/Avatar system? how does her avatar work in general? how/why did Miguel/some spider from HQ recruit her (going back to the whole 'was she a hero in her home dimension' thing)? how does she function at HQ, cause she seems to have a different role than other spiders, is she tech only or does she go on missions too?

I need to know how she works, I need to know about her home universe, I need to know how she exists as a spiderwoman, I think she's so cool and I want to know everything about her.

Is there any overly specific topic you’d like to ramble about right now. I am giving you an opening.

What if I said Octogoblin, would everybody unfollow?

I'm just teasing you.

But yes! There are many ideas I have been turning over lately. Let's see... there's a minor expansion on the idea of Harry painting portraits of his loved ones. There's the one about the gremlin-ification of the Green Goblin within more recent fanon. Or my severely mixed feelings on No Way Home and how the potential was there to do something cool and narratively compelling, but I don't think the MCU writers actually thought about what they were doing/the implications this plot would have on the other universes.

That one goes hand in hand with my thoughts on Norman Osborn Redemption Arcs and how I, a certified Norman Osborn Enjoyer, feel they should be done (read: not in the way No Way Home did it) which also circles back to the gremlin-ification of the Green Goblin because I don't like to see my favorite Spidey villain decontextualized, misunderstood and woobified. (Not to say we can't joke around or we always have to take things 100% seriously in fandom, I've reblogged plenty of Gobby memes, it's a very specific fandom phenomenon that happened to work its way into the fandom's depictions of this villain, seemingly after No Way Home came out. I wasn't deep into the fandom at that time, so I didn't experience the beginning, but MAN did I catch up on the backlog at the beginning of this year).

Regrettably, I'm very tired and don't feel capable of sufficiently developing any of these, so I'll tell you something I've been wanting to share because I think it's funny and I haven't had another opportunity yet.

When I was a kid, my brother and I watched Raimi Spider-Man all the time - the first two, anyway, those were the ones we had on DVD. We even watched them before bed. Not because we were bored, but because they were so familiar we could fall asleep to them. They are some of the most beloved pieces of art in my life and I'm very glad for the place they have in my heart.

That being said. When I was a kid watching the first Spider-Man for the first time, I did not yet know that stunts were a thing. I thought Spider-Man and Green Goblin were actually beating the shit out of each other for the sake of making this film.

I also thought that Aunt May and Uncle Ben were married in real life and while I did not think they actually killed Uncle Ben, I DID assume they had actually shot him. Sometimes I would imagine a conversation between Aunt May and the filmmakers as they explained that they were going to have to seriously rough up her husband for art.

None of this was particularly alarming to me. I did think it was weird that they would do such a thing, making people beat each other up, but it brought me and my brother some of our favorite action scenes, so it wasn't all that important.

I did eventually learn, of course. By the time Spider-Man 2 came out I knew that actors didn't actually punch each other in the face or throw giant clock hands at each other. But that was how I lived my life and interacted with art for a time, assuming that Tobey Maguire was willingly getting bloodied up for my entertainment.