This week, I did this illustration of Lea in a business suit. This is part of the change in direction her story is taking, but more importantly for the moment, it was a challenging angle to draw. I did it twice, and I’m happy with the result. There are a few things I can see now that would have helped. The skirt should have a more dramatic triangle shape to emphasize the position of her legs. I still think the documents she’s holding help sell the businessperson image, but I also really want to draw more of her side so I can emphasize her body shape and position better. Plus, with her one hand up by her glasses, having her other hand even lower could create another cool perspective visual. I’m going to draw this again, and I’m excited for it.
I want to say something else about my creativity here, as a kind of accountability: I want to test out my theory that if I put on music, I’ll start getting into a creative mood and draw, even if I’m not mentally there. I enjoy listening to podcasts while I work, but I also know I work slower while they’re on than with music, and music is much better for creative purposes. I also can probably be more consistent about doing chores if I listen to podcasts while doing them, because nothing gets me more ready to busy my hands than listening to someone talk at, but not to, me. It’s a simple thing that I could have done a while ago, but haven’t because any time I think of a way to do more of something, I get scared of losing time for doing other things. But I want to do things, and this is all stuff I do anyway, so I want to publicly say I want to try this new way of managing my activities in the hopes that I draw more.
On another note, this week Marvel Snap introduced the Scarlet Spider card, so I’ve been thinking about him. If you’re not familiar, the Scarlet Spider is Ben Reilly, Spider-Man’s clone. He was in Across the Spider-Verse, voiced by Andy Samberg, in the blue hoodie, going, “Ah, my life is so tortured!” He tends not to generate much enthusiasm because he’s at the center of what’s quite possibly the least popular Spider-Man story of all time, and more recently in another poorly received story. I’m thinking about him because he’s such a great example of a character that should be really great, but no one knew what to do with him.
Ben first appeared in the seventies, after the death of Gwen Stacy. Their college professor, Miles Warren, felt Gwen shouldn’t have died and blamed Spidey for her death. He made a clone of her and Peter, and when the Peter clone had Spidey powers, he enacted his revenge by making Peter fight his clone. The clone and Warren seemed to die in a building collapse. The nineties come along, Marvel needs Peter to get married so they can have an event to pull sales from DC, but they didn’t want to lose their classic, schlubby Spider-Man. Enter the clone, who survived and is now named Ben Reilly. There’d be an event called the Clone Saga where Ben shows up, along with Warren, who’s made more clones, and there’s a big clone fight, ending with Peter retiring as a superhero and leaving the mantle with Ben. The only issue is that the initial event was really popular, so editorial forced the creative teams to stretch it out way too long and insert a bunch of unnecessary drama that turned it into the most hated thing ever. Peter came back at the end, and Ben once again died. Ben would later be revived in the 10’s, do some things that are more in the right direction but nothing notable, and then have his big turn. He was given memory issues related to being a clone, these issues drove him to villainy, and he started hunting down Peter, until eventually he got dark energy goo on him that made him Chasm. Chasm would go on to lead the Dark Web event, where he teams up with the Goblin Queen to lead an army from Limbo against New York. The story leading up to Chasm was poorly received, and they made a lot of bad choices in the lead-up, most infamously when they killed Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, allegedly at the behest of Marvel Studios.
As a concept, Ben shouldn’t be bad or hard to do. If the Clone Saga had ended as originally planned, then I’m sure he would have had a much brighter future and would be really popular. He’s Spider-Man, again. Sure, rehashing an existing character isn’t the most creative, but that character is Spider-Man, so it’s gold. Peter gets to grow up, but readers still get a version of the character they love, now with more edge and, quite frankly, some of the best costumes in the Spidey world. If all had gone differently, then a few years later, Peter comes back as Spider-Man, and Ben goes back to being Scarlet Spider and does more indie stuff in another city. I’d suggest magic villains, since Peter fights science villains. And what’s really wild is that Marvel kind of did that twice already.
Ben had a short-lived solo series after he was brought back in the 10’s, where he went to Las Vegas to become his own person and hero. He would later help out in a Midnight Suns event where demons attacked Vegas. And on top of that, there’s Kaine. Kaine is one of the other clones, the evil one. He came back…sometime, I honestly don’t remember, and at one point got his life in order and tried to become a good guy. Specifically, he took up the name Scarlet Spider, went to Houston, and got into some magic trouble (and, incidentally, one of the cooler Scarlet Spider costumes). Think about that: Marvel has two Spider-Man clones, and the good clone became an otherwise cool-looking villain and the evil one did the obvious solo soul-searching thing and fought magic stuff. Their stories are completely backwards to one another. Kaine could easily have become Chasm, since he already has a history of memory issues and mental instability in the vein they were going for (and sidenote, superhero comics should really stop using mental health as a reason for villainy). Ben could have conquered his challenges (like Peter did when he had the exact same issue with Doc Ock’s memory erasure) and gotten a cool villain to fight and make his solo series more prominent, or gotten a big role in an event so people paid attention more. But neither weren’t been able to rise above the reputation of the Clone Saga to gain a sense of their own potential value, and in the aftermath, Ben has taken a major fall.
Like, it’s not hard to imagine the better path. Not expanding the Clone Saga. Even ignoring that, giving Ben as Scarlet Spider a solo series much earlier would have been better, so he had time to set himself up. You could kick it off with the return of Demogoblin or Doppelganger, or maybe he’s the one who deals with the totem BS. There could still be a Chasm, if Chasm is a separate person and we connect his origin to Limbo to streamline that whole plot. I mean, Chasm is basically Ben’s Venom: The dark reflection, born from weird goo, with an alt on the Spider Sense, and the ability to generate weapons from nothing. That’s a symbiote, my dudes. Just like Venom has this sprawling mythos now, Chasm could have a whole thing with rising to be King of Limbo. The connection between Chasm and the Goblin Queen (the evil clone of the X-Men’s Jean Grey) can pair nicely with a cool fanfic idea I saw, I believe by Tenshi Arts (I’m sorry if that’s incorrect or I misspelled it), where Ben and Wolverine clone Laura Kinney were paired together. The good clones and the bad clones, both (not necessarily literally) marrying the Spider-Man and X-Men worlds. It’s an option, at least.
I’m a fanfic writer, I get excited about ideas like that. And that brings us to the actual point of me talking about Ben Reilly, which is that I’m trying to plan out a way of doing a superhero story differently. It’s a hard thing to do. As I get older, I get more annoyed with the sharp binary between heroes and villains, because I don’t think anyone would set out to be the villain. I also don’t like the unchanging “world outside your window” setting, because it’s very limiting in terms of what kind of effect super stuff can have and what the heroes can stand for. I’d also like it if the lore were more streamlined, and when a writer pitched an idea for a new thing that’s identical or very similar to something that already exists, editorial told them to use the preexisting version. And it would be nice if the stories were, you know, complete stories, with a beginning, middle, and end, instead of never-ending IP farms. The last two pieces are easy to do just by having one creative team making their story outside of the Marvel and DC bubbles. The first two are harder, because every story has a moral stance that will create “good guys and bad guys,” and superheroes need to happen in a world that looks like ours. The base premise of superheroes, after all, is, “What if someone had power, like politicians and the wealthy, and used it for good?” Superman’s early stories were about solving societal problems, before things shifted towards villains and battles; even then, many of the earliest villains were World War II analogs, because obviously punch Nazis.
So what I have so far in how to do things differently starts with a world that resembles this one, but isn’t. As long as the world has the same social and political issues, it works, and I can still have the characters do things that actually affect the world. I also think the way the stories go, the way the characters are conceived of, should be more in the vein of a shonen battle manga than what’s now the prototypical American superhero. What I mean is, if you got powers, you’d have a specific goal for using them, right? At least, you wouldn’t go through the trouble of making a costume and using them for non-mundane tasks unless you had a goal of some kind. Maybe you don’t have one now, but when you get them, it’s connected to something that you have to deal with, or you quickly discover some other issue that only you can address with your gifts. While I love the baseline, naïve assumption that the average person would use superpowers to help others and protect the defenseless, and I wouldn’t want my superheroes to ignore such duty, I also don’t think the best way to write a singular story, one you plan to have an ending someday, is to have the main character wage an aimless war to end all crime, and basically just become the person who handles problems too big for the police. Because Batman will never run out of mafia or Jokers, he can never retire. There’s no actual end point, there’s no thematic conclusion, and the character growth has nowhere to go and is often ignored or reset so new stories can be written. Give the hero a quest, with a defined goal and prize, and they can accomplish something, grow into the person they need to be, and give the story the thematic conclusion it needs. It also means that the story isn’t defined by “crime fighting,” which is a sorely needed change. Superheroes are polemical, they should have a specific issue that the villain personifies that they want to address; while aimless crime fighting can work for some people, it certainly doesn’t for me, and it’s far from the only issue to dramatize with awesome super fights.
Weekly Art Blog 9/21-9/28/2024
Life in the Gutters 