LightningStorm said:
Christopher said:
...Spidey gets organic webshooters...
I don't follow Spider-man (really at all) but I know the basics. Did they do that because of the movies? That just strikes me as... well, odd.
Yes, that's why they did it. But it's not at all unusual for comics to adopt elements from mass-media adaptations thereof. After all, a lot more people will watch a TV show or a movie than will ever read a comic book, so if you want to bring in members of that audience, it helps to give them something familiar. Superman comics in the '40s adopted many elements of the radio serials: the
Daily Planet, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, Kryptonite. Batman comics in the '60s changed to bear a closer resemblance to the Adam West sitcom. When
The Incredible Hulk was on TV with Bill Bixby wandering the country, the comics had Bruce Banner wander the country in the same way. And so on.
What's odd in this case is how little they did with it. They did a storyline in which Spidey went through a bizarre metamorphosis and emerged with organic webbing and an enhanced spider-sense. Then they totally failed to follow up on that in any way whatsoever; in most subsequent stories, we didn't see him using his mechanical webshooters, but we saw no evidence that he
wasn't, and the changed spider-sense (basically the ability to communicate with insects, even though spiders are arachnids) was never explored or mentioned again as far as I'm aware. And less than a year later, they did a story that put him through
another bizarre metamorphosis in which he emerged with stingers coming out of his wrists and a differently enhanced spider-sense (which was closer to how spiders' senses actually work, and actually along similar lines to how I depict the spider-sense in the novel). It was as though the first transformation had never happened. And they barely bothered to follow up on the second transformation because they then got caught up in the whole Civil War business and then decided to do this whole massive revamp and wipe all of it out of existence.
But I outlined
Drowned in Thunder before most of that ever happened. Actually the initial transformation and his Avengers membership had happened at that point, but I decided to set the novel before that, because I felt a "classic" solo-Spidey story would be better (plus I'm not that familiar with the Avengers, and Marvel wasn't keen on crossovers in the novels anyway), and because I really wanted to write about how the mechanical webshooters worked. Plus I think the whole idea of having spinnerets in the wrists is kind of silly. Why the wrists? And wouldn't extensive webslinging leave Peter desperately lacking in fluids and proteins after a while? I was happy to steer clear of that whole business.
