Spider-man books

[JonnyQuest037]

Easier to draw maybe, then describe in prose!

At least if you're introducing those characters for the first time.

I don't know. Even describing all of those characters in prose would take a lot less time than laying out an action shot with dozens of characters. If I had a choice, I know which job I'd rather have.

 

[tomswift2002]

I'm currently on book 3 of the X-Men/Spider-Man Time's Arrow trilogy. The trilogy has been very interesting so far with the trips to the past (although I do disagree with one of the trips, but that is another discussion for another day), Spider-Man and Bishop getting sent to the dimension with The Park, and now the future.

But where's is Rogue in this whole trilogy? She's not even so much as mentioned during Gambit's times of personal thought. And I was looking forward to a Rogue/Spider-Man discussion.

 

[tomswift2002]

So I’m currently reading “Codename Wolverine”. Looks like the book deals with Wolverine’s time with Team X, which seems to be in the 70’s or 80’s as East Germany and the Soviet Union are mentioned as being in existence.

 

[tomswift2002]

I’m upto Chapter 11 in “Codename Wolverine” and it’s pretty interesting. There’s even been a cameo by Nick Fury and SHIELD.

This is for KRAD, but did you always intend for there to be a solo Wolverine story in the line? Since aside from the X-Men logo, and a few mentions and cameos, this is a Wolverine and Mystique story.

 

[KRAD]

Sorry, only just saw this -- only check in here occasionally.............

We went back and forth on this. Chris originally pitched it as a Wolverine novel, but we decided to make it an X-Men novel because X-Men books sold really really really well, and we weren't sure a Wolverine book would, necessarily. We hedged our bets and made it an X-Men book, but with Wolverine's name in the title to make it clear that it would focus on him.

 

[tomswift2002]

Makes sense. When I think of the movie The Wolverine I don't think a lot of people connected it to X-Men right away.

 

[Greg Cox]

Just wait until somebody finally remakes LOGAN'S RUN . . . and everyone thinks it's a sequel to LOGAN.

 

[tomswift2002]

So I'm currently reading Adam Troy-Castro's The Gathering Of the Sinister Six. During the funeral scene in Chapters 5/6 I though at first that it was the Hobgoblin or the Green Goblin masquerading as the minister. But it turned out to be Mysterio. I forgot that Mysterio could levitate.

But I can see how the books is still in continuity with the rest of the books in the series. Of course now that its years after its publication I can read all 3 books close together without having to wait to see if the story would be concluded.

 

[tomswift2002]

Just picked up a few Marvel novels at a local used book store and some are by Trek novelists:

Wolverine
Election Day by Peter David
Nature of the Beast by Dave Stern

X-Men
Five Decades edited by Stan Lee
Dark Mirror by Marjorie M.Liu

Spider-Man
The Darkest Hours by Jim Butcher (cover looks like it came from the 90s TV show)
Requiem by Jeff Mariotte

 

[tomswift2002]

Wolverine: Election Day
Written by Peter David
Published: September 2008 by Pocket Books

Plot: A kid is kidnapped from his home late one night, just days before Presidential Election, and the American government asks Logan to help find the boy.

Review: So this was a pretty long book at nearly 374 pages. Unfortunately, this was not one of Peter David's better books. Essentially the book is your average political thriller, but with a side-serving of mutant problems, because it is a Wolverine/X-Men book after all. Unfortunately, this is a book that really needed to be edited even more, since a number of scenes I felt were just there to get the characters from one place to another to fill up the page count. There were times where the plot would just move at a good clip, but then it would just slam into a spot that would just crawl.

Rating: 4/10

 

[Defcon]

Wolverine: Election Day
Written by Peter David
Published: September 2008 by Pocket Books

Plot: A kid is kidnapped from his home late one night, just days before Presidential Election, and the American government asks Logan to help find the boy.

Review: So this was a pretty long book at nearly 374 pages. Unfortunately, this was not one of Peter David's better books. Essentially the book is your average political thriller, but with a side-serving of mutant problems, because it is a Wolverine/X-Men book after all. Unfortunately, this is a book that really needed to be edited even more, since a number of scenes I felt were just there to get the characters from one place to another to fill up the page count. There were times where the plot would just move at a good clip, but then it would just slam into a spot that would just crawl.

Rating: 4/10

Read it almost a decade ago, but definitely liked the novel way more than you did.

http://unreality-sf.net/2009/11/10/wolverine-election-day-review/

 

[tomswift2002]

So I’m just starting Book 2 in Adam-Troy Castro’s Spider-Man trilogy, Revenge Of The Sinister Six. I guess back around 2000 people were wondering if this trilogy would ever be finished, or if it would be like the TV shows of the day and just have the Spider-Man novels end on a cliff-hanger.

With the iBooks Marvel books, besides Castro’s Spider-Man books, are the rest in continuity with the Byron Preiss books? Was it just a case of the books were already commissioned, but because of Preiss’ death they had to be put on hold until all the legal stuff was sorted out? Or did iBooks create its own line that tied into the BP line?

 

[KRAD]

tomswift2002: You've got the timeline all wrong. Let me explain.....

Okay, so the Marvel novels, of which The Gathering of the Sinister Six was but one of many, was co-published by Berkley Books and Byron Preiss Multimedia Company. BPMC was formed in 1992 to produce CD-ROMs of various kinds, right when that format was taking off. BPMC also developed Virtual Comics, about ten years before web comics would be a thing. While Byron had a privately owned book packaging business (called Byron Preiss Visual Publications), BPMC was a publicly held company with stockholders and such, and so it was BPMC -- which had investment capital -- that got the license from Marvel to do novels and anthologies, which debuted in 1994. (BPVP couldn't afford what Marvel wanted for that license.)

By 1999, the CD-ROM bubble had completely burst, plus the world (and the technology) wasn't quite ready for web comics yet, so both Virtual Comics and the CD-ROM business imploded. The Marvel novels were the only thing keeping the company afloat. Then Marvel cancelled the contract due to non-payment of royalites (because all the money being generated by the books was going to paying the electric bill and people's salaries, as literally nothing else was bringing in money at this point).

BPMC fell into the swamp, and Byron formed iBooks as a new book venture, entering a co-publishing deal with Simon & Schuster similar to the deal BPMC had with Berkley. He was able to renegotiate with Marvel -- blaming the stockholders and such -- and renew the license. It was under this imprint that the Sinister Six trilogy was finished, and they also did several X-Men books -- Michael Jan Friedman's Shadows of the Past, Steven A. Roman's Chaos Engine trilogy, Steve Lyons's The Legacy Quest trilogy, Karen Haber's Science of the X-Men, and the anthology Five Decades of the X-Men.

Adam's trilogy and Mike's novel were both commissioned by me for the Berkley/BPMC line, but were cut off by the cancellation. (I had commissioned several other books that never did see the light of day, including a Captain America/Wolverine team-up novel by Jason Henderson, a Daredevil novel by Warren Ellis, a sequel to Venom's Wrath by myself and Jose R. Nieto, a Spider-Man/Silver Surfer team-up by Steven A. Roman & Ken Grobe, and possibly one or two others that I don't recall 20 years later.) By 1999, I had left the company in disgust, as in addition to not paying royalties to Marvel, BPMC wasn't paying freelancers, either, and I got tired of screwing people I worked with and respected in order to service my employers, whom I worked with and totally didn't respect. For that reason, and others, the Sinister Six trilogy are the only ones that can be considered in continuity with the Berkley/BPMC books.

The last novel in Byron's new license was the last book in the Chaos Engine trilogy, which was published in 2003. Byron died in 2005, so his death had no bearing on those books at all.

 

[Daddy Todd]

Thanks KRAD! I find the minutiae of the publishing field fascinating!

I used to read Locus largely for this kind of info.

 

[Jsplinis]

A couple of questions for KRAD:

1. Were there any novels that marvel considered in continuity with the comics?

2. Is there a comprehensive timeline of the order in which the novels and short stories take place? And more importantly, is there one available on the web? If I read these books I would definitaley want to read them in chronological order.

Thanks for any help

 

[KRAD]

1. The only one that came close was the Avengers/Thunderbolts novel by Pierce Askegren.

2. There is a comprehensive timeline of the order in which they take place, and, in fact, I put it in the back of each book. I may put one up on my blog for shits and giggles.....

 

[tomswift2002]

I just finished “Revenge of the Sinister Six” Yesterday. Boy, whoever was looking over it’s paperback publication I don’t think had a clue as to how to format the pages correctly. The print was smalll—-about as small as the print in David R. George’s “Twilight” From 2002—and each page had the text squished into the top 3/4 of the page, so that there was a strip of white paper about the width of my thumb at the bottom.

Also, and this may be from the change over from KRAD to whoever took up the editorial duties at iBooks, but the book really needed a second or third pass at editing because there were a number of grammatical errors. I was finding that there were a number of sentences that didn’t read correctly because of a dropped word or duplication of a word. So you might get “Peter to said to Mary Jane” rather than “Peter said to Mary Jane” or a dropped would look like “Spider-Man webbed window shut” when it should’ve been “Spider-Man webbed the window shut”.

Otherwise, it was a very good book and I was really wondering how Spider-Man was going to beat the Sinister Six, as he was really getting beat up there. Plus one real highlight scene was Mary-Jane’s battle with the Chameleon!

After 435 pages, I’m taking a little breather before I read the final book in the trilogy, “The Secret Of The Sinister Six”.

Oh, yeah, everywhere I went with this book, everyone would start singing the 1967 cartoon theme song!

 

[KRAD]

I was long gone from editing for Byron by the time the manuscript for Revenge of the Sinister Six came in......

 

[tomswift2002]

I was long gone from editing for Byron by the time the manuscript for Revenge of the Sinister Six came in......

Well whoever was editing shouldn’t have been in the business, or paid more attention to the book.

 

[KRAD]

At that point, Byron had a skeleton crew working for him, and they were all overworked and underpaid and underappreciated. I wouldn't be too hard on them, as Byron was simply horrible to work for.