• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Spider-man books

Oh, I should also mention THE AVENGER: THE ROARING HEART OF THE CRUCIBLE, an anthology coming out this spring featuring new stories about the classic pulp hero created by "Kenneth Robeson."

(And, yes, I have a story in the anthology.)

I'm VERY excited to hear this. Who's publishing this? Will your story feature any of the Justice, Inc. gang?

The publisher is Moonstone, who has already published a couple of AVENGER anthologies. And, yeah, a few of his sidekicks appear in my story.
 
Earlier this year I read "Spider-Man: Wanted Dead Or Alive". I don't recall who the author was, but I remember that one of the editors on the book was Keith R.A DeCandido. I found the book rather enjoyable.
 
I can read a comic from the 2000's in just a few minutes. It's the stuff from the 60's that takes a while to read because they spelled out every little detail for you.

Also because comics today have become so decompressed. It used to be that comics routinely had up to 9 panels per page, often quite crowded with speech balloons and captions. These days it's more typical to have 2-4 panels per page and relatively little text. Back then you could have 2-3 complete stories crammed into one issue, now it typically takes 4-6 issues to tell one story because comics are written with the trade paperback compilations in mind.

I would be interested in hearing your opinions on decompression in modern comics. Personally, I find it somewhat annoying as a comics reader of the 80's and early 90's. I've always read that writers today are made to "write for the trade", but I can't confirm the accuracy of that statement.
 
Earlier this year I read "Spider-Man: Wanted Dead Or Alive". I don't recall who the author was, but I remember that one of the editors on the book was Keith R.A DeCandido. I found the book rather enjoyable.
Admiral Young is correct -- that was by Craig Shaw Gardner, and was one of the 50-odd Marvel novels that Boulevard Books published from 1994-2000. I was the Supervising Editor of that line of books, and I still count that line as one of my proudest accomplishments in the publishing biz. :)

Several Trek authors contributed to the line, starting with me: the Spidey novel Venom's Wrath and short stories in The Ultimate Spider-Man, The Ultimate Silver Surfer, Untold Tales of Spider-Man, The Ultimate Hulk, and X-Men Legends. Others include Nathan Archer, John Gregory Betancourt, Greg Cox, Peter David, Diane Duane, Michael Jan Friedman, Tony Isabella & Bob Ingersoll, Dean Wesley Smith, John Vornholt, and J. Steven York.

Ah, memories............
 
Re: Spider-man books/Byron Preiss Marvel Books

Recently I've managed to read The Venom Factor by Diane Duane that launched the 1990's-early 2000's Marvel line of books. It was a really well done book, with it feeling like a possible episode of the 1994 TV series (albeit it with a PG rating rather than a C or G rating).

Right now I'm currently in the middle of the X-Men: Mutant Empire Trilogy (I'm on book 2 right now), and again it really feels like this trilogy could've easily have been a Season 6 or later episode of the 1992 X-Men TV series (again at a PG level rather than a C or G level). A few of the team members are different from what was seen on the TV series (Jubilee's missing, however Bishop and Archangel are members of the X-Men team) and I'm glad that the Rogue in the story is the Rogue of the 1992 TV series. I remember with the first X-Men movie it took me about 6 or 7 viewings before I finally realized that Anna Pasquin's character was Rogue, since aside from reading maybe 10 X-Men and Spider-Man comics (including two with Spider-Man in Canada, where Spider-Man was at the Calgary Stampede with his wife Mary Jane and their baby cousin/nephew that I got at a Canada Day event), I had seen most of the 1992 X-Men and 1960's & 1994 Spider-Man TV series. Even now, for me whenever I think of the character Rogue, I think of the Rogue from the 1992 TV series with Ms. Marvel's flying powers, and not the "empty cup" Rogue of the movies and 2000's X-Men series, who I find is kind of a weakling when compared to the 1992 Rogue. So I really enjoy how the Rogue in the trilogy is the 1992 Rogue that I remember from the TV series.
 
^That "1992 Rogue" dates from her debut in the comics in 1981. Taking Ms. Marvel's powers was the first thing she did in the comics.
 
I confess I still have my Spider-Man story, which was reprinted in WEB OF SPIDER-MAN #120 framed on the wall of my office.

It was about Morbius the Living Vampire, of course.
 
I confess I still have my Spider-Man story, which was reprinted in WEB OF SPIDER-MAN #120 framed on the wall of my office.

It was about Morbius the Living Vampire, of course.

Which story is that? Was it in one of the anthologies?

After spending a minute on google :p, I guess he is talking about Cold Blood from this anthology: http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Spider-Man-Stan-Lee/dp/0425170004/

Bingo!
 
After reading Christopher's comments on Pocket's policies concerning continuity, I was wondering if KRAD could comment on the policies for the line of Marvel books he was in charge of. Were they meant to happen in the comic continuity, the concurrent cartoon continuity, some other continuity or one of their own? Also, are they written as stand alone stories that don't have to stay consistent with each other like some Trek novels or do they try to stay consistent with each other?
 
After reading Christopher's comments on Pocket's policies concerning continuity, I was wondering if KRAD could comment on the policies for the line of Marvel books he was in charge of. Were they meant to happen in the comic continuity, the concurrent cartoon continuity, some other continuity or one of their own? Also, are they written as stand alone stories that don't have to stay consistent with each other like some Trek novels or do they try to stay consistent with each other?

Keith would know better than I, of course, but from the books I read, my impression was that they were like most tie-ins in general, or like Trek tie-ins were in the '90s: Basically consistent with the core canon (in this case, the comics) but not really integrated with it, so that from the perspective of the canon they'd be along the lines of alternate history or historical fiction.

I've hardly ever come across a comics-based novel that was set in the continuity of an animated adaptation, except for Geary Gravel's novelization of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. There have been comic series published as tie-ins to animated adaptations and set in their continuities, though they usually weren't canonical with respect to those series (although the Young Justice tie-in comic was canonical). I do recall a Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman novel by C.J. Cherryh, but it was actually more of a generic Superman story with a few trappings of L&C's continuity and characterizations, without really feeling like an L&C story specifically. And I seem to recall a couple of stories in the '80s Martin Harry Greenberg-edited Batman anthologies being set in something approximately like the Tim Burton universe -- at least, I recall a Joker story that seemed to be about the Jack Napier version. But those are the exceptions.
 
There is also the Smallville Season 11 comic series, which basically does for Smallville what the Trek Relaunches did for their respective series.
 
After reading Christopher's comments on Pocket's policies concerning continuity, I was wondering if KRAD could comment on the policies for the line of Marvel books he was in charge of. Were they meant to happen in the comic continuity, the concurrent cartoon continuity, some other continuity or one of their own? Also, are they written as stand alone stories that don't have to stay consistent with each other like some Trek novels or do they try to stay consistent with each other?
The Marvel novels I edited were in a modified comics continuity -- basically, we hewed as close as we could to the comics while still mostly dealing with the archetypal versions of the characters. For this reason, even though the comics at the time were doing things like the Spider-clone storyline and Reed Richards being dead and Ant-Man being in the Fantastic Four, not to mention the whole Age of Apocalypse and Heroes Reborn/Return thing, our Spider-Man novels just had Peter Parker as Spidey in them while married to Mary Jane, our FF novels all had the original foursome in them, etc.

But more importantly, the novels were consistent with each other. The books all had a timeline in the back, and I made an effort to keep the "Marvel novelverse" coherent and consistent. So, for example, Dr. Octopus's appearance in the "Doom's Day" trilogy picked up on his previous appearance in Diane Duane's The Octopus Agenda.

We also had a series of novels-only characters who showed up in several stories, most notably a bunch of NYPD cops who interacted with Spider-Man and Daredevil, and the intelligence organization Strategic Action For Emergencies, or SAFE. (See our license didn't allow us to use S.H.I.E.L.D., beyond the occasional mention. So, since S.H.I.E.L.D. was international at that stage, answerable to the UN rather than the U.S. government, we created SAFE as a purely domestic agency.) Sean Morgan, the head of SAFE and several of his subordinates regularly appeared in the novel line.
 
Keith would know better than I, of course, but from the books I read, my impression was that they were like most tie-ins in general, or like Trek tie-ins were in the '90s:
Oh goodness, no. The Trek tie-ins of the 90s were the antithesis of what I was trying to do. :)
 
Okay, then. I was going by the few that I've read, basically just Diane Duane's Spidey trilogy and her X-Men novel (Empire's End), plus PAD's Hulk: What Savage Beast. I hadn't realized there was a unified "novelverse."
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top