Skeletor’s original origin, as forgotten as He-Man’s original origin.
What happened to villains, anyway? I’ve written a few articles in the past few weeks or posted videos by other commentators about how in the quest to be either open-minded or complex, the purpose of the villain seems to have been forgotten. While you can have a sympathetic villain, good goals but evil methods, or have a sympathetic backstory about how they turned evil, sometimes people do just want to watch the world burn.
I still blame Wicked, the play that thought it would be fun to have the Wicked Witch of the Oz franchise with a sympathetic story. I still haven’t seen it and don’t plan to but I’m aware of the fallout. While DC having their villains in the position of having to save the day at least offers a potential for fun, watching Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty or a character literally named Cruella De Ville for a reason actually being the victims rather than just evil misses the whole point of why a villain exists. I went over this a bit last week with the current state of Autobots and Decepticons, that in order to make kids show villains more mature they have to not necessarily be evil, the same affliction that hit Skeletor in the recent DC run of Masters Of The Universe comics. This usually flies in the face of why these villains exist.
In the following video, Henry of The Closer Look defends the idea of the villain who is evil for evil’s sake and why some narratives need that kind of villain.
Even Spider-Fan Writers Aren’t Into Modern Spider-Man
Spider-Man is Marvel’s flagship character. That’s why they fought so hard to get him in the Cinematic Universe, even if he’s only Peter in physical design, with maybe a few good quips. That’s on Sony but that’s another discussion. Created by Stan Lee and designed by Steve Ditko, Peter Parker’s first appearance was in the last issue of horror anthology Amazing Fantasy, all the way back in the 1960s. Lee had tried to get his bosses to let him do the character but they weren’t into him…until Spider-Man got such a strong response that they suddenly loved the idea and Amazing Spider-Man #1 soon hit shelves.
However, there are a lot of problems with modern Spider-Man. There are some things you can trace back to the 1990s but it’s in the 2010s and 2020s that the characters has really started suffering. Recently, Avi Green of Four Color Media Monitor, a comic critique and commentary site that sometimes has articles on Bleeding Fool, located a commentary on the Spider-Man fansite Spider-Fan. At least it was a fansite. While still up as of this writing I can’t find a review after 2015 of the main books and the contributors (that’s plural) only seem to post something once a month to the blog. In June, contributor Adam Winchell posted a commentary entitled “Spider-Man Ends: Or Why It’s Time For Marvel To Hang Up The Webs”, which you can read here for full context as I go over the commentary. With a title I don’t think I have to tell you what it’s about, or how hard it was for someone who writes for a Spider-Man fansite literally called Spider-FAN to make such a statement. So what does he say and how much sense does he make?
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on October 10, 2023 in Marvel Spotlight and tagged commentary, Marvel Universe, Peter Parker, Spider-Man (Peter Parker).
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