…And His Amazing Friends: Amazing Spider-Man SDCC 2012 Panel

There was one minor, eensy, tiny problem with Marvel Comics’s Amazing Spider-Man panel Sunday. The panel wasn’t really about Spider-Man.

Oh sure, the panel opened with news about the Amazing Spider-Man and Avenging Spider-Man comic books, but those updates took about seven or ten minutes of an hour long panel. After that, we got updates on Carnage, Venom and Scarlet Spider, which are at least Spider-Man related… but we also got status reports on Captain Marvel, Punisher War Zone, Space Punisher, and last but not least, Daredevil, whose status report was, in effect, “Yeah, we have no idea what’s going on with that triple-Eisner Award winning book! But Eisner Awards are cool! And Daredevil won three of them! So who doesn’t love Daredevil?”

Which actually brings to mind another minor problem with the Spider-Man panel, and with every other Marvel panel we went to: Moderator Arune Singh, who is Director of Communications for Marvel Comics and possibly the most irritating and repetitive public speaker on the planet. Here are some of my notes from the panel, verbatim from my notebook:

• If I hear Arune Singh say, “How many of you are loving X” again, I will shit.
• At least 4 “How many of you love…” so far. Fuck.
• Fifth. Fucking. “How many of you LOVE…”
• SIXTH. SINGH WILL DIE BY MY HAND.

As a hype man, Arune Singh makes Flava Flav look like Puck from Much Ado About Nothing. “Who here is loving Bottom? I call him Assface! Give it up for Assface, everyone!” Singh’s relentless, unstoppable, unkillable, unchanging enthusiasm for apparently every book that Marvel is producing is to be expected – Ike Perlmutter isn’t paying to fly the man to San Diego to say, “Carnage? I personally don’t care for him.” in front of a crowd of potential paying customers. But the hype feels constant in Marvel panels, with a much crappier signal to noise ratio than competitor’s panels.

But despite the nonstop boosterism and the rather broad definition of what constitutes a Spider-Man comic, there was some actual discussion about upcoming events in Spider-Man books. Amazing Spider-Man writer Dan Slott was not at the panel but Singh got him on the phone and held it up to the microphone, allowing him to speak to the crowd in a way that some dingbat always tries at one of these panels and which never seems to work, but damn if Slott wasn’t audible, even in the back of the room.

Slott talked about the upcoming introduction of Spider-Man’s sidekick (“My notes here say, “Fuck.”), Alpha, in Amazing Spider-Man #693, which is also the chronological 50th anniversary of the introduction of Spider-Man. Slott said that bringing Alpha into Spider-Man’s orbit is meant to be a new take on the continuing Spider-Man theme that with great power comes great responsibility by turning Peter Parker’s origin on it’s head. Where in Amazing Fantasy #15, Peter wanders into a science exposition and an experiment exposes him to the radioactive spider, in the case of Alpha, “A kid comes to [Peter’s] lab and gets zapped and gets superpowers,” Slott said, “So it’s the kid’s powers, but still Peter’s responsibility.” Which is an interesting story trope, but if Peter is responsible for this accident, doesn’t that mean that the original scientist at the original science exposition had a responsibility to teach Peter? If that’s true, Dr. Deadbeat Spider-Tweaker PhD is a father figure so irresponsible and deadbeat we’re lucky Peter’s not working a stripper pole in Secaucus. But I digress.

The primary difference between Spider-Man’s and Alpha’a origins are the nature of the secrets that they need to keep – specifically, Alpha doesn’t need to keep any because the experiment that gave him his powers happened in front of God and everybody, so everyone already knows he has them. “Alpha is everything Peter wishes he was in high school,” Slott said. Still, the creative team’s goal is to make Alpha as relateable as Spider-Man was when depicted as a high school student. “[We want to take] an everyday kid and make him look like something special,” said Amazing Spider-Man penciller Humberto Ramos.

Starting in Avenging Spider-Man #9, Kelly Sue Deconnick’s newly-reimagined Captain Marvel will be teaming up with Spider-Man, and Deconnick said she is having fun writing their dialogue and relationship, calling it flirtatious without particularly going anywhere. “”They have a history,” Deconnick said, “They have a really good, really genuine friendship that makes them good partners.”

Deconnick also revealed that Carol Danvers will be based from Boston (Finally! We never get any damn superheroes! The closest we’ve gotten recently is Andrew Bennett from I, Vampire, and he skated the second that whore Gotham City opened her legs!), and that she’s written a battle sequence she’s particularly proud of that takes place over the Zakim Bridge (She asked the crowd how we from Boston pronounce “Zakim.”  And when we two or three from here yelled out, she assured us that the bridge’s setting would look excellent in the battle). Of course, considering she didn’t know how to pronounce the Zakim Bridge, we might be looking forward to seeing Captain Marvel clean up the Combat Zone before saving the Travelers Building and intervening in the Boston Massacre. But still: nice to have superhero action happening in a setting I recognize.

Cullen Bunn, who’s taking over Venom from Rick Remender, announced some of what he has in mind for that title, which will include taking on some entity known as The Savage Six, which I predict will be either six villains with a mad-on for Venom, or five pissed-off guys searching for an accountant. “Flash is answering for all the mistakes he’s made… in the form of The Savage Six,” Bunn said, “It’s going to leave some serious scars on Flash Thompson.”

One of the bigger announcements of the panel is a mini-event going across at least Venom and Scarlet Spider: Minimum Carnage. Which means despite the best efforts of Brian Michael Bendis, who showed us Carnage being torn in half and left in high Earth orbit by Sentry back in the first arc of New Avengers, we’re getting more Carnage… or arguably less. Because this arc, written by Chris Yost and Cullen Bunn, with Lan Medina, Carnage will escape prison and flee to the Microverse. Where the Micronauts live. I’m thinking Carnage vs. Baron Karza. As someone who read Marvel Comics in the late 70s: Me Likee.

During this storyline, Venom and Scarlet Spider will be meeting and working together for the first time, to mixed results. “They do not have a flirty chemistry,” Bunn said, “They are going to clash.” In addition, Bunn said that Flash will be given the chance to be rid of the symbiote for good. “All he has to do is destroy a universe,” Bunn said.

The attention of the Amazing Spider-Man panel then turned to Captain Marvel. Why? Beats the fuck out of me. But at least they had Deconnick there – you know, and actual writer, which is something that felt lacking from many of Marvel’s other SDCC panels. Deconnick described Captain Marvel as showing us the superhero as Chuck Yeager – constantly analyzing situations and trying to assert control at all times. Which Deconnick said works in a test piloting situation but doesn’t work well in the real world. “She’s a bad ass,” Deconnick said, “Control issues, shoots a guy in the back… my kind of girl.”

The Spider-Man panel then turned its attention, obviously to Punisher: War Zone. A miniseries written by Greg Rucka with art by Marco Checchetta, it will feature a battle between The Punisher and much of the Marvel Universe, which sounds like an an Elseworlds title, but the panel assured us, “This is all in continuity.” The downside? This miniseries will end Greg Rucka’s run writing The Punisher.

Then the fans who attended the Spider-Man panel hoping for news about Spider-Man were given Marvel’s latest news about Daredevil. That news being: they didn’t have any news. Marvel’s Senior Vice President of Creative and Creator Development C. B. Cebulski, when asked what was coming up in the title said, “I honestly don’t know.” And why would he prepare news for Daredevil? This was the fucking Spider-Man panel.

Thankfully, things then got back on track for the Spider-Man panel when they addressed the most important subject for fans of the Webslinger: Space Punisher. Writer Frank Tieri described the book, the first issue of which should be out now, as, “Think Buck Rogers if Buck Rogers really screwed up.”

Contrary to what the title might lead you to believe, Space Punisher is not about shooting The Punisher into space. Instead, this is a completely different Frank Castle, indigenous to space (But aren’t we all, if you think about it? Particularly if you think about it while using mescaline?), whose family is killed by “an intergalactic mafia” called The Six-Fingered Hand, Tieri said. He added that we can expect appearances by Space Deadpool and Space Sabretooth: “A lot of them get killed,” Tieri said.

We were forced to leave the Spider-Man panel when they opened the floor to questions, which was probably for the best; given the laser-focus of the panel’s subject matter, we might have wound up hearing the panel wax rhetorical about upcoming events in Betty and Veronica. Amanda commented on the way out that this panel was less a Spider-Man panel and more a State of The Marvel Union panel. Which is fine, but the panel, as with pretty much all the Marvel panels of the con, felt like vastly more hype than meat. At least this panel had some actual comic creators – the AvX panel in particular seemed to be all editors, which isn’t nearly as exciting and informative as hearing from the dudes in the trenches.

But still and all, having the creators there couldn’t prevent the hype from taking front and center. Singh can ask up whether or not we’re loving X for as many times as he likes; the fact of the matter is that at SDCC is filled with people who traveled many miles at great personal expense to hear about the books. Of course we’re loving them. You don’t need to tell us constantly that we should; give us some news to remind us why we do.