Month of May · 7:15pm May 18th, 2018
Hello everyone. Given it's the month of May, I thought better late than never that I'd talk about a character that has not only had an impact on my writing but also one of the reasons I decided to give this fandom a chance. Today I'll be talking about Marvel's May Parker, the daughter of Spider-man.
Jumping back quite a bit back to 2007, I remember my brother bringing home a book from our local library. That book was trade paperback copy of Spider-girl. At first I was not impressed. I'd seen a lot of characters just borrowing the name of an established character and just adding -girl, -boy, etc to try and make them unique or standout. I was actually impressed when I began to read the one book they had and ended up having to check out the other copies they had.
The story takes place in an alternate Marvel universe, earth 982. In this timeline Peter and Mary Jane Watson remain married and have a daughter named after Peter's now deceased Aunt May. Peter has a final confrontation with his old nemesis, Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin which results in Peter losing his leg and forcing him into a permanent retirement where he settles down and into family life. The story takes off when May is a teenager and discovers her spider powers. The series actually holds a record in Marvel for the longest single run title for a female character at 100 issues. To compare Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk lasted 50 and 60 issues respectively. The creators of Spider-Girl, Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz are staples of her book and seem to have a massive amount of respect from Marvel. Whenever they bring a Spider-Girl series back or involve her in any of their story lines, these two are always brought back on to handle the character which I find both surprising and refreshing.
What interested me is that May is not a carbon copy of her father in any manner. Yes, she does share the bad luck of trying to balance her social life with her hero one but that seems standard hero territory. Spider-girl has a plethora of new characters from her school mates, her own unique rogues gallery as well as new heroes that have picked up where older, and recognized ones have fallen or, like Peter, taken to new, non-hero lives. As this is a new generation, there are of course, new legacy characters such as Norman "Normie" Osborn, son of Harry Osborn and the new Green Goblin, Dark Devil, a young man infused with the spirit of the original Daredevil and a demon, and April, a girl infused with the DNA of the Venom symbiote. The book also manages to bring back classic threats such as Carnage and Hobgoblin just to name a few.
I'll admit that Spider-Girl was the first female protagonist that I'd ever really given a chance as no others before her that I'd seen had impressed me. I'd say that reading her series made me more open to giving things, like MLP, a chance where before I would have written this show off as well.
There are always calls to bring her books back every once in a while since her final run, Spider-Girl: The End came out back in 2010 and her fans have been known to make the impossible happen, given that she's had three revivals before that. There have even been petitions for the new Disney owned Marvel to launch a television series or animated film. No telling where that will go but I hope it won't be long before I see my favorite Marvel character again.
If I've peaked your interest, I recommend checking out Spider-Girl yourself and let me know what you think. Marvel.com has all of her issues collected on their website for just $5.00 a month.
Well that's all folks.
Heh, nice pun with the title. ^_^
While I've never deliberately sought out many Spider-Girl books (I was kind of getting out of Marvel fandom in the years I was really getting into collecting comics), I absolutely love what stories I have read there.
Note to self, add Spider-Girl to my (long) list of books to read...
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Yeah, I'm not really a Marvel comics reader anymore either but I always check the Spider-Girl pages for any news. She's just a character I love. I've been working on a fanfic about her that I've been working on and off on and hopefully I'll have it finished before the year is up.
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Really? That's cool!