This is not a flame about the movies using organic web shooters (i did that years ago)
I’m flaming Marvel for actually giving Spidey organic webshooters in the comics to make him more like the movie version. I just want to say ** i think ** this is the worst idea since the Scarlet Spider.
If there was ever proof that Organic webshooters where a bad idea in the movies this is it.
So i just want to say fuck you marvel!
Well, that just sucks, though I’ll admit it’s pretty silly that even an especially smart high-school student like Peter Parker could whip up a superstrong adhesive and a miniature pressurized delivery system, and yet leave his guardian Aunt and Uncle (Ben was still alive at the time) stuck in the constant financial struggle of lower-middle-class existance.
Anyhoo, another aspect of comics copying the movies inspired by the comics is John Byrne’s 1986 reboot of Krypton as cold, hyper-advanced and sterile, much as it had been in the Christoper Reeve movie a few years earlier. Up to then, the standard Krypton portrayal made it look like Buck Rogers with rayguns and clunky robots and jetpacks and crap like that.
Spider-man 2099 had organic webshooters.
Organic webshooters are an improvement.
I was always annoyed by the idea that some high school student could invent some sort of super strong liquid adhesive chemical. Give me a break.
Moi, aussi. When the first “Spiderman” movie with Tobey Maguire came out, I was somewhat confused because I remembered reading Spiderman comics where he had those superglue shooters on his wrists inside his suit. But, I was pleased because it just seemed to make more sense for him to have organic webshooters.
If they are going to be organic like a real spider…shouldn’t the spinnerettes be in his butt?
Which book is this in? The only current one I’m aware of is Spider-Man India.
In Ultimate Spider-Man, this is expanded upon. The adhesive was something Peter’s late father had been working on. Been awhile since I read it so the details are fuzzy…
The movie did it for a very good reason: It’s a big stretch to believe that a kid could invent such a thing and get magic powers from a spider bite. You can get away with it in teh comics, but the movies have less time to establish teh characters and powers in a believable manner.
As for it carrying over to the comics, well, let’s face it, it won’t be too long before more people know Spider-Man primarily from the movies, rather than the comics. It’s not a bad idea to follow their lead, sad as it might be to say.
But not part of the standard SM continuity.
Ah, I’m glad I’m not the only one who remembers 2099. What a great series (at least until they changed art teams). Really the only time anyone got even close to the feel of the original Ditko/Lee series.
But that’s neither here nor there.
I have no idea why they’re ruining their comics by making them conform to the movies. I’m not aware of any meaningful/sustained increase in sales due to the movies. I have anecdotal personal experience and Quesada trots out a single experience, but c’mon.
Sigh. At least Ennis hasn’t completely ruined the Punisher yet.
I’d also like to pit Ellis’ retconning of Iron Man. Now, he’s some genius who got his start during Gulf War I and didn’t become Iron Man until 2001ish. Now he’s a young smartmouth hotshot inventor who feels bad and wants to change the world.
Perhaps Marvel needs a CRISIS ON INFINITE MOVIE TIEINS to straighten everything out.
I can never understand why people say it such a stretch for a kid to make webshooters in a universe where radioactive animals can give a human superpowers.
And i call BULLSHIT on people who say there wasn’t enough time in the movie to show Peter making webshooters. How long do you think it would taken them to do that and do you think that time would have hurt the film?
If they had used mechanical webshooter I really doubt people would have walked out saying “I can by the radioactive spider and superpowers, but man those mechanical webshooters where a bad idea I really think the five minutes they spent showing him make those things really made the film drag. They should have made them part of his superpowers that would have been so much better.”
BTW a lot of people have asked why Peter never patented the webshooters and web fluid and make some money. I just have to ask would there be market for this stuff?
PS i could see web slinging catching on as a sport but i don’t see any other use for the things.
IIRC there was a bit in an early Spider-Man book with Spider-Man offering his web fluid to a chemical company. They turned him down, saying there would be no market for super-strong non-permanent adhesive. I didn’t think about it much at the time but just thinking about it now I can think of a number of uses ranging from industrial to medical to law enforcement to fire and rescue-type things to warfare.
I don’t much care either way about organic vs tech webshooters in the books but on screen I agree that building them would have wasted too much screen time (and the “snagging the lunch tray” scene was funny) and if they looked anything even remotely like the ones from the 70s TV series, ugh, no thank you.
Quite simply, it’s easier to suspend belief for a lesser amount of unlikely things than it is for a greater amount of unlikely things.
It’s easier to suspend disbelief for the impossible than for the really improbable. Just like 007 making bulls-eye shots with a pistol while clinging to the wing of a flying airplane is ok, but picking the bad guy’s 5-digit password by sheer luck would never work.
I think it’s more the problem that what are the chances that the same guy who gets all these powers has an uncle or whatever that invented a perfect web adhesive.
Even if I give Peter a pass for inventing the web shooters and the webbing formula, I can’t give him a pass for not thinking of a way to MAKE $$$ FAST from such an invention. The uses in non-lethal weaponry alone would have fat royalty checks from DuPont rolling into Forest Queens for the next 200 years…
I’m one of the few hardcore geeks I know that didn’t mind the organic webshooters.
Maybe it’s because as I get older I’m frothing-at-the-mouth less about geekcore stuff such as much adaption inconsistencies. I’ve finally realized and accepted that film and print are two totally different mediums that don’t always translate perfectly.
Or maybe it’s just because organic 'shooters are cooler :).
YMMV.
Except in the comic the organic webshooters look like they’re dribbling snot all the time.
I accept the organic web-shooters as a sensible retconn because their existence explains why Parker is broke… unlike now, when there’s no good reason for him to be.
See, I can buy the idea of a cash-strapped 60s superhero not pressing the issue when told there are no commercial applications for this invention. Forty years later, that’s just ridiculous. The medical and entertainment applications using the adhesive alone would make Parker a very rich young man. Add the web-deployment system and you’re talking about something that can be marketed globally to military, law enforcement and private security firms for potentially billion-dollar annual revenue.
But Parker makes his own webs, so it’s not necessary to invent a device that mimmicks an existing body function. So he stays broke, so we can still relate to him and his problems.
Mechanical web-shooters are way cooler, though. Them, rocket packs and hovercars, are all items I thought I’d be using on a daily basis by the time I was thirty-five. WHAT THE FUCK, PEOPLE?