Dragon said:
Okay.. First- why did we need this Mexican wrestler story? Spidey has plenty of enemies far more interesting than these. I mean PAD came up with an interesting character with the machine guy from issue #1 whose name escapes me at the moment. But the wrestlers were pretty weak, and it appears PAD intneds to bring them back.
Well, I think the wrestler story was a way to perhaps introduce El Mueurto (sic) to the Marvel Universe... characters like these are hit or miss... remember Moon Knight? Anyway, through the years, we get new characters that last or they don't... Ned Leeds, the Rocket Racer, Mrs. Muggins, Marcy Kane, Debra Whitman, etc... all characters that were introduced into the Spidey mythos that either took off or disappeared. While I would like to see an old familiar nemesis for Spidey to tackle, I'm not going to fault PAD for introducing a new character in a two-part arc. At least it gave us a reason to fix Millar's John Jameson/Spidey thing, and we get to see Robbie again as well.
Dragon said:
Second, the whole deal with Ben. I am curious about how PAD intends to handle this, and I hope it's better than what he's done with Flash, or I'll lose whatever respect I have left for his writing skills. Ben must know about his death in this reality, or else his reaction to seeing the love of his life- the woman he died to protect (To hell with JMS' spin) with another man would be far different from what we saw.
I'm not too impressed with the Ben deal as well, but all I know is that he shows up through a restaurent window for a brief second. Unless I see it in print, anything that I read/hear about on the Internet is speculation. As it stated in the letter pages, we'll get to see something about "blah blah what would have happened if Ben didn't die blah blah..." which leads me to believe that Peter will have to let Ben die (again) if things are to be normal.
The concept of such a story is cool, but it's coming at the wrong time in the Spidey mythos. The fans are still dealing with things like Sins Past, The Other, and all the other nonsense that's been in print the last few years that this type of tale just reeks of "Oh no... here we go again". I would rather have a few old-fashioned Spidey yarns, and perhaps some conclusions to all the crap, and THEN ... maybe this Uncle Ben story could have been told.
But what do I know...