3. It Created New Levels Of Sympathy/Understanding For Doctor Octopus
Once Marvel announced that the new hero of the Superior Spider-Man series would be lifelong villain Doctor Octopus, Spidey fans started to question how they could accept a story that celebrated a murderer and an egomaniac as its central figure. Marvel could not just make Doc Ock an unqualified good guy and ignore his 50 years of treachery and deceit, nor could the publisher have him walk around acting like a villain and expect this wild premise to suspend readers disbelief for more than a few issues. The Superior Spider-Man worked primarily because it had it both ways Doc Ock was a jerk with a gigantic ego that, but he was OUR jerk. He was not necessarily sympathetic in how he went about conducting himself, but the character also made some valid points about the inferior way Peter Parker interpreted "with great power must also come great responsibility." For example, Otto was on to something when he questioned why Spider-Man let a remorseless killer like Massacre go free rather than do the world a favor by putting a bullet in his head. Or how about the way Otto eliminated almost all street-level crime in New York City by installing his spying Spider-Bots in key areas? Amazingly, now with Superior coming to a close, theres a contingent of fans who are bemoaning the return of boring Peter. Otto was not the most likeable character, but he no doubt kept things interesting for the past 16 months.
Mark is a professional writer living in Brooklyn and is the founder of the Chasing Amazing Blog, which documents his quest to collect every issue of Amazing Spider-Man, and the Superior Spider-Talk podcast. He also pens the "Gimmick or Good?" column at Comics Should Be Good blog.
