10 Terrible Mistakes That Almost Ruined Spider-Man For Everyone‏

4. All That Mystical Ezekiel Business

The real money in comics publishing these days doesn't come from the sales of comics themselves, but from the movies based off of them. Marvel and DC don't make anywhere near the amount they used to from sales of single issues, instead relying on the lucrative licensing deals and box office receipts that come from the likes of Avengers and the Dark Knight films. It stands to reason, then, that the publishers would make sure their comics are more closely aligned with the movies, hoping to catch some of the overspill of audience rushing to the multiplex for the latest offering from the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Zack Snyder's dystopian DC movies. In the early noughties, for Marvel, this meant giving Spider-Man organic webshooters. The first of the Sam Raimi Spidey movies had come out, renewing interest in the character, and they wanted as many of these new readers to get an experience as close to the film as possible. In the comics Peter Parker's webbing came from a couple of neat gadgets he wore under his webbed gloves, but in the films he produced them naturally. How to introduce that into the comics? How indeed. As it happens, Marvel ended up going with the most bat-poop crazy way of introducing organic webshooters - and a whole mess of other new spider-powers - with J Michael Straczynski's storyline The Other. Since the beginning of his run on Amazing Spider-Man, the former Babylon 5 writer had been trying to introduce a mystical element to Peter Parker's powers. He created the character of Ezekiel, an old dude with similar wall crawling abilities who kept insisting that The Spider was some magical totemic symbol which chose a champion in every generation. A bit like being a vampire slayer. Except more stupid. Ezekiel's hippy ditherings reached their naturally insane conclusion in The Other, a crossover event that saw the death of Spider-Man. Well, apparent death. Because then it turns out Peter Parker has just shed his skin (which spiders don't do) and in the process gained a load of new abilities, including night vision, stingers, being able to talk to other arthropods, and organic webshooters. Apart from the webbing, none of these wacky new powers were ever used, and the whole sorry mess was blinked out of existence by...well...