The Eyes Have It

Yesterday I saw a really cool optical illusion on Twitter and retweeted it as one is supposed to do when they find something cool on Twitter. I was discussing it with The Gnome when she revealed something that shattered my already fragile psyche. Things kind of devolved from there. Watching people put contacts in completely freaks me out and now I have to worry about people making me go blurry at will. When The Gnome got LASIK last month, the nurses kept asking me if I wanted to watch. They couldn’t understand why I was so adamantly against it and I couldn’t understand why they would think I’d want to watch that. I think I’m going to run off and go live with the eyeless mole people who live at the center of the earth to get away from all of this freaky eye stuff.

A month ago, Marvel killed Peter Parker. Well, to be more accurate Marvel killed the Ultimate Peter Parker, not to be confused with the Regular Peter Parker who was still bitten by a radioactive and has super powers which would make him a little less Regular than Regular but still not awesome enough to be classified as Ultimate. I guess since the Ultimate Peter Parker still has both Mary Jane and Gwen Stacey around loving the Spidey action that’s what makes him Ultimate and the other Peter Parker less Ultimate. In the long run, it doesn’t really matter because Ultimate Peter Parker is dead and Regular But Still Better Than Regular Regular Peter Parker is still alive. Plus One for being Regular. Let’s try this again, shall we?

A month ago, Marvel killed the Ultimate Universe version of Peter Parker. They then had a weekly series of Ultimate Comics Fallout issues dealing with the, well, fallout of Peter Parker’s death which culminates in this week’s Ultimate Comics Fallout #4 and the reveal of the new Ultimate Spider-Man. Then, next month every book in the Ultimate universe resets to #1 as the new Ultimate Web Slinger gets to interact with the rest of the Ultimate Heroes.

Who the new Ultimate Spider-Man would be has been a closely kept secret, but everybody was pretty sure they were going to do something very 21st Century that would make sense but also be fairly controversial. My money was on either Mary Jane or Gwen Stacey picking up the mantle, but none of the other heroes actually knew who the New Spidey’s secret identity was and just assumed that it was a guy. That way they could spend lots of time exploring gender politics and the different ways the same person is treated changes depending on what sex others think they are. Kris figured that it would be Ben Reiley, who unlike the Regular Universe Ben Reiley is not a clone of Peter Parker but is a doctor/scientist and African-American. Kris expected they would use this opportunity to explore race relations. Following the trend of the big comic reveals being spoiled by the comic companies themselves before the comics come out, we now know the identity of the new Ultimate Spider-Man. Kris and I were both wrong, but I guess you could say I was more wrong than he was. Robot 6 has some interesting extra backstory on the creative changes. Ret-Conned HQ applauds Marvel for their decision and thinks that it’ll be interesting to see what they decide to do with this new character.