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Spider-Man
🕑 Added 2017-09-12 22:00:02 +0000 UTC So I think one of the big issues with modern Spider-Man writing is that it's been decided that his youth is the all-important focus of his characterization, and all that comes with it is to be prioritized--his inexperience, his ineptitude, on and on and on. When really, Spider-Man's focus has been (until unfortunately recently) on his coming-of-age... his progression from boyhood to young adulthood, from dating to courting to marriage to children, from comparatively minor responsibility to major responsibility. It seems like Marvel realizes this on some level--they want Peter to be an Avenger and somewhat 'at the head' of a Spider Family--but they don't want the character development that goes with it, so we just get a Peter who is immature, unstable, reckless, gormless, et al, but still rakes up the 'cool bits' of a more mature characterization. So, for instance, while working essentially the same entry-level newspaper job he did as a teenager, he accrues a 'Hollywood Dateless' harem of willing women.The solution to this is obvious--at least try to depict Peter as a matured and veteran character, both personally and professionally--but that would frak with the status quo, despite Peter's very status quo being that he has no status quo. Anyway, to suggest some solutions...
1. I already brought up Peter as a small business owner, but it still makes sense.
2. Peter as a mentor to young superheroes. This would give a boast to a lot of newer characters, who seem especially vulnerable to being overlooked or killed off, and put Peter in a team environment that makes sense to his loner nature.
3. Peter as a high school teacher is a little too cute for its own good (it kinda locks the character in to reliving the high school years that already get too much of an emphasis in every f'ing adaptation there's ever been), but what about him as a college professor. He'd be involved in scientific experimentation to some degree and interact with young people. Plus, with less of an age difference between Peter and his students, it wouldn't be quite as weird for them to interact socially (which all the soap opera plotting requires). This one is probably redundant with him mentoring young superheroes, but either one is a fine direction to take the character. Him as a superheroic mentor could keep the Daily Bugle photography, while him as a professor...
4. Could open him up for a slot on the Avengers. To be honest, I kinda see Peter as eventually being at least semi-retired around the time he has kids and is mentoring people. But before then, it would be interesting to see him in his prime, as a top member of the Avengers. The problem with him as an Avenger is mostly that it seems arbitrary, rather than a logical progression, and that instead of being the 'local boy makes good' storytelling that would make the pill of the new easier to swallow, he generally gets characterized as the youngest, silliest, most inexperienced Avenger out there. Even when he's working alongside superheroes who have been active far less than he has (my refrain when writing Spider-Man would be "Hey, I've been doing this since I was seventeen.").
Just having Peter as a deputy leader, or a major team player, or one of the team's science whizzes instead of Jo-Jo The Idiot Spider-Boy would make Peter on the Avengers seem fitting, like he's paid his dues and is now moving on to bigger and better things. That would, after all, make more sense than him stopping Sandman from robbing bank vaults forever.
(As for a civilian job, why not have him at least be a lab assistant for Reed Richards? An actual 'Fantastic Five' membership wouldn't work, but him being divided between the FF and the Avengers would be at least a little clever and make Peter still a bit the odd man out.)
