“I don’t dream, Pete. Not anymore. But if I did, this is what I’d see. The end. Of course, you’ll fight. Try to stop it. Try to push back the impossible weight. Try to be free. But we’re all in a hell of your making. Living through the choices you’ve made. Suffering for them. Screaming for help – dying in your arms. You have great power, old pal. And rest assured…you’re responsible.”
I could feel it coming in the air tonight in Nick Spencer’s tenure as Spider-Man storyrunner right from the jump. Something was decidedly different about what he was doing, compared to the previous storyrunners, and it had me excited.
To be honest, I’ve enjoyed a ton of Spider-Man stories in the recent eras. Dan Slott might not be the deepest of writers that Spidey’s ever had, but his enthusiasm for the material shows in his work, and say what you will about some of his decisions but his Spider-tenure is a masterclass in planting and harvesting plot seeds and playing the long game. So don’t take this as a broad-strokes criticism of his work.
But for a long time, ever since the end of J. Michael Strazynski’s era, there’s been a shadow looming over the Spider-Man comics. You might call it a dark cloud, or an elephant in the corner. Or, more literally, the devil in the details.
The details of One More Day have been re-litigated so many times in so many corners of the internet that I’m not going to run it all down here (nor tell you how long this thing sat unfinished because I just, like…didn’t want to summarize OMD again and was putting it off). In short, they’d written themselves into a corner by having Peter out his identity in the Civil War arc and then-EIC Joe Quesada wanted a ‘swingin’ single’ Peter instead of a married Peter who had to struggle with adulting in a marriage on top of swinging about in spandex, so he manufactured a dumb situation where Mephisto appears to Peter and offers to resolve things if Peter has his marriage with MJ retconned. So Peter makes a deal with the devil.
I promise it’s way worse than I’m making it sound, to the point of going out of its way to literally insult its own readers by accusing everyone who enjoys escapist fantasy like comics and video games as doing so because they’re losers who are dissatisfied with how their lives turned out. In short, in addition to being a metaphorical fuck-you, OMD is as close as you can get to a literal fuck-you from Quesada to the readers, just chomping the hand that feeds like a problem dog. Obviously I have nothing but contempt for this scene on every conceivable level – if he really thinks this way then I honestly want him to quit being in a creative field and go work in a call center or something, but I’m getting off track.
Then they made it worse with a story called One Moment In Time where the slapdash attempts to clear things up just dug the hole deeper, such as with having MJ declare that without kids, marriage is just a piece of paper. So also fuck you, childless couples?
And so long as Quesada remained looming over the Spider-offices, I can only assume that there was basically a gag order placed on the writer’s room, where they were not really allowed to confront One More Day and One Moment In Time. The status quo had to be, on its face, accepted and worked within.
Quesada left when Slott did, and when Nick Spencer took over as storyrunner, he got right to work, and this was when I realized that that uncomfortable status quo that Quesada had forced on the comic was no longer in play.
One of the very first things Spencer did was to organically get Peter and MJ back together as a couple. No magic retcon, just simple, good character development. He wasn’t finished his redemption tour just yet: he proceeded to have Peter unmask himself to Black Cat, and even tying Black Cat’s character derailment under latter-day Slott back to the psychological repercussions of OMIT for the characters around Peter, effectively getting Black Cat back to baseline in a way that – I’ll grant, is a bit of a stretch, but at the same time, I like it. It almost feels like a ‘screw-you’ to the negative consequences of Peter’s choices in OMIT, and acknowledging that yes, there would be negative consequences to such an event.
On one hand, you expect these kinds of choices might be made when a new storyrunner takes over, just sort of shaping things from the outset to better reflect the direction they want to take the story in. There’s a much smaller-scale example of that phenomenon in those first volumes: back at the end of Slott’s tenure, after the Parker Industries stuff all exploded (literally), Peter eventually landed back on his feet as the editor of the science section at Robertson’s Bugle.
My guess is that Slott did this to clean house and establish a comfortable baseline for the new storyrunner: combining the Bugle history of the classic comics with Peter’s science-based Horizon job of Slott’s run, coming up with a new position that was both fitting and comfy for the character.
But Spencer must not have liked that, because one of the very first developments in his tenure sees Peter being ousted from the job over accusations of academic plagiarism. So, that job’s out, immediately after it was clearly set up as the New Thing for Peter. It’s in moments like these where you can really feel the tug-of-war of a sequentially shared narrative, but fortunately it’s a rather small-scale thing.
No, what Spencer did with MJ and the Black Cat was a different beast: this stuff made me realize that the boundaries and don’t-go-theres of the previous era were off the table.
Now we’re up to speed, and we’re ready to look at the Kindred saga, in many ways an immensely haunted story arc. Haunted by the abyssal, visceral nature of what we see on the page, reinforcing at every turn that we are no longer in the friendly neighborhood; haunted by the past decisions of our protagonist, as brought to life by a creative team haunted by the decisions of those who’d come before.
Not a bad week-before-Halloween entry for the Looking Glass, then. Boo.
The first volumes of Spencer’s run introduced us to a brand-new villain called Kindred, who at first provides the slow burn, setting all this in motion as we lurch forward.
This in itself had me excited from the jump, before knowing anything about the character; Slott’s run was mainly focused on the greatest hits and the remixes from Spidey’s pre-existing rogues gallery (not a criticism; Ock got more real-time character development than ever before under Slott, and Red Goblin was just…so good).
But Kindred was something new. This villain is a stygian nightmare of brooding shadows and ominous portents, and while he definitely stands apart from a lot of Spidey’s rogues’ gallery, his insectile/centipede motif helps tether him to Spidey’s aesthetic. And Kindred’s every scene feels drenched in such purpose. There’s a palpable electricity to his scenes, like you just know Spencer is going somewhere big with this.
I do have to admit, right from the moment that it became clear Kindred had both a deep connection to Hell and a deeper grudge against Peter, I held out just a glimmer of hope that this was going to end up addressing that, especially in the light of One More Day already being symbolically undone with Peter and MJ finally getting back together. The more the run progressed and the slow-creep of Kindred’s arc built up, I still had no early-bird clue who Kindred actually was, but the more sure I became that this was what I thought it was.
Especially when in Sins Rising, Kindred speaks of “The sin you’ve been running from so long you’ve forgotten it’s there; the lie that unravels everything you are”. At that point, I (with no small amount of hope) knew that this had to be that, barring some new revelation invented retroactively a la The Timeless Child twist on Doctor Who.
Aesthetically, the arc itself goes full dark. From his first appearance, Kindred’s every scene carried with it an air of absolute dread, this idea that once he made his play, nothing was ever going to be the same. His aesthetics already dealt in Hell and damnation and all that juicy stuff, but once he stops merely puppeteering events and steps in personally, the aesthetics probe levels of pure black the likes of which might remind you of previous outings like Kraven’s Last Hunt (or its spiritual successor Grim Hunt – the Spencer-penned climax to the long-game Kraven trilogy in Hunted was altogether less of a grimdark affair) or even the deeper cut Revenge Of The Green Goblin, one of the darkest psychological deep dives the book has ever done.
Now this, I do like: I’ve always been a fan of when the Friendly Neighborhood turns into You Came To The Wrong Neighborhood. Something about taking the quipping, colourful web-slinger and showing what happens when you force him to the dark. And then the knowledge that the dark is always there, held pernally at bay. (I always liked the thought that Peter is always holding back from his true strength, even against super villains, as we see when Ock in Peter’s body knocks Scorpion’s jaw clean off without even trying to.) As an aside, I was super-happy to see that side of Peter make its way into the MCU with the final Goblin fight in No Way Home.
That said, in Last Remains, the big flashpoint at the middle of the Kindred saga, when we get to the decomposed, skeletalized bodies of Peter’s fallen loved ones (including Uncle Ben!) being dug up and arranged around Kindred’s table as a twisted mockery of a family intervention, the closest comparison in comics I can come up with is some of the darker imagery on display in Scott Snider’s Batman run (Court of Owls, Death Of The Family, Metal, Death Metal), a run that I’ve heard described, not-inaccurately, as a form of gothic horror. Mind you, I loved Snider’s Batman run: the Metal stuff is my favourite superhero comics crisis crossover event of all time. So that is not a knock.
(I could also draw comparisons between Kindred and The Batman Who Laughs: both are new villains that bring with them an air of absolute doom. To quote Batman about the one who Laughs, “He feels like the last one. The one at the end.” In the case of The Batman Who Laughs, it’s earned because he’s the ultimate subversion of the very concept of Batman himself, the Final Form, every strength of the Dark Knight and the Pale Man and none of their respective weaknesses, the twist to every little meta-joke about how Batman is unstoppable if he has time to plan et cetera. In the case of Kindred, it’s earned because he brings with him tidings of Peter’s ultimate sin, the chickens coming home to roost, the ferryman ready to bring you across the river. Incidentally I don’t plan on covering Metal/Death Metal and the associated stories here because there’s just way too much there for me to even begin to think of trying to find an angle to do them justice with. Just know that they’re like an event made from the ground up specifically FOR me, and I love them.)
In fact, the comparison to Snider’s DC fare is the furthest thing from a knock: how is a writer to theoretically handle finally, properly confronting the events of One More Day? Nick Spencer understood that you need to go dark. You need to go full dark, because just think about what actually happened in One More Day. Parse the insane shit that Quesada had Peter do. Spencer takes this time to explore the things that Quesada refused to let his writers contemplate.
For reasons that were more selfish than heroic, Peter made a deal with the devil to save his aunt. His elderly aunt. (I hope this doesn’t come off as ageist, but the whole thing could have been marginally more palatable if it had been MJ being shot instead; that way Peter would have had to make the choice between losing MJ entirely, or having her live but losing their life together.) In doing so, he – okay, Mephisto, but Peter gave Mephisto the keys to the kingdom – caused the entire fabric of reality to retroactively change, playing about with everyone’s lives. This is fucking horrifying. Existentially, morally, and what it means for Peter’s character going forward. You might say this is an unforgivable sin.
And none of that was so much as touched on until now. Quesada wouldn’t allow it. He wanted to shove his new status quo down everyone’s throats, nobody wanted it, nobody asked for it, but good writing be damned. Just, la dee da, it’s a brand new day, go and swing on, you hero you.
This brought about such insane dissonance that it really did break the Spider-Man comics for a lot of people. I can’t really say I blame them. I can still enjoy Slott’s run (less so Brand New Day, just because so much of BND feels very bland to me, devil deal or no, thanks to its ‘brain trust’ creative structure literally writing by committee, as opposed to a single unified vision or a small close-knit circle), but I absolutely understand not being able to hold with Peter’s adventures post-OMD because of that dissonance.
When we think about One More Day in the context of the universe, once said universe is actually allowed to address it, really the only way it could be handled is to go dark, possibly darker than ever before in the Spider-comics. Because here is what’s at the heart of the Kindred arc: Peter really did commit a truly cosmic, unforgivable sin. He doesn’t consciously remember, because that was part of the deal. But he did it nonetheless.
And as the flashbacks to the last pages of One More Day continue, as the visual parallels and references pile up, we as readers become fully aware of exactly what it is that this is all about. The sin he’s buried so deep he doesn’t even remember it’s there. His allies infiltrate Peter’s mindscape, his link to the astral plane, which has been reduced to an apocalyptic wasteland filled with monsters symbolic of the events leading up to the devil-deal. Seeing his connection to the astral plane like this is harrowing; it’s like his very soul is rotting. It barely feels like a ‘superhero comic’ at this point, so much as a very dark fantasy, or a Faustian morality play about the infernal consequences of unforgivable acts.
This part of the story sees Spencer cherishing the ecstasy of sheer, unadulterated suspense. Kindred knows. We know, because the flashbacks and everything else make it absolutely, undeniably clear where this is headed. Peter doesn’t know. This is the sin that undermines every single act Peter’s ever done as a hero. And the very real consequences of that are finally coming home to roost.
Alas, there is a great big ‘but’ to all this. By the end of the Kindred saga, Peter still does not know. Kindred knows; we as readers now know why Mephisto did what he did in One More Day. Peter and MJ’s relationship is reaffirmed. And yet, Peter is insulated from the truth.
Here’s why that’s so disappointing to me, and why I would almost consider it the fatal flaw of the Kindred saga.
Remember how Kindred referred to One More Day as ‘the lie that unravels everything you are’? He’s right. And that’s a big part of the reason why people hate OMD, beyond it being abysmally written, beyond it being literally insulting to the reader. Because it sees Peter, at his wits’ end, betraying every principle he ever stood for, making a monumentally selfish and foolish decision that affects the lives of everyone without their consent. And that – bear with me here – that can work. But it’s presented in the wrongest possible way.
And Kindred being right? That’s cool on its own because villains who have a point are awesome to read. But without being anywhere near an ‘audience insert’, Kindred is giving voice to things that fans have screamed about for many years, right here in-canon. That’s exciting because it sees the story being self-aware enough to take the decisions made in-universe for what they are, with appropriate consequences.
Here’s the funny thing about One More Day: that whole idea of the hero being pushed to the point where he would make a literal deal with the literal devil? That’s good fucking drama right there. Or it could have been. The hero falling from grace. Played right, written right, done for the right reasons and with the right intentions, it could have been amazing to see Spidey be broken to such an extent that he’d be willing to deal with the devil. Hell, JMS’s era already toyed with this idea of these glimpses into Peter’s possible future where he’d gone dark, rageful, losing the vision of the hero he once was. If they’d leaned into that, presented OMD as a moral event horizon at the edges of desperation that it would take years to claw his way back from, there still would have been backlash because hello, Spider-Man is making a deal with the devil but it could have been played up in a far more palatable way if they absolutely had to do the thing.
Only, in OMD it’s presented as this weird railroaded choice that makes no sense (until the retroactive explanation given in What Cost Victory, the volume that brings us the conclusion of the Kindred arc and numerous twists that we didn’t ask for, while denying us the one thing that needed to happen), and what’s more, is treated as some noble deed that’s for the best. And then, for an entire decade, the story was not allowed to reckon with it, or react directly to it, or confront it in any way. Quesada’s leadership had a terrible idea and then he doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on it, in the process making every worst play possible at every step of the way to ensure the Spider-Man comics going forward would be harmed as much as possible by the cognitive dissonance of how the ongoing narrative handled that one arc.
There’s this weird dissonance that happens when a story isn’t self-aware enough to realize what kind of story it is. I think most of us agree (outside of the Youtube screamers who insist that everything is the death of a franchise because outrage games the algorithm more than nuance) that Thor: Love And Thunder was an entertaining enough film, if not necessarily up to the level of MCU high points like Ragnarok, the Infinity duology and No Way Home. But I saw a lot of talk about how the film spends so much time painting the gods as aloof douchebags that it doesn’t stop to reconcile that it’s kind of demonstrating Gorr’s cause as just, without actually having the withwhereal to realize that’s where it’s thematically taking us.
That’s a pretty innocent and easy example of this dissonance; once committed to the angle of “Gorr is bad and is a threat to the universe”, they could/should have brought more attention to how slaying the gods is wreaking havoc across space and causing horrible collateral damage, kind of like a God Of War 3 “kill Poseidon and the whole region floods, killing countless people” effect. The battle Thor and the Guardians are in at the start of the film is actually a result of that planet’s gods being cut down by Gorr, so it’s fundamentally there, but not enough attention is drawn to it.
But One More Day is a much darker example of that kind of story dissonance, because the story itself came about in what I can only call bad faith. Everything beyond that is fruit of the poison tree and all.
So ultimately, the Kindred saga provides us the honest accounting of One More Day that the series was long denied. The time has come to reckon with Peter’s unforgivable sin.
…Yet Peter ends the Kindred saga still oblivious to the truth.
This is very different than, say, holding back plot details because an arc is already so stuffed and the writer intends to resolve the threads in time (for example, series 5 of Doctor Who, the cracks-in-time arc, works perfectly well in a vacuum even though there are several crucial elements of the whole thing that wouldn’t be revealed until later seasons). No, Peter finding out the truth is something that I would argue is not only essential, but the most important part of doing an arc like this to begin with.
The slow-burn leading through the Kindred saga was magnificent, but it was all leading organically to Peter learning the terrible truth of himself. Everything was swirling around that, like ships caught in a whirlpool down to the abyssal truth. I was so sure of it that I even advance-wrote some of this, fawning over how important it was that the Kindred arc took the step of having Peter find out his greatest sin, only to delete all that once I actually read What Cost Victory because they faceplanted in the homestretch.
Peter begins Last Remains knowing bugger-all about what Kindred wants him to “CONFESS” and ends What Cost Victory no longer feeling like all this really was his fault. Except it…totally is? And the moment when he proclaims that seems meant to feel like this great cathartic turning-of-the-tide moment in the final battle, except to me (and surely other readers) it was the moment I finally let go of my last shred of hope that they were going to take this arc to the place it always needed to go.
There are twists to be had in What Cost Victory, but the revelations that the Harry we’ve seen since the ending of OMD was a clone, that Norman Osborn obtained his success by selling Harry’s soul as a child to Mephisto, and that Kindred was never the true Harry but instead Gabriel and Sarah, were – I would say – ancillary compared to the burning need to have Peter discover the truth of himself. Because that is literally the whole point of the Kindred arc. The consequences of One More Day. I would argue that the primary thrust of the narrative is Peter drawing ever-closer to the horrible truth that has finally come back for him, inching closer to the reveal just barely in the shadows at each turn.
In a way, that gives the Kindred arc its own form of story dissonance, where despite being more self-aware than the Spidey books have been in a very long time about what needs to happen here, it stops just short of being self-aware enough to understand that the pull toward the terrible truth, of Peter finding out about the lie that unravels everything he is, is absolutely the core of the story. Yet, What Cost Victory gives us the kitchen sink, everything except that. And I don’t expect they’re holding it back to give it to us later, given Spencer stepped down after this, the arc was considered finished and they went on to other things. This, my friends, was it – to paraphrase Ant-Man in Endgame, this was their shot, they shot it, it’s shot.
While some of the twists we get do fall flat (back in Last Remains, I had assumed that this Kindred=!Harry could only be the original dead Harry from before Mephisto played about with reality and caused the timeline to split, so falling back on clones for that twist feels pretty dull in comparison), on the whole the twists in What Cost Victory are nice, especially the bizarre and convoluted but extremely welcome reveal that Norman Osborn never gave Gwen Stacy the Saturday slam, another JMS-era revelation so universally reviled that no writer in the meantime dared to touch it until Spencer bought it back just for the purpose of canonically undoing it, but they’re tertiary compared to why we’re really here.
And when the story is denied that catharsis, that release, there’s a sense of…emptiness to it. Because, first up, not allowing Peter the chance to react to the truth is just taking a swerve away from good dramatic storytelling. Secondly, it denies the character a chance to learn anything from this, to take stock, to realize just what it is he’s done.
For what it’s worth, Doctor Strange now knows the truth, so Marvel has that in their back pocket going forward. And yeah, I think Strange died or something shortly after the Kindred arc, but come on, these are cape comics, he’ll be back right quick if he’s not already.
In all honesty, if Peter found out the truth, he’d probably hang up the spider-mantle right then and there. You might say that’s why Spencer had him remain insulated from the truth, but then Spider-Man Beyond came right after this and had Ben Reilly being the main web-slinger for the next while, so they already had their in. It actually would have been a fantastic turn, for Peter to voluntarily hang up the webs as he tries to grapple with what he’s done, only to inevitably return to the fold when something drastic happens and people will die if he doesn’t forgive himself long enough to don the webs. Instead, Peter just gets knocked into a coma, because why risk serious character development? Come to think of it, if they did choose to shield Peter from the truth so as to avoid having to deal with the consequences, isn’t that the same mindset – albeit far less caustic and cynical – that brought us One More Day to begin with?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m jubilant that they went so far as to do this whole Kindred arc and confront OMD, not with another magic retcon, but by treating it as the moral event horizon that it was. But then failing to deliver on the promise of any consequences for Peter by sparing him the revelation? It’s just baffling, and shows even a story like this beholding itself to the self-made shackles of the status quo – which was the very thing that prompted the atrociously stupid arc that the Kindred saga set out to address in the first place. And for all the swirling darkness and visceral nightmare fuel that paint the styxian pages of the Kindred arc, maybe the scariest part of it all is just how much of a letdown it can be when the storytelling snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. Happy Halloween.