So does Spider-Man remember making the deal with Mephisto, or what?
I mean, the new “Brand New Day” era of Spider-Man has been mostly inoffensive B-grade entertainment, and that wasn’t good enough? So they’re going to remind everybody about their power-stupid handwave to make it happen now, or something?
(Alternately, it might just be Dan Slott trying to fuck with people. Which I doubt, because come on, that would be retarded.)
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That’s not Peter Parker. That’s a Skrull.
You must not know Dan Slott. There is obviously some alternate reason that Peter Parker would think this.
I think this is a reference to an older storyline where Norman forgot who Spidey was.
Can’t we just get Squirrel Girl to retcon-…uh, squirrelbite everything prior to Civil War out of Marvel canon already? I mean, come on — the only halfway decent thing that came out of Civil War/World War Hulk/Secret Invasion was Punisher dressed up as Captain America.
Oh, whoops, lack of sleep = shitty proofreading. That should be “everything since (and including) Civil War)”. Or something like that. You get my point.
Blargh. LAUGH AT MY MISFORTUNATE PHRASING.
They’ve been trying to learn foreshadowing, so I wonder if the spell Mephisto cast might be breaking down.
Or this Peter is a Skrull, because the real Parker isn’t generally THAT stupid!)
Or Mephisto was a Skrull.
Pedro’s got a point, that could be a reference to that old storyline. But then, there is the “Everything we did…” comment. What’s that about?
The “Everything we did” bit could be their in-continuity explanation for why people who knew that Peter was Spidey before Civil War don’t anymore; instead of just handwaving that Peter never revealed his identity to Daredevil or Black Cat or anyone, maybe he thinks he just had Dr. Strange cast a spell to make the world forget or somesuch.
Considering that his hair makes it look like a big spider is sitting top of his head, Marvel may have gotten confused and is actually working on learning forehead-shadowing. And I’m outta here…
Or he thinks he guilted Iron Man into erasing everyone’s memories. Tony’s done that a bunch of times before.
He makes a comment later in the issue that is suspicious as well:
“Wrong Goblin. Times have changed. And THIS time you have no idea who I am and I know everything about you.”
*shrug* If it’s Pete commenting about Mephisto that’s…interesting. If it’s alluding to some story from years ago pre-OMD without them “reminding” or clarifying where given the recent (screwed up) OMD events, it’s crappy/confusing storytelling… not that that’s anything new on this title- I’m just sayin’. :-p
There’s only one way I can think of making this whole Mephisto screw-up work on any level and that’s to make the spell that made everyone forget, keep making everyone forget.
Like if Peter told MJ again, or if the Goblin followed him home again.. in 18 hours, they’d forget all over again.
Something diabolical so that Spider-Man couldn’t count on anyone for emotional support anymore.
heh, this same debate is raging on scans_daily as we speak
i’m thinking that he’s referring to some, as yet to be revealed(!), in-story reason why no one remembers that doesn’t include, y’know, deals with the devil.
which is still lame.
My theory is that they didn’t change Norman making Pete his personal whipping boy, and therefore Norman knew who Spider-Man was at one point. In which case, there needs to be an explanation as to why Norman doesn’t know now, because otherwise Peter would wonder – all that crap piled on him couldn’t have been coincidence. Logical solution – he did something to make everyone forget.
Add in “everything” (cast a spell to make people forget doesn’t sound like everything) and the “we did” (meaning not just him, and certainly not him getting someone else to do it while he does nothing), not to mention he didn’t ever ask for this…something else is afoot
Maybe he got Sentry to boot up Cloc again to make everyone forget about Spider-Man?
Maybe he cut a deal with Skrull Mephisto?
Everyone BUT Spider-Man is a Skrull. And the Skrull invasion they plan for the next big story arc are really just Skrull pretending to be Skrull pretending to be Kree pretending to be a clone army of Spidermen. And I’m sure Mephisto is in there someone casting spells.
Ah, Skrull. If D&D went into space and discovered a planet full of dopplegangers, you would be them.
Zifnab: lol
But Iron Man can’t be the one behind the erasure, because Pete seems to not know about the Negative Zone prison or his conflict with Iron Man. His reasons for not registering is he’s afraid his identity will somehow be revealed. That’s it. There’s been no going into how Iron man screwed him over and sicced SHIELD and Thunderbolts on him because he committed no crime other than standing up publicly to the administration.
So… what’s going on here? Oh wait, they’ll get to it, we should be patient, why we gotta be so MEAN?
Probably because if Slott were in our shoes, he’d be just as pissed off and confused as some of the readers are.
And this is the whole problem with the whole OMD/BND fiasco. What is still in continuity? So, people who knew Peter was Spidey before Civil War still know or don’t know. If they don’t, how come? I’m not a continuity freak like some people are, but to cause this much confusion over the history of your title character and limit (yes, that’s right, limit) the types of stories you can tell just because the E-I-C doesn’t agree with a married Spider-Man seems a bit too much.
That being said, I picked up the BND Vol. 1 HC and they are enjoyable stories, but feel a little too much like Stan Lee Spidey if you know what I’m saying. And since, the object of any serial medium is to [I]advance[/I] the story, well that’s a problem.
Ahhh, OMD/BND is crock. Let Petey grow up. What is Aunt May now, 90,110,220,6000? gods, let the poor soul die. And Pete and MJ have freaky radioactive babies? But in Q’s eyes, who need any structure?? Make Mine.. anything but marvel.
This didn’t really didn’t bother me, I tend to focus on the quality of the story over it’s effects on continuity. That, and I had stopped reading Spider-man years prior, when JMS’ writing took a dip.
I am really enjoying this arc, too. It’s seemed to break out of it’s rather static feel that BND has had and is giving the sense that things are moving forward. In fact, other than Bob Gale’s arcs, I’ve enjoyed most of Brand New Day
I haven’t cared for BND so far. I felt like, after OMD, they really needed to come out of the gate with a winner and while that first story wasn’t horrible, it didn’t blow me away either. The one’s following it got increasingly stupid, IMO. I like Menace, for the most part, and Mr. Negative, while a really retarded name, is an interesting concept. The rest has really fallen flat for me and I actually stopped following it the past few months. I did pick up these last two issues simply because my friend recommended them- plus it’s John Romita Jr. Whenever he does Spidey I’m at least going to give it a shot. I have to say New Ways To Die, other than the “what the hell is going on in continuity?” part, has been pretty good. With Waid coming on board later in the year I’m at least willing to give it another shot, but they really REALLY need to work out the continuity issues. The farther they go the more it feels like they didn’t really plan ahead (as far as continuity goes) when they made the decision to screw stuff over and now it just feels like them making it up as they go along.
I was pissed when I saw the Venom symbiote STARING at Parker and not remembering that it once shared his body. When they put new writers on Spiderman after OMD I said “Were I the new writer I would totally have Peter propose to MJ at the end of the first book, just to piss in JQ’s eye.” unfortunately nothing that cool has come up yet, and the crap keeps rolling downhill, now they are using “foreshadowing” which they have, apparently, no experience with since I doubt that anything that comes up in the next few issues will make it understandable. Let’s be honest, every year the big names in Marvel supposedly meet up for a week or two to decide what they over all story is going to be, however this looks a bit more like they decided to say “Screw this, let’s wing it!” and have been drunk ever since. The secret invasion could have been done better, I don’t think the Civil War was necessary, not without foreshadowing the invasion first, subtle clues would have been a good way to go. The first hint we got of a Skrull invasion was when Skrullectra kidnapped (Sk)ronin, or was it Skulldevil…I don’t remember offhand, but there should have been more hints, better hints.
EDIT: Skrulldevil, not Skulldevil…
I think this is probably just an allusion to whatever Peter THINKS happened post-Civil War to erase his identity from everyone’s memory. It kind of reminds me of the (somewhat stupid) way DC handled the Crisis On Infinite Earths — that story erased itself from continuity, and although a VERSION of it obviously still took place afterwards we didn’t really know what happened. We never saw the post-Crisis Crisis. All we really knew is that Barry Allen died somehow or another.
But, as has been pointed out, there’s other lines of dialogue that get me to suspect Slott is planning something. It’s worth noting that I’m pretty damn sure Mary Jane remembers everything — she makes some cryptic lines of dialogue in the Paper Doll story that seem to suggest she knows Peter’s Spider-Man and has memories of their time together. And she DID whisper something secret to Mephisto that I think may have had to do with her having to hold onto her memories in exchange for an extra favor or something.