Appearance Spotlight: Lady Octopus

There's a strange phenomenon that happens as part of being a comics fan: the characters and concepts you're introduced to in your first couple years of reading comics become far more important in your mind than they are in the grand scheme of the universe. It's certainly true of me. It's why the Slingers are one of my favorite superteams, it's why I'm still disappointed Conduit never appeared in Smallville, and it's why my favorite Scarlet Witch outfit will always be this one. It's also why I'm glad Lady Octopus is having a resurgence.

Lady Octopus, or Doctor Octopus as she was originally called, was a former student of the original Doctor Octopus, who took over the role when he died. She first appeared in Amazing Spider-Man #406 (August 1995), and as that story is not only in the mid-90s, but in the Clone Saga as well, her story is needlessly complicated. I won't get into it all here, but suffice to say, it involves blending reality and virtual reality. Again, mid-90s.

After the original Doc Ock returned, she started going by Lady Octopus and only made sporadic appearances here and there. Recently she had a cameo in Amazing Spider-Man #17 (March 2019), though not wearing either her classic costume or her current one...

...which is strange, because in the next issue - Amazing Spider-Man #20 (April 2019) - she IS wearing an updated version of her classic outfit. Looking at the two, it seems like the one above is simply a coloring error, but I don't know that for sure.

A few months later, though, she appears in a brand new costume with the new Sinister Syndicate in Amazing Spider-Man #25 (July 2019).

What's the deal? Well, only a few months earlier - December 2018 - a movie called Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was released. And one of the many villains who appeared in that movie was a female Doctor Octopus. To be clear, she is not Carolyn Trainer. She's Olivia Octavius, the CEO of Alchemax. She looks like this.

Clearly it's not an exact match. But side-by-side, it's easy to spot the similarities. The long, pulled-up brown hair instead of the short brown, black, or pink hair. The green, round goggles. The cream chestpiece. The green abdomen. The black arms and legs, and the lighter colored...thigh-highs, for lack of a better word.

One thing I wish they would've adapted was Olivia's clear, more lifelike tentacles, which would have made her more distinct from the original Doc Ock. But either way, it's nice to see a great movie like Into the Spider-Verse already impacting the comics!

Flashback Friday: Ms. Lion

Each Friday, I take one of the entries from my old Super Posts and expand it into its own featured article.

This week: Ms. Lion!

Ms. Lion first appeared as Firestar's dog in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (1981), but she keeps Aunt May company whenever the heroes have to go fight crime.

He first appeared in comics as a member of the Pet Avengers in Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers #1 (May 2009).

He also appeared with the Pet Avengers in Thor and the Warriors Four #1 (April 2010) and Tails of the Pet Avengers: Dogs of Summer #1 (July 2010), although these are considered alternate realities.

Then the Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends version appeared in comics during the Spider-Verse event in Amazing Spider-Man #7 (October 2014), after Morlun has killed the heroes on this Earth.

Strangely, Ms. Lion is only yellow on Earth-1983. Every other time he's appeared, he's been white. I'm not sure why that is.

Flashback Friday: Spidey's "Spider-Man Unlimited" Costume

Each Friday, I take one of the entries from my old Super Posts and expand it into its own featured article.

This week: Spider-Man's Spider-Man Unlimited Costume!

In 1999, Fox Kids released an animated series called Spider-Man Unlimited, that had the strange premise of sending Spider-Man to Counter-Earth - a planet in the same orbit as Earth on the opposite side of the Sun created by the High Evolutionary, obvi - along with Venom and Carnage, and giving him a new, hi-tech suit. Partly this was to cash in on the success of the recent hit Batman Beyond, but it was also because a little movie you may have heard of called Spider-Man was in production, meaning Fox Kids and Saban Entertainment had to somehow make a Spider-Man cartoon without access to any of the classic parts of the Spider-Man franchise, including his costume. Which, as I'm sure you know, looks like this.

But in Spider-Man Unlimited, he looks like this.

Spider-Man Unlimited premiered in October 1999. The following month, Webspinners: Tales of Spider-Man #13 (November 1999) was released with the following cover:

In the story itself, you discover that Spider-Man receives visions of characters from the Spider-Man Unlimited world, and then enters the Negative Zone, where his suit changes - for absolutely no reason - into the Unlimited costume. It's back to normal by the end of the next issue. As you can see from the footnote, this was just a way to promote the show and the tie-in series that was debuting the same month this issue came out.

Later, during Spider-Verse, we'd see this costume again. The Spider-Verse creators considered Spider-Man Unlimited and Spider-Man: The Animated Series to be the same reality, although that was not the show's intentions.

Flashback Friday: Firestar

Each Friday, I take one of the entries from my old Super Posts and expand it into its own featured article.

This week: Firestar!

Comic book adaptations in the past were much more willing to create original characters than they are today. If you take a look at a show like Young Justice, it has an enormous cast but all of them  - perhaps with one or two exceptions - are characters from the comics, even if they're very minor ones that only made a couple of appearances. Compare that to something like Batman: The Animated Series, where it seems like half the characters are original to the show. It's that mindset that gave us Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, a show where 1/3 of the main characters was somebody kids had never seen before.

There are many rumors about Firestar's appearance on the show. One is that she was originally meant to be the Human Torch, which makes sense because Spider-Man often hangs out with the Human Torch (and Iceman to a lesser extent) in the comics. There are a few reasons why people say the change happened, but the fact is that the Human Torch's rights were tied up in a solo animated series that never got made, so he would've never been considered for this show. The most likely explanation is that they knew they couldn't use him so created someone similar to him, and then decided that since they were creating an original character anyway, they may as well diversify and make her female.

Similarly, there's a popular rumor that her secret identity was originally going to be Mary Jane Watson instead of Angelica Jones. Other than the two characters having similar looks, this rumor has no grounding. Regardless, she first appeared in the first episode of the show ("Triumph of the Green Goblin", September 1981), and we eventually learn that she is a former member of the X-Men and one of their earliest recruits.

Her first comics appearance was in the tie-in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends #1 (October 1981), an adaptation of the first episode...

...but her first appearance that counts was a few years later in Uncanny X-Men #193 (March 1985), although surprisingly not as an X-Man or even a potential X-Men recruit. Instead, she was part of the Hellions, a team of rivals to the New Mutants led by Emma Frost.

Her next appearance was the following year (January 1986), when she received a mini-series called Firestar that told how she ended up at the Massachusetts Academy and joined the Hellions, then left and became a solo hero. Notably, she was kept in the dark about their true intentions, so she didn't realize they were bad guys.

Since then, she's had a steady career as a B-list superhero. She was a main member of the New Warriors...

...and the Avengers...

...and the Young Allies...

...and finally the X-Men.

She also appeared in Spider-Man Family: Amazing Friends #1 (August 2006), a one-shot to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the show, in which she, Spider-Man, and Iceman team up for a story.

They also teamed up in Amazing X-Men #7 (May 2014) and Iceman #3 (November 2018).

I'll finish up by talking about a strange quirk of Firestar: no one really knows who owns the rights to her!

As you might know, in the 90s Marvel sold off the rights to nearly all of its characters to various production companies, but for the past ten years or so, there have only been three groups worth talking about: Fox, which owns X-Men and Fantastic Four; Sony, which owns Spider-Man; and Disney, which owns everything else.

So does Firestar fall within the X-Men rights because she's a mutant who's been a Hellion and an X-Man? Or does she fall within the everything else rights because she is mainly known as an Avenger and New Warrior? But maybe she falls under the Spider-Man rights because she was created for a Spider-Man show and was a Spider-Man supporting character in Ultimate Marvel. If any of these companies know, they're not saying. But I'm pretty sure nobody really knows and that's why nobody's used her in adaptations in any substantial way. Luckily, it soon won't matter now that Disney is buying Fox and has a deal to use Spider-Man characters in the MCU, but it's interesting to think about nonetheless.

Spider-Verse: Vintage Spidey Costume

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Canon immigrants are plentiful, with new ones coming all the time. That's the whole premise of this blog, after all. But for every one that gets media attention, three or four slip under the radar. Which is how it came to pass that I'm posting a new Spider-Verse spotlight YEARS after that event.

For those who don't know, Spider-Verse was an event that had "every" version of Spider-Man teaming up for reasons that aren't really important. I put "every" in quotes because there were a couple versions that were left out for legal reasons, and a couple more that just didn't appear. But overall it was surprisingly thorough, as this entry can attest.

I'm not sure we realize how lucky we have it as comic book fans these days. Just look at toylines like Hot Toys are Figuarts, which give us hyper-poseable action figures that look exactly like the character they're supposed to be, even if that character is from a live action movie. If you buy a Hot Toys Avengers: Infinity War Captain America figure, I hope you like Chris Evans's face because you're getting Chris Evans's face. It's like they shrunk him down and encased him in plastic.

But it wasn't always that way. Accuracy was more a suggestion than anything, and you need look no further than this Spider-Man Halloween costume to see the results.

This costume is from 1963 and made by a company called Ben Cooper. And this is surprisingly one of the more accurate ones of the era. As you can see from the below catalog, they were still selling this costume as late as 1986, and the general style of costumes - at least from this company - had not really improved in those 20 years.

Surely no one would be upset if this costume stayed in the past where it belonged, but when Spider-Verse said "every Spider-Man ever", they (mostly) meant it! So when we get a shot of the Spider-Army in Spider-Verse #2 (January 2015), there he is, in the bottom left corner:

The coloring isn't completely on-model, but it's closer to the Halloween costume than the Halloween costume is to the original character.

Spider-Gwen's New Alias: Ghost Spider

With Halloween just around the corner, I figured it was a perfect opportunity to talk about "Ghost Spider". So what is Ghost Spider, anyway?

To answer that question, we have to go back a few years to a little event called Spider-Verse. You may have heard of it. The premise was that a group of bad guys was traveling to all the different alternate universes to kill all the different Spider-Men and -Women, so a bunch of different Spiders teamed up to help defeat them. It was billed as featuring "Every. Spider-Man. Ever.", and although that isn't true, it came very close. It also introduced several new Spider-Men in the pages of a mini-series called Edge of Spider-Verse, and one of those new characters was Spider-Woman, aka Gwen Stacy. She debuted in issue 2 (September 2014).

This version of Spider-Woman had a great costume, and the issue had a punk rock sensibility, both of which greatly appealed to fans, so it didn't take long for her to get her own series, Spider-Gwen (February 2015), set on Earth-65. (Side note: although the series is called Spider-Gwen and that's what fans call her too, her superhero name has always officially been Spider-Woman.)

Spider-Gwen has quickly become one of Marvel's most popular characters, so she's started appearing in merchandise and adaptations as well. In December 2017, she was announced to be in a movie called Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors. Only in this movie, she goes by Ghost Spider.

In July 2018, Marvel announced she'd be getting a new series called Spider-Gwen: Ghost Spider, which released last week.

I dig the name. Not only does it play up her unique outfit, but it cleverly has the same initials as Gwen Stacy. And that's not the first time they've done it. It took me a while to notice, but she lives on Earth-65 because 65 looks a lot like GS.

Costume Spotlight: Spider-Man's Advanced Suit

Of the thousands of comic book characters out there, I'm pretty sure none has had as many video games as Spider-Man has. Wikipedia lists 35, stretching all the way back to the Atari 2600, and the newest one - simply called Spider-Man - debuted earlier this month (September 7) on PS4.

The game was first announced at E3 in 2016, which is also where they showcased a new suit that would appear in the game and took focus in most of the marketing.

A similar suit debuted in Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #305 (June 2018), which came out the same week as E3. There are several differences between the two outfits (especially at the wrists and ankles), but it's clearly supposed to evoke the Advanced Suit of the game.

But in case that's not close enough to count for you, never fear. The character himself appears in Spider-Geddon #0, out today!

Spider-Geddon is a sequel to the recent Spider-Verse event, which famously included "every Spider-Man ever". They did a pretty good job with that, so will this be the only new addition? Surely there are a couple they weren't able to include before - I don't ever recall seeing MTV's Spider-Man, for instance, and Atari's Spider-Man almost certainly never showed up. Anyway, I'm excited to find out!

Character Spotlight: La Fantome (aka The Fifth Avenue Phantom)

There's a famous saying: "There are no small parts, only small actors." That seems to go doubly true for canon immigrants. There is no detail too minor for a comics creator to reference if they're geeky enough, and you can never underestimate the geekiness of comics creators. The Fifth Avenue Phantom is a good example.

The Fifth Avenue Phantom is a villain that first appeared in an episode of the same name (November 1967) of the Spider-Man animated series. The Phantom is based on Fifth Avenue - as his name suggests - and has a minor fashion theme. For instance, he attacks Spider-Man with a robotic mannequin. He appeared in one other episode a month later, and then that was it.

However, in Spider-Girl #91 (October 2005), a villain named La Fantome shows up.

Although the name's different (barely), they dress the same and La Fantome's crimes also center around fashion. I'm sure most people reading this issue would have no idea who this character is based on, but that's never stopped a comics creator before!

Spider-Man's Marriage

This is one of those tricky ones where an idea was created for an adaptation, then they decided to introduce the idea in the comics as well, before the idea appeared in the adaptation. What makes this trickier is that they tried to have the two storylines coincide.

Since 1977, Stan Lee has written a daily newspaper strip called The Amazing Spider-Man. At some point he decided Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson should get married in it, and he approached Marvel Comics about them doing the storyline in the comics as well, ideally having them take place the same week.

They didn't happen in the same week, but they did happen close together. In the comic strip, the marriage took place on June 21, 1987:

In the comics, they got married in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 (August 1987):

Of course, they're no longer married, which is unfortunate. But it still counts!

Character Spotlight: Gustav Fiers (aka The Gentleman)

Gustav Fiers is a rare case of a canon foreigner appearing in another adaptation before appearing in comics.

He first appeared in a novel called Spider-Man: The Gathering of the Sinister Six (1999) as the brother of Karl Fiers, an established character who was responsible for the death of Spider-Man's parents, Richard and Mary Parker. As the Gentleman, he became a man behind the scenes in the criminal underworld and was responsible for the creation of the Sinister Six, a team-up of some of Spider-Man's greatest foes. He went on to appear in Spider-Man: Revenge of the Sinister Six and Spider-Man: Secret of the Sinister Six, where he was killed off.

He later appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), where he was only credited as "The Man in the Shadows". He also appeared in the sequel, called Gustav Fiers this time, where he talks with Harry Osborn about forming the Sinister Six.

Fiers received a cameo in Civil War II: Kingpin #4 (October 2016), where he was one of several villains who supported Janus as the new Kingpin.

Characters' Names: Venom's Spawn

This is a surprising one for me, so I'm glad to be able to share it.

When I was a kid, I remember seeing a line of Venom toys called "Planet of the Symbiotes". The internet tells me this line came out in 1996, which sounds about right. Symbiotes were all the rage in the mid-90s. I can't say why - even as a kid, I didn't see the appeal - but they were, so these toys didn't surprise me. A year later, they came out with a sequel series called "Along Came A Spider". Each of these lines were named after Venom miniseries that involve these characters, but don't have much in common with them beyond that.

I didn't recognize most of these characters at the time, but that wasn't anything new. I often learned of characters through toys. But here's the thing, which I didn't learn until today: some of these characters didn't have names until they released the toys!

The story behind this group of Symbiotes is that they were created from Venom by an organization called The Life Foundation. They first appeared in Venom: Lethal Protector #4 (March 1993).

In their appearances before the action figures came out, the Symbiotes didn't have names. They referred to each other by their host name. But no one would buy a Symbiote named Donna, so Toy Biz came up with more appropriate names. It's a little tricky to explain who has a toy-original name and who doesn't, so we'll go through them one by one.

Moving left to right on the group photo above, we'll start with Scream. The yellow Symbiote was first  designated Scream in Civil War Battle Damage Report #1 (March 2007).

Next up is Lasher, the green Symbiote. It was first called that in Carnage USA #2 (January 2012), although it's an interesting case in that the lettering makes it seem like "Lasher" may be the name of the dog that hosts this Symbiote, rather than the Symbiote itself. It's unclear.

In the middle, we have Riot. The grey Symbiote is first called "Riot" in Carnage USA #2 (January 2012).

After that, we have the orange Symbiote, Phage. Phage is a VERY interesting case. If you go back and look at the toys, you'll see one named Phage. But it's not a Symbiote! It's actually an alien called a xenophage, which is a predator of Symbiotes. Here's a picture of one:

Regardless, they had another Symbiote they needed a name for, and Phage is what they chose, no doubt because it was used in this toyline. Phage's name first appeared in Carnage USA #2 (January 2012).

You might notice the final (pink) Symbiote, Agony, is not in the toyline either. And no toy is named Agony. So I don't know where her name came from. Regardless, these Symbiotes (minus Scream) are part of a task force called the Mercury Team. Each soldier is assigned one of the Symbiotes and keeps them contained until they're needed, then bond with them just long enough to finish the task at hand.

Pretty neat, right? The immigrants that catch me off-guard are always my favorite.

For completion's sake, you might also notice there's a toy we didn't mention: Hybrid. Hybrid's name is from the comics, but it's not its own Symbiote. It's a combination of Lasher, Riot, and Phage, who first appeared in Venom: Along Came A Spider #1 (November 1995).

Edited to Add (6/27/21): As evidenced by the upcoming Extreme Carnage #1: Lasher (August 2021), Lasher is, indeed, the name of the symbiote and not the dog.