A hub for the "Book of Masks" universe. |
So I finished watching Season Two of "Marvel's Spider-Man" yesterday, and it's left me in a bind. I was hoping that there would be lots of plot threads lying around that I could use as scaffolding to hang my version of "Superior Spider-Man" on, but there aren't any, not to speak of. In fact, there are so few plot threads or continuing, surviving villains of interest that I'm wondering what the real-world writers are going to do. I have the feeling that they're going to do the obvious--have SSM horrify his friends by going medieval on the any bad guy who crosses his path--and that seems to me a boring way of developing the inner conflict that SSM is portrayed as suffering. Norman Osborn is probably still out there someplace, so I guess they could bring him back. Otherwise, there's not much that's interesting to work with. So I'm stuck between matching wits with the writers by using the same materials they've got, and ... Well, cheating. Cheating, by which I mean, I could go back and revise the first two seasons, making up my own alternate version of the series thus far, and giving myself the materials that I think would be fun to work with. I wouldn't be writing those alternate episodes in script format, though. (Too much work.) I'd write up summaries or detailed treatments. That would still be a bigger project than what I had originally planned, but in some ways it would probably be easier. I bought one of the ASM "Epic Collections" yesterday (Vol. 4) and I'm going to check out some other collections from the library, so I'm already getting ideas by reading some of those stories. That's not the same supply of material that the cartoon writers were drawing on (they're drawing on the last few years of Dan Slott's work) but I would be writing on the most original of the canonic material out there. I'm going to have to think about this some more, and I'm going to have to think about it by actually trying to wrestle out some of my own ideas for an alternate version of the series. Hell, if nothing else, it would give me a chance to outline a Doc Ock episode that I could title "Sh! The Octopus!" |