"They're Hunting Spiders..."
They’ve done it to me again.
For the second time, Marvel has killed off a character with significant ties to Ricochet, without a great deal of fanfare or indication that they plan to show its impact on him. Not that I’m surprised, really-it’s not like Rico’s been much on their radar screens since over a year ago… And then just barely, with him in a cameo written by the author of the abortive Loners series as a fellow Loner, Darkhawk, got a push toward a higher profile in Marvel’s cosmic books. Whatever-the point being that even if I’d known this was coming, I wouldn’t have expected Marvel to tie Rico into it…
… but given what actually happened, they could have. And it would’ve been awesome.
Mattie Franklin, the fourth Spider-Woman, one-time member of the Loners, and one-time bedmate of Ricochet, is dead. She was killed off as part of ASM’s current storyline, the Grim Hunt, which I’ve just started following and have actually kind of been enjoying (despite the accusations that Mattie’s death amounted to yet another example of the “fridging” phenomenon in comics-whatever, that’s not the main focus of this piece, although I think the argument could really go either way).
The long-story-short of it is that the Grim Hunt is a call-back to the classic Spidey story “Kraven’s Last Hunt,” which saw kinda-lame Spidey-foe Sergei Kravinoff, aka Kraven the Hunter, kill himself after tracking down Spider-Man and defeating him-the culmination of his life’s work. Cut to this story, where Kraven’s wife Sasha has gathered her and Kraven’s children together into a “pack” of sorts and gone after Spider-Man for revenge, going so far as to have organized other supervillains to continually hit Spidey one after another in an on-going gauntlet to weaken him ahead of time. The bigger hook to this storyline is that the surviving Kravinoffs have defined the fight in mystical, totemistic terms, pitting themselves, the hunters, against the “spiders”-Spider-Man and any other spider-themed superhero in the Marvelverse, whether closely associated with Spidey or not. So far this has included the psychic Madame Web (kidnapped and tortured by the Kravinoffs to use her prophetic visions against Spidey), Mattie as someone who’s gone by Spider-Woman, Julia Carpenter aka Arachne aka also Spider-Woman, Kaine (the last remaining clone of Peter Parker from the much-maligned Clone Saga), Araña (a Hispanic spider-themed teenage heroine), and if teaser art is to be believed, possibly also the last Scarlet Spider and someone wearing the infamous “black costume,” better known as the Venom design.
The mystic angle gets brought in again as the goal of this Grim Hunt is to magically resurrect Kraven himself using Spider-Man’s lifeblood as a sacrifice-which is how Mattie died. Using Madame Web’s visions to their advantage, the Kravinoffs captured and killed her in a sort of beta-test ceremony, which proved the concept was sound in that it resurrected Kraven’s son Vladimir who’d also died fighting Spidey-but he came back wrong, as some kind of were-lion, proving also (at least as far as crazy animalistic supervillains rely on proof) that they need Spidey’s own blood to perfect the process for Kraven’s resurrection.
Anyway-Mattie’s dead, they’re hunting spiders, and things look bleak… So what’s this got to do with Ricochet?
Well again, he’s got ties to Mattie-they were teammates, however briefly, and the sexual tension between them even culminated in a one-night-stand, and they parted on terms that made it clear there was unfinished business between them. That gives him at least some kind of in-story reason to care about what happened to her-and with Rico and the other Loners back in NYC as of their last appearance, he would’ve been around for everything that went down. More than just geographical availability is character motivation-after all, Rico’s current pro-superhero stance derives from the death of his former partner, the Hornet-a death for which Rico blames himself, naturally, since he wasn’t there to help Hornet-so by rights even the rumor that a former teammate was in trouble (and Mattie had been missing for weeks before her death) should have kicked him into action.
But there’s more than even that, from an OOC perspective. This story has been set up as a fight between the hunters and the spiders, because the Kravinoffs want Spidey dead and want to hit everybody who even resembles him because of the totemistic angle they’re working-they’re hunting and killing spiders wherever they find them. Ricochet, obviously, is not sufficiently spider-themed to warrant that kind of attention… But he could’ve been sufficiently Spidey-themed for Editorial to take notice. After all, Ricochet and his fellow Slingers were all adapted from temporary masked identities assumed by Peter Parker when Spider-Man was on the outs with the public. Three of the original four Slingers are still alive-Rico, Prodigy, and Dusk, minus Hornet-and all available to be used when pulled out of the character stable.
What I would’ve liked to see-and that’s basically what this boils down to, for me: complaining about what I would’ve liked to see rather than what I have been seeing-is for the writers to throw characters like Rico and the other Slingers right in the Kravinoffs’ faces. They’re set on wiping out the spiders because they perceive them as part of Spider-Man’s clan, a group that bear his influence-even though that despite the common spider-theme, most of those heroes are only tangentially connected each other or even to Spider-Man himself. Instead, while the hunters are targeting them, I would’ve liked to see a big damn cavalry moment where heroes who have actually connected with or been inspired by Spidey show up to help turn the tide-folks like the Black Cat, the Prowler, Puma, the remaining Slingers of course, maybe even Moon Knight or Daredevil (if the latter weren’t apparently becoming an evil ninja master in his own book, apparently)… To show that Spidey’s real influence isn’t in some kind of spider-totem, but in the impact he’s had on the superhero community, by his efforts or his example-and for that impact to hit the hunters right between the eyes.
So yeah, the very-long-and-short of it is that I’m whining about Marvel not using Ricochet when I can conceive an opportunity for them to have done so. But I think it would’ve made sense, given Rico’s connection to the first victim of the Grim Hunt, Mattie, and his history as a character specifically inspired by Spider-Man, when the villains are supposed to be after “heroes like Spider-Man.” But oh well-they haven’t, and I don’t think they will be.
Instead, I have to find yet another IC explanation for why Ricochet has sat out a storyline where someone he knew (both personally and biblically) was brutally murdered while he was in town. This, on top of needing to find a reason why he’s still in NYC when almost the rest of the mutant race is trapped inside a magic bubble in San Francisco fighting evil robots from the future, but hey… Another day in the Marvelverse.
For the second time, Marvel has killed off a character with significant ties to Ricochet, without a great deal of fanfare or indication that they plan to show its impact on him. Not that I’m surprised, really-it’s not like Rico’s been much on their radar screens since over a year ago… And then just barely, with him in a cameo written by the author of the abortive Loners series as a fellow Loner, Darkhawk, got a push toward a higher profile in Marvel’s cosmic books. Whatever-the point being that even if I’d known this was coming, I wouldn’t have expected Marvel to tie Rico into it…
… but given what actually happened, they could have. And it would’ve been awesome.
Mattie Franklin, the fourth Spider-Woman, one-time member of the Loners, and one-time bedmate of Ricochet, is dead. She was killed off as part of ASM’s current storyline, the Grim Hunt, which I’ve just started following and have actually kind of been enjoying (despite the accusations that Mattie’s death amounted to yet another example of the “fridging” phenomenon in comics-whatever, that’s not the main focus of this piece, although I think the argument could really go either way).
The long-story-short of it is that the Grim Hunt is a call-back to the classic Spidey story “Kraven’s Last Hunt,” which saw kinda-lame Spidey-foe Sergei Kravinoff, aka Kraven the Hunter, kill himself after tracking down Spider-Man and defeating him-the culmination of his life’s work. Cut to this story, where Kraven’s wife Sasha has gathered her and Kraven’s children together into a “pack” of sorts and gone after Spider-Man for revenge, going so far as to have organized other supervillains to continually hit Spidey one after another in an on-going gauntlet to weaken him ahead of time. The bigger hook to this storyline is that the surviving Kravinoffs have defined the fight in mystical, totemistic terms, pitting themselves, the hunters, against the “spiders”-Spider-Man and any other spider-themed superhero in the Marvelverse, whether closely associated with Spidey or not. So far this has included the psychic Madame Web (kidnapped and tortured by the Kravinoffs to use her prophetic visions against Spidey), Mattie as someone who’s gone by Spider-Woman, Julia Carpenter aka Arachne aka also Spider-Woman, Kaine (the last remaining clone of Peter Parker from the much-maligned Clone Saga), Araña (a Hispanic spider-themed teenage heroine), and if teaser art is to be believed, possibly also the last Scarlet Spider and someone wearing the infamous “black costume,” better known as the Venom design.
The mystic angle gets brought in again as the goal of this Grim Hunt is to magically resurrect Kraven himself using Spider-Man’s lifeblood as a sacrifice-which is how Mattie died. Using Madame Web’s visions to their advantage, the Kravinoffs captured and killed her in a sort of beta-test ceremony, which proved the concept was sound in that it resurrected Kraven’s son Vladimir who’d also died fighting Spidey-but he came back wrong, as some kind of were-lion, proving also (at least as far as crazy animalistic supervillains rely on proof) that they need Spidey’s own blood to perfect the process for Kraven’s resurrection.
Anyway-Mattie’s dead, they’re hunting spiders, and things look bleak… So what’s this got to do with Ricochet?
Well again, he’s got ties to Mattie-they were teammates, however briefly, and the sexual tension between them even culminated in a one-night-stand, and they parted on terms that made it clear there was unfinished business between them. That gives him at least some kind of in-story reason to care about what happened to her-and with Rico and the other Loners back in NYC as of their last appearance, he would’ve been around for everything that went down. More than just geographical availability is character motivation-after all, Rico’s current pro-superhero stance derives from the death of his former partner, the Hornet-a death for which Rico blames himself, naturally, since he wasn’t there to help Hornet-so by rights even the rumor that a former teammate was in trouble (and Mattie had been missing for weeks before her death) should have kicked him into action.
But there’s more than even that, from an OOC perspective. This story has been set up as a fight between the hunters and the spiders, because the Kravinoffs want Spidey dead and want to hit everybody who even resembles him because of the totemistic angle they’re working-they’re hunting and killing spiders wherever they find them. Ricochet, obviously, is not sufficiently spider-themed to warrant that kind of attention… But he could’ve been sufficiently Spidey-themed for Editorial to take notice. After all, Ricochet and his fellow Slingers were all adapted from temporary masked identities assumed by Peter Parker when Spider-Man was on the outs with the public. Three of the original four Slingers are still alive-Rico, Prodigy, and Dusk, minus Hornet-and all available to be used when pulled out of the character stable.
What I would’ve liked to see-and that’s basically what this boils down to, for me: complaining about what I would’ve liked to see rather than what I have been seeing-is for the writers to throw characters like Rico and the other Slingers right in the Kravinoffs’ faces. They’re set on wiping out the spiders because they perceive them as part of Spider-Man’s clan, a group that bear his influence-even though that despite the common spider-theme, most of those heroes are only tangentially connected each other or even to Spider-Man himself. Instead, while the hunters are targeting them, I would’ve liked to see a big damn cavalry moment where heroes who have actually connected with or been inspired by Spidey show up to help turn the tide-folks like the Black Cat, the Prowler, Puma, the remaining Slingers of course, maybe even Moon Knight or Daredevil (if the latter weren’t apparently becoming an evil ninja master in his own book, apparently)… To show that Spidey’s real influence isn’t in some kind of spider-totem, but in the impact he’s had on the superhero community, by his efforts or his example-and for that impact to hit the hunters right between the eyes.
So yeah, the very-long-and-short of it is that I’m whining about Marvel not using Ricochet when I can conceive an opportunity for them to have done so. But I think it would’ve made sense, given Rico’s connection to the first victim of the Grim Hunt, Mattie, and his history as a character specifically inspired by Spider-Man, when the villains are supposed to be after “heroes like Spider-Man.” But oh well-they haven’t, and I don’t think they will be.
Instead, I have to find yet another IC explanation for why Ricochet has sat out a storyline where someone he knew (both personally and biblically) was brutally murdered while he was in town. This, on top of needing to find a reason why he’s still in NYC when almost the rest of the mutant race is trapped inside a magic bubble in San Francisco fighting evil robots from the future, but hey… Another day in the Marvelverse.