The Book of Masks Homepage

Monsters

Today's Spider-Man fanfiction is now up: "S01E02 "Here Be Dragons"" . It's mostly new and only borrows elements from the IRL "Horizon High, Part 2": Peter angering Otto Octavius by not recognizing him; Harry asking Peter to bring him his old experiments in defiance of protocol; a fight with a spider-slayer that tries stealing Harry's goods; Raymond Warren being Gwen Stacy's uncle. The rest of it is my own invention, or me folding in other elements from the series or the comics.

I mentioned a few weeks back how surprised I was that J. Jonah Jameson doesn't show up in the first season of the show. He is such a mainstay of the universe that it's like leaving out Aunt May. So he shows up early, and I've tried to take some care in motivating his anti-Spider-Man animus without making it some huge, complicated deal.

It also astonished me that this animated series gives Curt Connors only the most perfunctory treatment in, as he's one of the most interesting and sympathetic villains in the early comics. (He shows up late, almost as an afterthought, as a Godzilla clone to be beaten into submission.) I'm all the more surprised considering that Eric Radomski is on the series's staff, and Radomski was one of the big creatives on "Batman: The Animated Series," which is renowned for its relatable villains. Spider-Man is too chatty a hero, and his universe too packed with supporting characters with soap opera stories, for it to really resemble BTAS, but I tried keeping BTAS in mind when such an obvious BTAS-like character as Connors comes along.