Former ‘Venom’ Writer Donny Cates Slams Marvel Comics’ Refusal To Let Spider-Man Grow Up: “Captain America Was A Nazi, And Peter Can’t Have A Kid?”
Like most everyone who has either read or worked on the wall-crawler’s more recent print adventures, former Venom Vol. 4 writer Donny Cates is not a fan of Marvel Comics’ continued insistence that of all the medium’s costumed characters, from Captain America to Superman, Spider-Man is the only one who is not allowed to experience any sort of lasting growth, character development, or status quo shake-up.
Cates, who also wrote brief runs on Hulk Vol. 5 and Thor Vol. 6 before a near-fatal car accident brought his comic book career to a sudden-but-temporary halt, shared his frustration with Marvel Comics’ editorial during a recent interview given to Popverse’s Dave Buesing.
Amidst a discussion on his now-abandoned pitch for Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 3, which he was originally tapped to relaunch before his accident took him off the board, Cates noted that similar to the book’s current direction under Jonathan Hickman, “My entire pitch for [Ultimate Spider-Man] was that people want him to be married, to have kids.”
“Do it for them!” he exclaimed. “What are we doing here? There’s an entire contingent of people screaming for him and Mary-Jane.”
“It’s like we have a Chili’s, you have people screaming for ice cream [and Marvel Comics is saying], ‘No, f–k you, we don’t have ice cream,'” Cates added. “[It’s like,] ‘Sell ice cream! What the f–k’s wrong with you?'”
To this end, the King in Black event architect then explained that Marvel’s refusal to roll back the events of One More Day stemmed from the fact that the publisher “doesn’t want to give him kids and a wife because the character is evergreen.”
“Eventually, when you give him the wife and kids, eventually what’s gonna happen is either he’s gonna have adult kids and you have a grandfather as Spider-Man, or he’s gonna lose a child, or he’s gonna get a divorce,” Cates detailed. “That’s their reasoning. That taints Spider-Man over time.”
However, while the publisher’s editorial team may believe keeping the web-slinger in this state of arrested development is the sole way to keep him relevant to newer readers, Cates argues that this reasoning is not only disingenuous, but outright bulls–t.
“My argument would be he killed Gwen Stacy like a year into it,” said the Absolute Carnage Vol. 1 scribe. “He broke that b-tches’ neck. He’s okay. He’s been divorced. All these things have already happened.”
“The way that I think of these characters is that you don’t honor these characters by treating them as fragile,” Cates asserted. “I think it’s our job as the inheritors of the legacy of these characters to try to break them as hard as you can. And it’s only in doing that that they will show you how strong they are.”
Putting a stamp on his pushback, the Marvel Comics alum ultimately declared, “Look, every character survived the ’90s. They can’t be broke. If we didn’t fuck up fucking Mullet Superman dying, coming back…”
“And I mean Cap was a Nazi, and Peter can’t have a kid?” conclude Cates. “What are we doing? Just say you don’t wanna do [it,] that’s fine.”
More About:Comic Books