Would Scarlet Spider fans be interested if Mavel created a Scarlet Spider 2099 comic?

[okpanic]

They had flying cars and a virtual reality internet. I think we're safe.


I 5th, 6th or 7th on a return to the OG Miguel O'Hara. I loved the first 20-30 issues of Spider-Man 2099 - and this was before I actually knew who Peter David was.

[CyberHubbs]

They had flying cars and a virtual reality internet. I think we're safe.


I 5th, 6th or 7th on a return to the OG Miguel O'Hara. I loved the first 20-30 issues of Spider-Man 2099 - and this was before I actually knew who Peter David was.

We have a flying car now.

But if 2099 is a progression of today, they have to get rid of the whole cyberpunk thing. It was futuristic 20 years ago.

This is without comparing it to the modern Marvel U. The technology would be a step back.

[okpanic]

Modernizing future cyberpunk... heh. It sounds amusingly redundant.

I get what you're saying but I can't think of any elements which are too future retro. Or retro future.
They just need to put it one step forward beyond what it was, IMO.

[CyberHubbs]

It'd be like watching Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Sure, it's set in the future. The future according to 1979.

We have wifi now. We shouldn't need a hundred different cables attached to the keyboard tucked under our arm.

[okpanic]

Cables are totes cool though

Makes me want to go through my 2099 collection actually.

[CyberHubbs]

Maybe cyberhipster. Or maybe cyber80s, with everyone breakdancing while hacking The Net.

[okpanic]

Maybe flares will be in again, not for the first time but the fourth time, in an ironic retro post modern commentary-slash-commemoration-on-100-years-of-disco-staying-dead kind of way.

Also "shock" is sooo much better than "frack".

[Thennary Nak]

Wasn't the Earth supposed to have gone through some major catastrophes between the present and 2099? If so that could explain why some of the tech is not as advanced as we would imagine it to be today.

[John Ossie]

It would depend on the pitch for me personally having said that however I was never a big fan of the 2099 universe so I probably wouldn't but I could be persuaded I guess.

[David Walton]

Call me crazy, but I don't see anything super-dated about the 2099 universe. If anything, the fear that corporations are taking everything over seems to have intensified. And the cop in J J Abrams' Star Trek who pulls Kid Kirk over at the first of the movie looks a lot like the 2099 police force. Can't argue with Abrams.

[rdfnd1253]

Does anyone think this character could work as the Scarlet Spider of 2099? Flipside, who was a cybernetic robot that scanned Spiderman 2099 and used the 2 closest super heroes he was programmed with(spiderman and venom) to get his appearance/design......could be reactivated or reanimated and see the error of his ways? Maybe he'd have some of Ben's memories downloaded into him and start to fight crime instead of being evil? I really liked his design and costume.....it was pretty cool and looks like a futuristic scarlet spider.

[Assassin Spider]

Call me crazy, but I don't see anything super-dated about the 2099 universe. If anything, the fear that corporations are taking everything over seems to have intensified. And the cop in J J Abrams' Star Trek who pulls Kid Kirk over at the first of the movie looks a lot like the 2099 police force. Can't argue with Abrams.

Not just a fear. By many accounts, it is almost a fact that corporations effectively have more power than either individuals or elected officials by virtue of being able to use their money to all but bribe politicians and other elected representatives into taking stances and passing bills that will benefit the corporate bottom line despite being uncalled for by and ultimately unpopular with the general public. Campaign finance plays a great role in this, particularly since the "Citizens United" ruling that basically equates money with speech and therefore enables individual persons to give as much money as they wish to specific candidates without having to release their identities. Then there's the issue of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which has been accused of acting as a vehicle for ramming right-wing ideology through state legislatures and maybe the U.S. Congress as well in the form of legislation that "happens" to advance business interests as well as right-wing political causes.

Another facet of 2099 (and cyberpunk in general) is the corrupted police institutions that seem to only "protect and serve" the upper echelons of state-corporate power while dismissing or brutalizing those of "lower" socioeconomic-political status. That seems to have bled out into the real world, as protesters against the World Trade Organization back in November 1999 and more recently against the perceived depredations of Wall Street and the so-called "upper 1%" were treated with excessive force by the local police, who came out in paramilitary gear to deal with them under the pretext that the protesters were disrupting public commerce. Aside from the protests, it's also been a general complaint that police tend to brutalize those they see as socially or politically powerless by virtue of poverty or minority status and conversely give special consideration if not an outright "free pass" to those they view in greater esteem for their perceived social or financial status. More specifically, there have been accusations of police attempting to persuade state and local legislatures to criminalize the use of cell phone or digital cameras/camcorders by ordinary citizens to record police actions, which many have taken to mean that the police are trying to prevent instances of police brutality from being held up to public scrutiny by way of recorded footage.

The first two paragraphs sound a lot like the kind of cyberpunk fiction I enjoyed reading in my not-so-distant college days and still enjoy reading today, and the general point of cyberpunk is not so much the 80s/90s predictions of what kind of tech we'd have in the mid-21st century but the kind of society we would have in the mid-21st century. Cyberpunk's prediction was that the societies of the future would be run by an elite few that would control politics, culture, business, media, and finance and use technology as a tool to maintain that control and hold themselves above the law, albeit a law that had long since been restructured for their benefit as opposed to checking their excesses. When not used as a tool of control, technology would be a facilitator of criminal enterprises or other less-than-legal ventures not exclusively the purview of the so-called "criminal class." In a way, the Marvel Universe seems to have moved a bit closer to this kind of theme, at least in the sense of advanced technologies with great potential social benefits being reserved for superheroes and specialized government agencies if not abused and perverted by super-villains and specialized criminal/terrorist organizations, denying ordinary citizens real agency and leaving them at the mercy of dishonest and manipulative power brokers and outright super-villains either way.

As for a Scarlet Spider 2099 idea, I've got one. Out of reaction to Spider-Man's continued assaults on Alchemax, someone within the company decides to revive the superhuman corporate raider program initially headed by Miguel O'Hara, who has ironically become Spider-Man as an inadvertent result of said program, in hopes of making a counter to Spider-Man. Project: Spider-Slayer goes off without a hitch, except for the part where the test subject winds up escaping but with damaged memories and confused instincts, eventually stumbling onto a Spiderite costume (worshipers of Spider-Man as a herald of Thor's return) that's had the colors reversed, red and black instead of black and red (an early issue said it was black, but the colorists shaded it dark blue to make it less flat). Putting on the costume, our confused "Spider-Slayer" stumbles onto various criminal acts in progress and stops them, mostly because the crooks recognize the costume and think Spider-Man has come to stop them, eliciting violent reactions from said crooks --- and even confused super-soldiers have the right to defend themselves, right? The Spider-Slayer's actions end up recorded and posted on the Web by someone who dubs him "the Scarlet Spider," which draws Miguel's attention. Cue confrontation and eventual team-up.

[matthewaos]

^ One of the best posts I have seen here.

[jackson2171]

I always thought of the whole 2099 should have asked us the whole theme. What if super hero's had not started till that area of time. Be it Thor or the hulk or Captain America. How could things go down and what would happen. It would give Thor much more of a birth maybe walking around doing stuff or Loki even or even the whole mutant agenda. However the team work I would like to see comic book characters take maybe to much for writers to handle. No more battle of hulk on iron man or the other characters. No more the streets littered with carnage.
Why have new characters move the whole of them to the year and say if this is the current year what would it be like if Professor X had began the xmen in the year 2099? What if Iron Man started dealing with his drinking in the year of 2099. Then we get into real issues what about the evasion of the earth by AI robots and what about the war of the worlds from planets that refuse to let us off world.
A huge story line that could be tapped into. Odin maybe would sit back a bit as he plays the game of chess with other high powered chess players. your move he may say to Zues. Give the feel of so much going on you have to hit slow motion in order to catch up.
I liked the scarlet spider and was hoping they would work them in more as a team. It never came about to the way that would make them both a really good read. The whole of the 2099 story however good the intent just missed something.