Okay -- I'm going to slightly bend one of my rules, and spell out for you what Howard and I briefly -- o, so briefly! -- considered for our Shaper of Worlds "fix".In a nutshell, Peter Parker's life goes completely to hell. Cut his life into the thinnest slices you can, and there will be something very, wrong with every slice. Everything has gone wrong.
He finds himself once more on top of the Brooklyn Bridge. This is the point where it all went to hell, he thinks. When Gwen died. Or when Captain Stacey died. Or when Uncle Ben died. Or when that damn spider bit him. There's no way to pick a point. It's all just blackness, blackness and more blackness. And…
He falls from the bridge. Did he slip? Did he jump? We'll never know. Because the last shot in that issue is him falling like a limp rag wrapped around a rock…
…And next issue he wakes up back in Queens, back in Aunt May's house, back in high school. Along with everybody else in his supporting cast, he's been rewound. Only, he doesn't know that. The readers know it, of course, but for Peter, it's business as usual -- for maybe two issues. Then there's this little tickle at the back of his brain that tells him this isn't right. Look over there. Johnny Storm is twenty-something. Why does Peter think they should be contemporaries? It's just little things, but over the span of a few issues it brings him back to the Bridge again. Here. Something happened here. What? What happened?
"I happened," says the Shaper of Worlds, appearing alongside Peter. "I was drawn by your pain. I reached into your mind and found the last place you were happy. And I put you back there. I fixed everything."
"Well, UNfix it," demands Peter.
"No can do," says the Shaper. "What I shape, remains shaped." And he disappears.
Peter goes back to Queens. What can he do? He can't tell anybody. And -- now that he's met the Shaper, he's finding those little tickles are starting to disappear. Like they're being erased. Like he's forgetting that things used to be different.
By the end of maybe nine, ten months, the status quo would be the status quo, and no further mention would be made of the Shaper, or the previous timeline. (Well, until someone else took over the character, that is. Or until someone in an unrelated title was shown reading the latest AMAZING and laughing. You know, professional stuff.)
Now, hands up who can tell us why this fix -- love it, hate it, feel totally indifferent about it -- is better than the Mephisto fix?
Topic Closed)
