Much has been written and posted on Youtube about how filmmaker Kevin Smith has desecrated one of the sacred cows of 1980s pop-culture, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, with his new Netflix series, Masters of the Universe: Revelations. I would even go as far as to argue that the firestorm of controversy that this series has kicked up has gotten Smith more exposure than he has had in some time, and that's bearing in mind his stature within the geek community. I've already weighed in on the series itself here, so I won't be reviewing this series in this blog post.
What I would like to point out, though, for the angry fans, is that, unfortunately, this is not the first time that Smith has hijacked a story which was supposed to feature a beloved character in order to hamhandedly push some clumsy advocacy. We comic book fans experienced this from him some time ago, long before the hotly-debated topic of "woke culture" was even a thing.
In 2002, Smith and artist Terry Dodson launched a mini-series that featured Spider-Man, then white-hot thanks to the record-breaking success of his first-ever feature film, and his ex-girlfriend and on-again, off-again ally Felicia Hardy, aka the Black Cat, in a series title "Spider-Man and Black Cat: the Evil that Men Do." Smith's stock among comic-book fans was soaring at the time; he had already completed the eight-part Daredevil epic "Guardian Devil" which was one of the flashpoints that brought about Marvel's renaissance at the turn of the millennium, following a truly disastrous period for the company in the 1990s, and had also just finished a highly-successful run on "Green Arrow" over at DC Comics.
The first three issues of the series shipped one after the other, and offered an intriguing, brand new villain who had both telepathic and teleportation abilities. It was fairly clear why Spider-Man and Black Cat needed to team up to take this bad guy down, and yet, by the end of the third issue, readers were left with a cliffhanger as the bad guy had mentally paralyzed Felicia and looked, from all indications, like he was about to rape her.
And then, for nearly three years, the miniseries went on hold as Smith stopped writing to take care of...stuff. It was one of a pair of embarrassments for Marvel as Smith had actually launched two miniseries that year, the other one being "Daredevil: Target" with Glenn Fabry, which, incidentally, was cancelled after one issue because Smith simply couldn't get his act together.
When the story was finished in 2005, things had taken a turn for the ridiculous as the Black Cat was in jail for the killing of the guy who had been poised to rape her at the end of the last issue, and suddenly the focus of the entire story was on Felicia's sudden, weird bond with the brother of the villain (and eventual villain himself), who had barely uttered any dialogue during the first three issues, but who turned out to be similarly superpowered, and a victim of rape growing up, something Felicia connected to as Smith had retconned a date-rape into her history as well.
Sound familiar, He-Man fans? Yup, Spider-Man had become a guest star in his own fucking book. There were a couple of gratuitous cameos by Daredevil and Nightcrawler, but the effect was still the same; Spider-Man was sidelined.
It didn't even bother me that Black Cat was the focal point of the remainder of the series; at least her name was in the title. No, what really got my goat was how hard Smith pimped his new villain, trying in the course of a few issues to both build him a backstory and make him formidable, and by the end actually made him the new Mysterio. A few years earlier, Smith had made Quentin Beck, the original Mysterio, blow his own brains out in the pages of "Daredevil." It felt somewhat presumptuous that Smith could just slot some "rando" into the bubble helmet and green tights after Beck had spent decades becoming an iconic villain, but, well, Smith presumed to do just that. And as one might expect, this new character didn't take at all; within less than two years, Beck was brought back from the dead--from Hell, in fact--and Smith's creation Francis Klum was killed off in the pages of another Spider-Man book and never heard from again. Similarly, Kevin Smith never wrote a book for Marvel again.
I don't really know if it's any consolation for disgruntled He-Man fans to know that Smith has done crap like this before, but, well, he has, and unlike Masters of the Universe, which has at least one more season to wrap up its obvious cliffhanger, that Spider-Man miniseries came to a most unfortunate conclusion.
One can hope, though, that Mattel has learned the same lesson that Marvel did and will never put Smith in charge of one of their most beloved properties again.
