”Sometimes I feel like my life consists of walking down the same streets, visiting the same places, fighting the same villains day after day after day..”
Spider-Man
Yo Yo Plot Point in the Spider-Man books.Setting
- Spider-Man moving out of Aunt May's place, publicly revealing his secret identity, and most of all getting married. Attempts to backpedal on any or all of these have been disastrous. And this is all alongside someone deciding they want to put their "once and for all" stamp on Gwen Stacy's clone(s) (which would be three or four since the mid-90s). His status as a Hero with Bad Publicity and his placing his responsibility over his personal happiness has also required increasingly more contrived methods to stick around, with the most recent example at the time of this writing being Spidey being a major factor in the death of Kamala Khan in a Milestone Celebration to The Night Gwen Stacy Died.
- Spidey is always going to be a Hero with Bad Publicity and a Working-Class Hero. And it's become rather breathtaking to see the lengths the writers go to Yank the Dog's Chain and remove any kind of attempt at giving Peter an improvement in his status quo, including being possessed by Doc Ock, his company being wrecked by HYDRA, and his relationship with Mary Jane becoming collateral damage to another Deal with the Devil — although one not made by him.
Specific Plots
- Another repetitive plot point of the Spider-Man comics is when a villain throws Peter's Love Interest from a bridge, in a reprise of The Night Gwen Stacy Died (1973).
- The Spider-Man books have had their share of an all-out Mob War between the many New York crime families/factions:
- Amazing Spider-Man #284-288: during Kingpin's absence, the Rose, Hammerhead, Hobgoblin (a major villain at the time), Jack O'Lantern (Jason Macendale) vye for the position of new Kingpin. Some street level heroes (Daredevil, the Punisher, Falcon, Black Cat) join forces to stop them.
- During Gerry Conway's second stint in the late-1980s in both "The Spectacular Spider-Man" and "Web of Spider-Man", another Gang War ecloded between Kingpin, Hammerhead (allied with the Chameleon) and a pair of Mexican gangsters named Lobo Brothers ("Spectacular Spider-Man" #150-154 and "Web of Spider-Man" #50-55).
- The "Flash Thompson becomes Spider-Man" What If? has been done a total of 3 different times, though all three were of course alternate realities, so it wasn't repeating from their perspective. What If stories can turn into this also when they're made to happen in the main universe. So Jane Foster became Thor twice, once in a What If story and once for real. And as for Flash, well, he never became Spidey for real... He became Venom instead!
Lampshades, Deconstructions, etc.
- A 2000 issue of title Peter Parker: Spider-Man (#16) leans so hard on the fourth wall by having Spider-Man's Inner Monologue about fighting supervillains every day, having to deal with the people's perception of him as a public menace, waiting for some villain of his rogues' gallery to attack him, Venom's hunger for Spidey's brain matter, and Jonah Jameson's typical blaming of Spider-Man. At the end of the issue, Peter goes to a Trashcan Bonfire and thinks he should give up being Spider-Man (again), but accepts his role. Really, the issue borders on an Indecisive Parody, trying to have its cake and eating it too, by lampshading and playing the clichés straight.
