This year, Marvel announced that they are working hard towards revitalizing their line of original graphic novels. A few months ago, they announced ‘Avengers: Endless Wartime’, a stand-alone story from Warren Ellis about some ghosts coming back to haunt a few of the biggest players on the Avengers roster. Now, it looks like Spider-Man will be getting the OGN treatment of his own in ‘Spider-Man: Family Business’, where the wall-crawler is set to meet his sister.
From the Eisner Award-winning minds of Mark Waid and James Robinson with ‘Secret War’ artist Gabriele Dell’otto, the story finds Peter Parker (rather than his arachnid alter ego) caught up in the Kingpin’s plan to take his crime syndicate global. But before Parker can get to the bottom of this, a mysterious woman in a convertible named Teresa Parker comes into his life and claims to be his long lost sister. In an interview with USA Today, Waid has this to say about the new addition to the Parker family tree:
“The story is moving at such a breakneck speed that there’s not much of a chance to catch a breath. He has every reason to be skeptical about who this woman is and who she says she is… [Teresa is] the anti-Peter. She’s got it all together, she’s smooth as silk. She’s Modesty Blaise.”
After explaining the CIA connections to Richard and Mary Parker, Waid continues to speak on the mystery surrounding Peter, Teresa, and the Kingpin’s plans:
“It seems very bizarre to him that Aunt May never mentioned anything about this woman, who’s about his age and the resemblance is there. Peter wants to try to figure out what this mystery is all about but basically they’re running from a crime syndicate out to kill them both throughout the novel, so there’s not a whole lot of time for Spider-Man to sit and relax and slowly suss this out.”
Similar to ‘Endless Wartime’, ‘Family Business’ will not be connected to the current mainstream Marvel continuity where Otto Octavius is currently running around in Peter’s body as the Superior Spider-Man. Waid talks about the challenges that are successfully avoided by keeping this tale out of continuity:
“Peter is generally most interesting when he’s as ordinary as possible, except for the spider bite. There’s the one freakish thing that happened to him. One of the reasons we haven’t explored a lot of untold secrets behind his lineage is the danger is obviously there to make it a little too convoluted and take away the everyman aspect of Peter.
If you were to reveal that his parents were really Skrulls or reveal that Aunt May was really his mother and not his aunt, if you try to pull something like that it feels like you’re pulling the rug out from the ordinary Joe that Peter is. We’ve successfully sidestepped this in this graphic novel.”
Who knows if this story will eventually filter back into the main Spidey story, but ‘Family Business’ definitely sounds like a departure from the hero’s wheelhouse. By the sounds of things, Waid and Robinson have created more of a secret agent role for Peter, which is one that we really don’t see the web-slinger in too often. We’ll see how it all turns out when the graphic novel finally hits shelves on April 2, 2014.
What do you think about Peter discovering his long lost sister? After delivering such awesome stories with the likes of Daredevil and Hulk in recent years, do you trust that Mark Waid will continue his awesome streak with ‘Spider-Man: Family Business’? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
