Could Frame Thy Fearful (What If Kraven’s Last Hunt?)

Side A: And Great Disgust. (What If Kraven the Hunter had Killed Spider-Man?)

 1/2: If they say demons laugh at talking about
next year, it's okay to just let them laugh.

When I concluded this project back in 2018, I knew there were going to be gaps. All histories contain gaps, knowingly or not. Limitations by the writers because of their biases, their greenness, or any such thing. A holistic history cannot be created simply because there is simply too much to contain every grain of sand.

In the case of Fearful Symmetry, my first blog project, the reasoning behind the lack of completeness when it comes to the various follow ups to Kraven’s Last Hunt is fairly obvious: they largely suck. They lack the magic upon which I gravitated towards when reading that initial comics series. Of the two that existed at the time, the one I’m not about to write about at length — Grim Hunt —  had the issue of being rather lame as most post-One More Day Spider-Man comics tend to be. (This is in contrast to the lameness of most post-DeMatteis Spider-Man comics, which gave one the sense that at least one person at a time was trying to do something.)

Meanwhile, later works like The Lost Hunt or the motion picture Kraven the Hunter also felt limited. The latter is fairly obvious in this regard: it’s a bad movie that was rewritten to hell and too incoherent to have any meaning. The former, meanwhile, while containing elements of DeMatteis’ larger themes with the character, nevertheless felt like it would be better off not being put in this context. It would be lessened by it.

So that leaves only one story: What if? In truth, there are two What Ifs to consider. The first of these, released in the immediate wake of Kraven’s Last Hunt (give or take a few years) is rather drab. Indeed, it’s quite apparent how drab the story is from the first proper panel after Uatu the Watcher (the Rod Serling of What If?) makes his opening spiel (with the bluntness of a steel hammer). Here, Peter narrates, “Stupid, Parker. Only a Bonafide nut-case would willingly venture out on a night like this! But that dream--! The spiders crawling all over me! I can’t remember ever feeling so terrified. I know it was only a nightmare, but--Oh, well. Another few blocks and I’ll be helping Mary Jane move the rest of her stuff over to my…Our place. Gee, that has a nice ring to it.”

This is a rather pedestrian approach to Peter’s mental state within the pages of Kraven’s Last Hunt. And yet, it feels small, inconsequential. Lacking in the tone and import of the book proper. Consider how that exact same moment is depicted in the book proper: “Head’s pointing— Like someone’s playing drums inside my brain. Jungle drums. Got the shivers. Stomach’s in a knot. Maybe I’ll just crawl up into a ball and-- No. Just keep moving. Gotta keep moving—and everything’ll be all right.”

Note the short, clipped sentences within the original version. Thoughts constantly interrupted by new thoughts, never being allowed the opportunity to cohere. By contrast, the What If has long, coherent sentences. The pace allows it to calm down from the shock and paranoia. Furthermore, the What If is depicted in a single panel of Spider-Man swinging around New York at ease. The thought bubbles surrounding Spider-Man. By contrast, the original work has the moment depicted over the course of three panels, each one having Spider-Man in a different pose. The text boxes containing his thoughts swing back and forth over the sequence, forcing the reader to move across the panels in a way that’s not inherently chronological.

What’s more, as the What If goes on, it reveals itself to lack several of the thematic and literary elements that makes Kraven’s Last Hunt truly special. The most obvious of these is the contrasting text boxes. Though most notable in the climactic pages of the first issue, wherein Kraven “kills” Spider-Man, the contradictory text boxes allow a variety of perspectives on the events of the story. From the manic mental state of Vermin to Mary Jane’s anxiety.

In this moment, Peter’s mental state is fractured between an almost rational mind trying to remain coherent and snarky in the face of death. The language used is, while short, written with full sentences in mind such that one can see coherent thought processes. The other mental state is more clipped in nature— short, incomplete sentences punching the reader with their intrusive nature. It’s only in the moments of death that the rational thoughts begin to degrade into the format of the less rational thought, by then those thoughts becoming single words, their thoughts split over a multitude of panels.

By contrast, the What If uses more traditional thought bubbles, leading to the thoughts, again, being more coherent. There’s no interruption in the thoughts of Peter Parker beyond Uatu’s narration. There’s a lack of collapse within the mind of Spider-Man and a visual lack of collapse within Kraven’s mind. Yes, he is portrayed in the comic as quite mad. But we never get the sense of his mental state the way Kraven’s Last Hunt immerses us within.

In both comics, Kraven is shown, in the wake of defeating the Spider, to be confronting a horde of spiders. In the What If, this is depicted rather straight forwardly with Kraven eating the spiders. Indeed, writer/artist Richard Howell and colorist Nel Yomtov depict the moment over the course of half a page (five of its seven panels) with a degree of drabness. The colors used to depict the walls of the room are a cool baby blue. Kraven’s body is drawn to look strong and put together, like someone disgusted with himself for eating the spiders, a literal depiction of events. Indeed, the text further literalizes things by explicitly telling the reader things that they were already explicitly told. Specifically, Kraven is shown questioning why he’s doing this in the same panel that the narration notes that he is of two minds regarding what he’s about to do.

By contrast, the original comic depicts Kraven’s engagement with the spiders over the course of six pages, each ranging between five to seven panels each. Artist Mike Zeck and colorist Ian Tetrault contrast the scene with the cool baby blues used in the What If, but also with a murky, pinkish red, unsettling the reader. Further unsettling things is Kraven, drawn constantly crawling around the manor he lives in, like an absolute nutter. Indeed, we are shown in moments that should be demonstrating his strength that his eyes are those of a mad man. We are trusted to interpret the scene without the narration going “Kraven, by this time, is quite mad. He equates spiders with Spider-Man and also with the decline of civilization.” We are shown this in the mania within his eyes, how the text boxes clutter over each other. And, of course, the fact that instead of eating the spiders, he is fighting a giant amalgamation of all the spiders in the room as some kind of gestalt being.

On this note, it’s worth engaging with the overall lack of mysticism within the What If. While not as explicitly a mystical story as a work by Morrison or Moore, Kraven’s Last Hunt has an air of the mystical. From the ritualistic approach to hunting Kraven engages with to the constant invocations of William Blake’s The Tyger all the way to the framing of how Spider-Man digs himself out of the grave, there’s the vibe of magic within these pages (further emphasized by the sequel, Soul of the Hunter, which makes the mystical elements more explicit).

By contrast, the What If is depressingly literal in how it approaches the world. It quotes the Blake poem, but turns it into the opening for a villain monologue by Kraven about how he’s going to do the bad stuff. Indeed, the comic is more engaged with being a traditional superhero fight than the abject weirdness that is Kraven’s Last Hunt. Instead of Spider-Man being left to his own devices for two weeks, Mary Jane immediately goes to the Human Torch for help. There’s a bunch of stuff with J Jonah Jameson being mad at all superheroes.

But the What If lacks the uncanny nature of the comic its following up. When writing a follow up to a work, you have to engage with what it truly is rather than what is easier to engage with. In the case of Kraven’s Last Hunt, the central heart of it is a horror comic about masculinity. From the serial cannibals lurking within the sewars of New York to Kraven’s own views of masculinity resulting in him becoming more and more monstrous. Indeed, the ultimate catharsis of the story is Spider-Man engaging with Vermin more humanely than Kraven did, a contrast of the kinds of men they are.

Meanwhile, for a comic where Kraven literally eats Spider-Man’s face, there’s a startling lack of horror. Instead, Howell approaches the task like it’s a traditional superhero book where Spider-Man is briefly taken off the board. As a result, the work feels limited.

It is for that reason that I ultimately skipped this when I was initially writing Fearful Symmetry. In truth, I didn’t think I had all that much to say about the work within the context of Kraven’s Last Hunt. Drab superhero comics are dime a dozen and I was, in truth, a rather limited writer at the time. A lot of the follow up pieces to the big Kraven’s Last Huntessay were written with summarization rather than analysis in mind. Summarization can certainly work within a bit of critique, but it can’t be the whole of it.

Sure, I covered up my summarizing tendencies through postmodernism, a term that is so vague it can mean quite literally anything. But I wasn’t really saying anything. There was no material reality to what I was doing with a lot of the works. Yes, there was a degree to which I was processing my grandfather’s death, but there’s also a degree of post hoc to that. That I’m justifying an earlier work with meaning that doesn’t measure up.

But that’s the nature of early works. Oftentimes, the limitations can be seen, even ones that are later overcome and engaged with in more meaningful ways. Artists will show the foundations upon which their later style will be built upon, elements that will, in turn, change over the decades that follow. I’ve always had a difficulty with reading my older works in part due to this change. I can rarely, if ever, see the good parts of it. I can only see the flaws, where I could’ve done better.

And yet, I keep at this sodding criticism game. Because, despite all my misgivings regarding my earlier works, I still love playing the game, still love learning new and interesting things about the medium, be it comics, film, video games, or what have you. I love applying my trade to the world. I want to learn more about the world.

There are limitations to the older work, to be sure. I didn’t read Dostoyevsky until recently, and can absolutely see his confessional approach within the pages of Kraven’s Last Hunt. I didn’t fully dive into the horror elements of the comic despite highlighting several works of horror fiction.

And, of course, there’s the actual piece on Kraven’s Last Hunt. My initial plan was for it to be a kind of choose your own adventure twine fiction (I was heavily indebted to the blog series Vaka Rangi — to the point of arguably being a rip off of it — which did stuff like that quite a bit) that would have alternate endings which the various essays would lead towards. But without that element, the essay becomes unwieldy and overly convoluted (as if it wasn’t already).

But at the same time, there’s still something within those old bones. Something worth engaging with and making something new out of. I still like the essay on Best of Enemies. The psychogeographic approach has yielded dividends. And I wouldn’t be here without it. We all have to start somewhere.

Side B: Burning Bright (What If Kraven Survived his Last Hint?)

1/2: So you can wipe off that grin, I know where
you've been. It's all been a pack of lies!

When engaging with an artist’s late work, especially a late work following up a critically acclaimed story, one can feel the sense of reflection within. In 1987, when Kraven’s Last Hunt was initially released, JM DeMatteis was in his mid 30s. A few years older than I currently am. He had just finished the first arc of what would become his critically acclaimed series Justice League International. (Indeed, the third word in that title wouldn’t be introduced into the book until halfway through Kraven’s Last Hunt.) He had been working on and off the Spider-Man books since 1981, had completed a solid Conan the Barbarian run in the early 80s, and published works like Into Shamballa and Greenberg the Vampire. And then there’s Moonshadow, his magnum opus, which was completed earlier in the year (or at the end of the previous year, if you’re not looking at the cover date). But there was so much still to come. Seekers into the Mystery, the semi-autobiographical Brooklyn Dreams, his revisiting of his initial pitch for Kraven’s Last Hunt with Batman: Going Sane. Even his full Spider-Man run was till left incomplete. Not yet begun. The future held and still holds so many possibilities.

He had returned before to the story of Kraven and his last hunt before. There was Soul of the Hunter, which sought to clarify the nature of the ending and provide the villain with an air of peace. There was the Lost Hunt, which explored the direct consequences of Kraven’s death on those who knew him. There was even the ill regarded Spider-Man ’94, which had Kraven appear in a supporting role. But DeMatteis never before returned to these specific events. Even when Kraven was resurrected and killed off once more, DeMatteis never returned. But now, in the twilight of his life, age 72, DeMatteis finds himself returning to the forest of the night.

Curious, then, that Blake is one of the book’s absences. There is a degree to which quoting “The Tyger” is a young man’s move. The sort of look how clever I am tactic that you so often do when you’re young. It’s not a bad move per say. Indeed, a lot of brilliant writers have made this move, DeMatteis included. But there’s a maturity to returning to the pages of what once was without the need to placate the fans’ expectations. Indeed, a lot of the comic acts to subvert what one would expect from such a comic while also embracing it. To many fans, the expectation would be akin to what was written back in the day with the initial “What if Kraven had lived” one shot: Kraven becomes a mass murderer that makes everything worse forever. Several sequences existing solely to pay homage to what came before.

And, to be fair, DeMatteis does play some of these tricks. But he doesn’t embrace nostalgia. Consider the one direct reference to the original six issues DeMatteis makes. The comic’s core premise is that, shortly after escaping from the grave, Peter crashes out due to the sheer mental stress of everything that occurred. As a result, Kraven realizes that he’s been a bastard and tries to do right as a sort of bastard version of Spider-Man. People, surprisingly, are on board for this. Meanwhile, Peter is in the hospital, healing from the sheer weight of it all. But there’s someone else at the hospital, waiting. The symbiote, at the time of Kraven’s Last Hunt, had yet to bond with Eddie Brock. As such, it does so with Peter Parker, feeding into his worst instincts and fragile mental state to become a hulking monster version of Spider-Man. They escape and return to Kraven. They descend, much as they did at the end of the fourth chapter of Kraven’s Last Hunt to confront the hunter. The homage, then, is an act of monstrosity. Where in the initial comic, it was the buildup to the final confrontation between fallen hero and triumphant villain, here there are no heroes available. Just two men consumed by monstrosity.

This is a core theme of DeMatteis that is enlivened within the pages of this What If. One loose thread DeMatteis pulls at is the character of Vermin, a tragic figure who recured throughout DeMatteis’ larger run. Kraven, initially seeing the lad as nothing more than a monster, kills him with no hesitation. In doing so, the boy reveals himself to be another victim in the cruel world we find ourselves within, deserving of just as much humanity as anyone else. The folly of Kraven is an inability to see anyone as a person, to see monsters everywhere. This is the approach Kraven takes in being Spider-Man. A hero who slays monsters.

But in the telling of the story, in the form DeMatteis does, he subverts the logic of Kraven himself. Kraven, even by his own admission, is a monstrous man. One capable of great horror and cruelty. But DeMatteis’ pen gives us a great degree of empathy for the hunter. We can witness, in his own words, who he sees himself as, even as the images paint a slightly different picture. Not contradictory, but revelatory. Able to behold the full scope of the man. We see the world outside of Kraven’s perception (even getting a small degree of confirmation regarding a subtext within the original story left unpulled regarding a certain journalist’s knowledge of Peter Parker’s identity), and through it, we understand the contradictory nature of Kraven the Hunter all the more.

It is worth engaging with the artistic stylings of Yildiray Çinar. Çinar has been a regular fixture within the comics industry since the early 2000s. His most acclaimed work has been his collaboration with Al Ewing on X-Men Red. And he’s rather good at it. It’s hard to live up to the sheer horror presented within Mike Zeck’s initial figure work, but Çinar nevertheless finds himself capable of living up to the challenge.

The key talent within the context of this What If is the shape eyes make throughout. Consider the initial sequence of Kraven discovering Peter’s true self at the start of the comic. The three panel sequence (aided by a small narration box by DeMatteis) starts with an imposing shot of Kraven from below, his eyes clearly demonstrating a sheer fury at the monster before him. The next panel moves in closer to Kraven’s face, his eyes softening. The final panel of the sequence is a close up of that face, his eyes completely horrified over what he’s done.

More interestingly is Çinar’s use of panel borders. Drawing from Zeck, multiple panels throughout the comic include distinctive panel borders to highlight the violence on display. Be it Kraven murder of Vermin being depicted solely through a close up of Kraven’s eye, a SNAKT sound effect, and a jagged panel border or the alien symbiote lingering within the gutters, attempting to make passage within to infect Peter with its cruelty, Peter’s eyes constantly screaming for help.

Equally, there’s the coloring from Alex Sinclair. An often derided colorist, Sinclair reveals his skills when working in a more muted color pallet Janet Jackson provided, emphasizing the sunken eyes of Peter Parker through grayscale, muddy splotches. Letterer VC’s Joe Caramagna, meanwhile, captures the tone of Rick Parker’s initial letters.

Through it all, we’re presented with the fullness of another life, even as its snuffed out completely(?) by the end. We end, much like with Soul of the Hunter, with Peter and MJ musing about the nature of what has occurred. As before, MJ has a somewhat more cynical (or, perhaps more accurately, less romantic) take on the events. Peter, meanwhile, decides to give the villain a degree of grace. “He died to save me, MJ” he notes, “And to spare other people of the agony of being bonded to that…thing. That’s what I choose to believe. That’s what I’ll go on believing.” In the end, he provides Kraven a degree of grace.

The same could be said of DeMatteis. DeMatteis closes the book on Kraven the Hunter a hero. A complicated man with more vices than virtues, but someone who desired to do the right thing by the end. Moreover, someone who was given the option to shirk his responsibilities, but chose instead to embrace them, even at the cost of his own life. This is, after all, the heart of heroism within the context of Spider-Man comics: what “With great power there must also come great responsibility” truly means.

This was an element I struggled with for some time when it came to Spider-Man. The phrase felt a bit too pat and tacked on, without any true meaning to the story of Spider-Man. It wasn’t until a few years back, that I finally understood via, in Will Graham’s words, a negative. About a month after I concluded my Fearful Symmetry project, DC Comics released an event comic called Heroes in Crisis. Infamous for a number of reasons, Heroes in Crisis ends with the Flash being revealed to being a murderer. The moral of the comic is that you can’t undo the past, can’t undo the harm. But you have to work to make things better. Killing yourself isn’t a solution. The comic itself is a bit of a mess, but I rather liked the morality at the end. It feels earned, albeit messily, to what came before. The comic overall feels like a wet fart for a number of reasons I won’t get into here (though I may change my mind should I reread it), but the ending tracks.

Most comic fans were not happy with the ending of the Flash being arrested for murder, so it was undone, as so many comics are often undone after fan outcry (indeed, One More Day is the rare exception to this form of outcry). In truth, I experience Flash comics through friends rather than on my own. He’s simply a character I never fully gravitated towards. He’s fine, but not my thing. But something began to nag at me upon seeing the way Flash being a murderer was being undone. Over the course of a few years (including a brief dalliance with the Flash becoming the new Dr. Manhattan, as if that was a thing anyone wanted), Heroes in Crisis was undone. The Flash had not, in fact done anything wrong. It was three or four completely unrelated forces.

In superhero comics, I can accept mind control, frame jobs, even things being undone via time travel. But doing all three at once simultaneously by multiple different people feels like hack work. And, because fans love to compare any young adult male superhero to Spider-Man, it got me thinking. There was something about all of this that felt wrong, wrong in a way beyond being bad comics made by hacks, and wrong in a way understandable through Spider-Man comics.

It took me a bit to click the full nature of Spider-Man and responsibility. About that old comic where Peter Parker doesn’t stop a robber, resulting in Ben Parker dying. I thought of Oppenheimer, creator of the atomic bomb, raddled with guilt over what he had done. I thought about the movies, about my good friend David Mann’s own thoughts on the character. I thought of Ben Sisko, who says he can live with it, but is never shown to do so. Never forced to face the music of what he had done.

Spider-Man comics, at their best, are about the need to face the music. To accept what you have done and work to do better. It is about change, about growth and becoming something new. And that means you have to face the music and accept the responsibility of what you have done. The tragedy of Kraven the Hunter, then, is of a man forever trapped in one moment. One fatal sin that he can never undo, save, in his mind, by dying. Kraven the Hunter will never be allowed to survive the events of his most famous story.

He won’t let himself.

“But here begins a new account, the account of a man’s gradual renewal, the account of his gradual regeneration, his gradual transition from one world to another, his acquaintance with a new, hitherto completely unknown reality. It might make the subject of a new story—but our present story is ended.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866 (tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2021)

The End.

07/13/2017-07/27/2026

[Photos: The Guys With the Best Match Directed by Ryuta Tasaki Wirtten by Shogo Muto, The Future Directed by Ki-Yong Bae and Jinhui Park Written by Lamar Abrams and Miki Brewster]

Long ago in an American autumn.