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A "retro" figure from 2008.
After a mission goes wrong, an alternate version of Peter Parker leaves his old life behind to target the Black Ops world as a killer for hire.
Remember all the confusion that abounded during the Hobgoblin saga? Turns out not all of it was "confusion." Tom DeFalco had been the Spider-Editor before Roger Stern left, so of course he knew what the plan for the character was; he just didn't like it, so opted to do something else. DeFalco and his new editor, Christopher Priest, butted heads, and eventually Priest removed the entire creative team from the book. Before that happened, though, Priest directly asked who was planned to be revealed as Hobgoblin, and DeFalco told him it was Daily Bugle reporter Ned Leeds - something he said only because he didn't trust Priest. And what happened next depends entirely on whose version of events you believe.
In late 1986, Marvel released Spider-Man Versus Wolverine, a one-shot
written by Christopher Priest that saw Peter Parker being sent to Germany with Ned Leeds to cover an international story. While there, Ned Leeds was killed by the KGB for being too nosy, an event which messed Pete up and left him emotionally vulnerable. It's a good comic, and is a turning point in the romance between Peter and MJ, so it also became the subject for What If? Spider-Man Vs. Wolverine.
On Earth-8351, Peter doesn't return home to New York immediately after the events of the comic, but instead stays in Europe to help
Wolverine tie up some loose ends - Logan felt bad about everything that had happened, and honestly thought this would give Spider-Man some closure. Even after that was done, Spidey still didn't go home, instead starting to train as a spy and operative. He adopted a new, darker costume (that honestly seems to owe a lot to the David A. Williams sketch that inspired Alex Ross's proposed movie costume) that features a black suit with a red section on the chest and neck, and an extra-stylized spider on the front and back. There are red bands around the wrist, and a thin line at the waist that matches the shape his original belt would have had. His mask has no webs, just small black lenses.
The sculpt of the toy is fine, but there are engineering problems that drag it down. The work obviously began with the Retro Collection body, though the pelvis had to be new because this costume has pockets on the waist. Apparently taking the complaints about that sculpt's weirdly narrow hips to heart, Hasbro's also had their sculptor make new ones, but unfortunately they're extremely too wide, sticking way out
from the body and leaving giant gaps. And it is just down to the constuction of the figure: some people have tried simply swapping in the hips - not the waist, not the thighs, literally just the hip section of the legs - from Black Panther, and not only do they look better, they have a better range of motion. How do you mess that up, Hasbro, and how do you charge us $25 for your mistakes? And that's not even to mention this body still has the barbell head instead of a balljoint/hinge, so he'll never be able to adequately move his head up; a notch in the back of the neck can only accomplish so much. Hope you weren't planning to pose him in a crouch and still have him looking forward or anything.
The other mistake is one of art-direction. Being involved in the world of black ops, Spider-Man became more deadly, willing to kill his enemies if he had to. To that end, he had guns installed in his
webshooters, able to fire them with a specific gesture same as he'd fire his webs. In fact, that's where this toy's name, "Spider-Shot," comes from (he was in the Spider-Verse crossover, and was referred to as "Assassin Spider-Man"). The figure includes new hands with two fingers out in a "gun" pose, and two small yellow blasts that can plug in. Unfortunately, whoever art-directed this okayed the sculptor making it so the muzzle flashes plug in between the fingers and thumb, rather than having them come out of the wrist like they should.
To hear Christopher Priest tell it, he was blindsided by Tom DeFalco's declaration that Hobgoblin was going to be Ned Leeds.
According to Peter David (who was tasked with cleaning up the mess), the story where Ned dies was written specifically to mess with DeFalco - sort of a "oh, you were planning to do X? Well now you can't, ha ha" thing - and Priest kept the crossover book a secret until it was already drawn and ready to be printed. In David's version of events, the timeline goes: Priest asks who Hobgoblin is going to be, DeFalco gives a fake answer because he doesn't trust Priest, Priest tries to undermine DeFalco by killing that character off pre-emptively, then ends up firing him from the book anyway before any of that hard work needed to be done, Peter David is brought in to write the wrap-up and make it all make sense. All of which makes Christopher Priest seem like a real vindictive jerk.
But if you think about it, that doesn't necessarily add up. If Priest had done this to purposefully make work harder for DeFalco, why fire him before any of that work had to be done? Why then hire someone to write the same ending he believed DeFalco had in mind, rather than
something new and different, since he could now do whatever he wanted?
When he was Editor-In-Chief in the 1980s, Jim Shooter rightly decreed that writers could no longer be editors on their own books. Since Christopher Priest was writing the Wolverine/Spider-Man crossover, he couldn't edit it, and so that fell to the X-Offices. As Spider-Editor, he didn't need to worry about getting permission for anything he decided to have happen to Spider-Man-adjacent characters in the story (if you read it, you'll see the only people who undergo any kind of changes are new introductions or ones Peter knows, not Logan or the X-Men), but the book just had to be overseen by someone else. So yes, it's entirely possible he never told any of the Spidey team about it, because it wasn't a Spider-Man book, and as the editor of the line, he'd be able to head off any continuity conflicts. So he writes a story in which Ned Leeds is killed, and that story is off in the X-Offices being worked on.
When he then asks Tom DeFalco about Hobgoblin's identity, Tom, for whatever reason, throws out Ned's name, which legitimately catches Priest off-guard, just like he says it did. But Priest knows Ned won't work, and so tries to get DeFalco to change it; DeFalco refuses (because it wasn't the real answer anyway), and since they are obviously having trouble working together,
Priest fires him from the title just before the issue comes out. He takes Peter David out to lunch not to ask him write a new story, but to finish DeFalco's as best he could. Today, David tells this series of events as a "Chris did this to piss off Tom" thing, but he (like many of us) has a tendency to remember things more kindly in his friends' favor and holds a grudge like nobody's business, and it's clear whose side he's on in this one. In a later interview, Tom DeFalco and Peter David even blamed Christopher Priest for Ned Leeds being named as Hobgoblin! Bitch, the only thing that's his fault is asking a direct question of someone who worked for him and believing the answer they gave him was the truth! Wow, what a stuck-up fool he must be, right? Really, a lot of the blame hinges on whether Spider-Man Versus Wolverine was written before or after the story conference where DeFalco told everyone he was going to make it be Ned, and we have no way of knowing that.
Considering the story that ultimately gave birth to this character is rooted in such a confusing mess, it's somewhat appropriate that the figure is a mess, as well. Spider-Shot could have been an interesting oddity, a fun addition to a Spider-Verse display, but weird choices made in production mean it's really not worth grabbing off the shelf, unless you find it on a deep, deep discount, and plan to leave it hidden behind better toys that will help conceal its flaws.
-- 07/15/24
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