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For those who read the Greg Rucka/Eduardo Risso one-shot in tangled web, check this out:
 Bad things happen as a matter of course when a company pollutes the water, and people get sick. When one of those people however, happens to be Martha Conners, the wife of Dr. Curt Conners, you can bet that the bad things that are going to happen are going to come at the hands of the Lizard.
That’s roughly the idea behind writer Greg Rucka and artist Scott Sava’s four-issue miniseries, Spider-Man: Yith. The project, set to debut in April or May, is part of Marvel’s already large and growing line-up of Spidey projects with a different looks and voices designed so there is something on the stand for every reader in time for the release of the Spider-Man film in May. In addition to Yith, that line-up already includes story arcs in the three ongoing series to coincide with the film, Spider-Man: Blue by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, the movie adaptation by Stan Lee and Alan Davis, and rumored various one-shots by big-name creators and a Brian Bendis-written Ultimate Spider-Man special illustrated by an undisclosed by purportedly “huge” art team.
“Dr. Curt Conners’ wife Martha has cancer, and he believes she got it because of a company that has been doing work in the Florida Everglades, and has been releasing runoff close to where they live,” Rucka explained of is and Sava’s project. “That means that not only does his wife have cancer, his son, Billy may have it as well. The only rationale he can have for not getting it himself is the experimentation he did to himself long ago, which resulted in him becoming the Lizard. So, Conners is trying to redress the corporation responsible, and of course they don’t want anything to do with the problem, and Peter Parker gets caught in the middle.”
With the Lizard figuratively banging on the company’s door, there’s only one way out – call a specialized troubleshooter, and no, it’s not Erin Brockavich. “The company in question – they’re not stupid,” Rucka said. “They bring in an appropriately large gun to handle the problem, in the shape of an individual named Yith. And no, I’m not saying anything else about Yith.”
Safe enough to say though, if the company thinks Yith can handle both the Lizard and Spider-Man, it must be one bad dude.
In writing Spider-Man: Yith however, Rucka found himself caught in the web originally spun by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko – while he is one of Spider-Man’s oldest foes, the Lizard is not a bad guy. “The one thing that I do consistently is try to find the pathos in my bad guy, and as soon as I find the pathos, it’s hard for them to be the bad guy,” Rucka said. Conner’s has always been at his worst, a reluctant ‘villain,’ so what you have here is Curt Conners being pushed to an extreme action, and the action itself is not rational, but the motivation behind it is.”
As for Rucka’s artistic partner, while his name may not be familiar to current comic readers, Scott Sava’s career has followed a similar arc to other artists currently finding work in comics: Sava originally entered comics primarily as a painter in the early ‘90s, painting for companies such as Malibu, DC, Marvel, Blackout, and Wizards of the Coast. Sava left comics and headed into animation, finding success, and landing gigs working on the Casper movies, the animated Spider-Man series, Power Rangers, and Eerie, Indiana.
Leaving his 2-D painting behind, Sava now illustrates in computer-aided 3-D, resulting in some fairly unique looking art, as can be seen in his recently release through Astonish Comics, The Lab. “Basically Scott creates, on computer, full, 3-D models of everything in the book, and then we can sit there and rotate, mutilate, change angle, shift pieces, and so on and so forth,” Rucka explained. “As a result, it’s going to look very different. It’s going be very visually different – his art adds a wild, sort of animation style. Scott’s already completed a seven-page ‘cold-open’ sequence with Spider-Man and Doc Ock – a chase sequence. The animation style and sense of it is amazing…there’s one page that, as it stands right now, looks like if you literally cut out the panels and stapled them together, and flipped them, it would be seamless. It’s pretty cool, and the finished project should have a very unique look on the stands.” |
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