Marvel partners with USA Today for a Spider-Man project

Another of Marvel's pointless attempts to gain more publicity includes the following project at USA Today:

USA TODAY and Marvel Comics have partnered to provide USA TODAY’s PLAY digital entertainment hub with access to the most popular comic-book characters in the Marvel universe. PLAY will be the exclusive home for the new vertically formatted “Spider-Man TODAY” Infinity Comic series, which runs for 48 weeks beginning June 16 – with new issues dropping every Wednesday. Readers also will be able to dig into 1,000 curated archival Marvel comics ranging from old-school classics to modern favorites.

“USA TODAY is the largest news publisher in the country, and so that's always exciting,” says Marvel’s Spider-Man editor Nick Lowe. “And then you pair them with the greatest comic-book company in the world, Marvel Comics. I mean, that's chocolate and peanut butter, right? It's the best.”

Lowe sees “Spider-Man TODAY” as “the new incarnation of the Spider-Man funnies” by Spidey cocreator Stan Lee and artist John Romita Sr. that ran in newspapers starting back in the 1970s. “This is us trying to take up that baton and run the next part of the race.”

The new series features a “dream team” of artists Al Ewing (“Venom”) and Todd Nauck (“Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man”) bringing to life a story that “will span the entire Marvel universe and is good for fans of all ages,” Lowe says. [...]

Gee, when a left-wing ideologue like Ewing is involved, what's there to look forward to here? Even Lowe's not encouraging. That aside, why do they think a comic strip that wasn't as well written as the mainstay pamphlets is something to emulate? I seem to recall that, in the last few years before it ended, there was a very atrocious story where both Wolverine and Sabretooth turned up, with the latter incomprehensibly searching for the former, and was even willing to threaten Mary Jane Watson if that's what it took to get Spider-Man to reveal Logan's location (which he didn't know). Then Wolverine turned up and both he and Sabretooth knocked themselves out, and soon vanished again. That storyline, coming as it did near the official end of the original newspaper strip 7 years ago, was so insulting to the intellect, mainly because it didn't depict Spidey unleashing a gale of justified anguish at Sabretooth for threatening his wife. Why should this be just Wolvie's battle? That it was made to look almost absurdly comedic only worsened the tale. I couldn't bring myself to continue reading the newspaper strip after that, and besides, if the comics were already tainted by Joe Quesada, it only figures the newspaper strip was too.

So what's the use of turning out another comic strip that could be similar to ran during 1977-2019? Coupled with such awful writers and editors, that's why this is not something to care about, and could be worse than what the newspaper strip wound up being like. They also hint they've prepared comics, digital or otherwise, that're "modern", and that's another red flag they could be foisting some of the worst of the modern era on the readerships, stuff that could've come after Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson's marriage was forcibly annulled. Also, I've never been very impressed with USA Today's overall news coverage, which is little different from J. Jonah Jameson's MO. One more reason it'd be better not to waste time and money on what they now have in store for Spidey. Marvel's done little more than make a business deal with a real life variation on the Daily Bugle.