Five years after telling "The End" of Spider-Girl, Ron Frenz returns to the character he helped create.







Running as a back-up in the "Spider-Island" Secret Wars mini-series, the daughter of Spider-Man and the MC2 Universe get another hurrah courtesy of Tom DeFalco, Frenz and Sal Buscema.







Spider-Girl returned last October as part of the Spider-Verse event, during which her father was killed in "Amazing Spider-Man" by Dan Slott. The seismic change has given Mayday Parker's creators an extra challenge in returning to the character they guided for 14 years.







"It makes you very uncertain about the ground that should be very familiar. Somebody else has come in and shifted the gravity a bit, so you are coming into territory that should be familiar but there has been this gravitic shift that makes every step feel very tentative," said Frenz.







"May was not the main focus of Spider-Verse, of course. Peter Parker ostensibly was the focus of it. She had this major thing happen to her, and she decides not to take vengeance on Deimos at the end of the story. That was the end of her arc; she made her father proud—the page said so. She goes back to what's left of her house, and her mom's next door, and she saved her dad's costume—which was in the attic, so I don't know how that happened, but that's wonderful. So she throws on the costume and says 'I'm going to call myself Spider-Woman now.'







"When it became apparent in the preview pages that Tom and I were still dealing with the fallout of a teenager losing her father to violence, and dealing with his absence and his legacy, I was a little surprised to see people say, 'Boy, if this is supposed to be eight months later, you'd think she'd be over it by now.'







"That's what we're dealing with here, the specifics of mourning. I lost my dog a year ago, and she was my best friend, and I lost my dad two years ago, all around this time of year, so it's not a fun time for me right now. You still feel it, it's a loss. Different things spark it."







Frenz sees the response from some reflective of current storytelling and reader expectations.







"What's interesting about comics these days—again, I don't want to feel judgmental about it, but everybody loves the comics they grew up on. That's what a good comicbook is to them. That seems to be pretty much the model, and I certainly fall under that definition. The books that I grew up on are the type of books I enjoy, and the type of books that I pretty much always produce.







"I get the impression that characters are more like avatars or video game characters. They go through the motions of the action; they tell the story, and then the emotional fallout is something that is not all that considered. From what I understand, in video games, no one really mourns that prostitute who gets run over in 'Grand Theft Auto.'







"It kind of caught me by surprise because, as the original creators, we did have a few things that we wanted to say about how May would feel about this situation. We also didn't feel that it would be a stretch whether it was three months, two months, eight months or a week that she would still be mourning her father, who she was really close to.







"I've never had a situation like this before where I've had the chance to return to a character that another writer has come in and made major changes to, and make no mistake, this is a major change. It's more than just a costume."







Said costume has generated discussion among fans, some of whom don't like the look of Spider-Man's outfit on Mayday, and have asked Frenz for his thoughts.









"When Tom originally pitched Spider-Girl way back when, his original idea was for her to just wear Pete's costume, and I was the one—because I didn't think it looked all that great—went looking for an alternative and landed on Ben Reilly's costume. So anything else I say may be a bit self-congratulatory. I didn't want to use it to begin with, so no, I wouldn't have returned to it.





"Sal Buscema one time said that when he saw the Ben Reilly costume the first time, he thought it looked more feminine than masculine, so it didn't surprise him at all that it worked on the female figure. So that was kind of cool to find out when he joined us shortly after my run on the book began."







"People who followed May through her two series and the back-ups weren't waiting on her to 'grow up.' They weren't waiting on her to have this change of attitude or this change of life where was going to 'rate her father's costume.' Her journey of self-discovery was very personal and was not a constant reflection of her father. I think it struck people who actually read the character as an inorganic move because no one was waiting on her to make this transition into Spider-Woman, certainly not at 16.







"When you think about it realistically, and I realize that's a silly word to use in a conversation like this, it's one thing to decide to call yourself something else, but unless you have cards printed up or a Facebook page, you're going to be telling people one person at a time. So that's something Tom and I discussed and played with in the course of this thing. She's not going to buy TV time to announce it. Maybe we can satisfy everybody and she can be like Prince, and start going by a spider symbol."







The story focuses on May, with her supporting cast and other MC2 heroes appearing during the adventure.







"Originally one of the riders was that we use Spider-'Woman' and the alternate Uncle Ben as the entree characters, but when we learned that it was a back-up in 'Spider-Island' that what the editor was really leaning towards was a Spider-Girl/Woman story that featured other characters from the MC2 Universe. It is very May-centric, although it does feature as many A-Next characters and May's supporting cast members that we could fit it, but it's only 30 pages, and we actually are trying to tell a story.







"A lot of them will amount to cameos and featured cameos. I can't speak to them all having a line of dialog, but they're all there. The Dream Team, the newer team of A-Next from the mini Tom DeFalco did with Ron Lim, and some of Spider-Girl's back-up characters DarkDevil, Kaine, The Buzz, Raptor. We were able to throw in one or two scenes of the high school cast.







"For the most part in the satellite stories they didn't want us doing anything that would impinge the main story. So mostly no knows there's anything different. I threw a few things in the background, and there's one concession we made to the whole Doomworld scenario that will be apparent in the very first chapter, I think the longtime fans will recognize it pretty quickly.







While the format isn't ideal, Frenz is glad that Marvel is acknowledging MC2 during Secret Wars.







"Five-page chapters isn't the best way to do it because you want to tell a story; you want some action and some character stuff in there. I'm not sure anybody except Tom DeFalco could do that so may be another reason why we got the back-up, because Marvel has very few writers who could even do that," he said laughing.







While Spider-Verse took May's father, it gave her a new uncle, as a Spider-powered Uncle Ben, who lost everything on his world, has come to live in hers.







"What really was difficult about it was that our initial take on Uncle Ben had to be revised. The editor felt aspects had already been dealt with in Spider-Verse, and we didn't have to chew that cud twice. The interactions are there, but now his point of view is slightly altered and the point he is trying to make is slightly different.







"Believe me, if we ever have another chance to do another Mayday series of any kind, Tom and I would both love to dig into what they have established for this new Uncle Ben character. This is a guy who was Spider-Man for a while, Pete got killed, May got killed, so he took Ezekiel up on the offer of going into the bunker. While he's in the bunker, the world is destroyed. This guy must have PTSD out the wazoo. I just think there're a lot of issues that would be a lot of fun to deal with with this guy. You can't expect this guy to be the same Uncle Ben that Pete experienced..







"There are just stories and stories that can be told about something like this. If you stop for a second and say, 'OK, these are comicbook characters, but if this was a real person...' You just have stories for months and months to come. That would be a lot of fun to explore, but I don't think we will have the opportunity since there won't be a world to tell them on."







While DeFalco and Frenz walked a line, leaving doubts about the May Parker in "Spider-Verse Team-Up," this time, it is clear that this is the true MC2.







"I do feel we embraced it a little more as May because we're showing Cafe Indigo and we're showing her school with the regular cast. So as much as in the last 10 pages we were playing devil's advocate and throwing out the fact, 'You know, if this is a story about alternate universes, then this doesn't necessarily have to be our May.' This one weaves a lot more closely to pre-established elements about May, so this one reads a lot more like our Mayday Parker, but under this new situation.







"I think MC2 fans certainly should enjoy it. I went out of my way to make it feel, for the brief time we had, that if you are reading Spider-Island, you will get a taste of what MC2 was all about."







Beyond this story, and keeping busy with commissions, Frenz jokes that he is now a "fulfiller of dreams," helping writers bring their creations to life.







"I'm working with this gentleman out of California, and he's launching a new line of comics called SitComics. Next month, we're going to be doing a bunch of shop appearances in Central Pa. I'm also working for an independent publisher, a woman who's decided to publish her own character down in Memphis. And we're working on a graphic novel for her, that should be debuting at the end of the year.







"I'm the guy when they can't get Sal Buscema that pencils people's long-held dream to publish comicbooks. That's not such a bad place to be. I will always take second fiddle to Sal Buscema."