Ron Frenz has recently visited with an old wall-crawling friend and helped bring the adventures of a newer hero to life.







Whether re-teaming with longtime collaborator Tom DeFalco to tell a new story of Peter Parker or helping Darin Henry to build the Sitcomics superhero universe, Frenz crafts stories that celebrate comics' halcyon days.







As part of Marvel's 80th-anniversary celebration, the publisher is releasing a series of one-shots reuniting fan-favorite creators with iconic characters. Frenz and DeFalco tell a story titled "With No Power!" as a back-up feature in "The Sensational Spider-Man: Self-Improvement." The lead sees Peter David and Rick Leonardi bringing to life Spider-fan's Randy Schueller's original proposal for a black-costumed Spider-Man to life.







"DeFalco and I were offered the lead feature for 'Self-Improvement' and we thought about it and discussed it for a day or so. What we decided is that there was no way to do it that wasn't just rewriting what was already there completely. The reason these plots were not turned into a story back in the 80s was that Tom DeFalco (as editor) wasn't able to get Randy Schueller to the point that it was a self-contained story that served a function or told you anything about Pete."







"If you look at what Peter David ended up doing with it, he took the bare bones of what was proposed by Randy and turned it into a story with a beginning, a middle and an end with a throughline. By adding Firebrand and the ex-wife and the kid, he was able to take all of these elements and shape them into something. It really was a story by Peter David based on an idea by Randy Schueller, and Tom and I were less comfortable with doing that. I think Peter David and Rick Leonardi did a terrific job with what they were given."







While Schueller was the first to propose the black suit, it differed significantly—in both in-story creation and overall design—from what Jim Shooter, Mike Zeck and Leonardi developed for "Secret Wars."







"The only thing I regret in not doing it, I was really hoping the entire time that I was waiting for this to be presented, that they were not going to show Randy Schueller's costume as the black and white Secret Wars costume because all that does is confuse the marketplace even more that Randy created that suit. I would have stuck a lot more closely to what Randy's description was of the suit, which is very different from the Secret Wars suit. They kind of split the difference. I would have done something a little different to completely divorce it from the idea that seems to go around every five years that somehow Randy Schueller invented the black suit that became Venom and Marvel only paid him $220 dollars for it. I just get exhausted when that comes around."







DeFalco and Frenz were then offered a 10-page Spider-Man story, though they were not initially sure in which comic it would be published.







"I remember contacting editor Nick Lowe when we knew we would be presented as the back-up in this issue and asking, 'If this is going to be in the "Self-Improvement" one-shot, do you want Spider-Man in the black costume?' He said, 'Nope, just do a classic Spider-Man.' 'OK, even better.'







"We had worked with him before when we did the Spider-Girl back-ups on the last Secret Wars. He was aware of how we work and pretty much stands back a lets us do it. He's a terrific editor who keeps a close eye on every facet of production, and I got to see his editorial notes on Tom's script, and they were all succinct and perceptive, and even his notes on the coloring were really impressive. I enjoy working with the gentlemen, and hope to do it again at some point."







Following the shifts in status quo that had defined much of Dan Slott's years-long run on "Amazing Spider-Man," Frenz and DeFalco wanted to get back to basics.







"We tried to take the 10 pages, and as we often do whether its 20 pages or five pages or a six-issue arc and tell you something about the character. After where Peter has been for a while being Tony Stark for a while with Parker Industries, we did think it was a nice moment in time to remind people what we think is the core of Peter Parker, which is just a guy who puts on this goofy suit and goes out every night trying to make up for the biggest mistake of his life.







"One of the things that I have always felt to be an intrinsic part of Peter is his loneliness, his isolation in having this experience. Not just the experience, because if he's hanging around with the Avengers, they've all had experiences like that, but that it is so personal for him because of the connection to Uncle Ben and the mistake that he made. I always felt that even when he was married to Mary Jane, and they were as healthy a couple as you could muster, that is something that even somebody who loves you very deeply can't completely relate to. Any time we've touched on it when handling the character, it is something that moves me very deeply.







"We wanted the arc of the 10 pages to be that he starts out as happy-go-lucky Spider-Man, loving his life and helping people, and then through the course of those pages you get to the final panel and he is reminded that this isn't a game. People are out there making hard choices all the time, and he knows this because he is making one every time he puts on the suit and tries to make up for his mistake. It could be considered a downer ending, but we thought it was a point worth making when given this opportunity."







In a story that sees Peter interacting with a situation that parallels his own background, Uncle Ben's famous quote, "With great power, there must also come great responsibility" looms large. The "must also" is often dropped, whether on Marvel collector coins or Sam Raimi's film, a change that is one of Frenz's pet peeves.







"Interestingly enough, Tom put 'should also' in his script, and it was one of the things Nick Lowe called him on, 'Are we sure we want to do something different with this?,' and Tom stood his ground, and Nick let it go through. It was obviously something that was deliberate and Tom wanted to make the point.







"I recently did a Facebook post about it, and it was interesting to see everybody's different reactions to it. Some people never noticed, there are some people who resolutely don't feel that those two words make any difference in the statement at all, which without getting personal, I find absurd because words mean stuff, so if you put two different words into a sentence, it does change the meaning, albeit subtly. In one, the situation brings the responsibility, and in 'must also,' it is calling on the person to bring the responsibility to the table. The world is full of people with great power who don't show any responsibility in wielding it.







"To just say that with great power, comes great responsibility, OK, but that doesn't mean you wield it with responsibility. The lesson that Peter learned with the death of Uncle Ben is that with great power, must also come great responsibility or you are going to have terrible things like this happen, and if you're a decent person or a person at all, and you don't want these things to happen, you must show responsibility."







While the Spider-Man story was a one-off assignment, Frenz has been staying busy working on "The Blue Baron" and doing character design for emerging publisher Sitcomics, the brainchild of Darin Henry, a TV writer, and producer who credits range from "Seinfeld" to various Disney Channel programs including "K.C. Undercover."







"Darin is a child of 70s Marvel, and he initially contacted Sal (Buscema) about penciling it. And Sal at that point had pretty much given up on penciling. He didn't enjoy penciling stories. He didn't enjoy the blank page. We had just wrapped up our run on Spider-Girl, and Sal told him, 'I don't pencil anymore, but if you get Ron Frenz to pencil it, I would be happy to ink it.'







"I would have been very interested if Sal had accepted penciling it because it wasn't just penciling the first issue, it was designing all of the characters from the ground up. It was a lot of fun working with Darin because he would send all of this disparate reference for any given character—'I'm thinking a mask like this, and a shirt like this. Do you think we could work these boots in?'—just from all over the internet. There was a lot of that work to be done even before I started penciling.







"Once I started penciling, I thumbnailed the job, Darin has written for TV, but had never written for comics, so he was trying to work plot-script. So he wrote a plot, and I thumbnailed the pages, and when he looked at the pages, apparently his brain short-circuited, and wasn't able to now write dialogue for things that were already visualized. As a TV writer, he's used to people working off of his scripts, so he's used to doing the visualization. I ended up re-thumbnailing everything I had done because what we decided to do was, he still writes plots, but he breaks it down almost panel for panel conversationally. That helps keep him involved in the pacing of the story and the treatment of the story. I'm free to handle the visuals however I choose, and I will occasionally combine panels if I feel it is called for or I'm able to, but it keeps his natural rhythm, so he's able to script it easier.







"If Sal had been the penciler on that, Sal doesn't do thumbnails, he would have just penciled those pages, and Darin would have had to have dealt with that, so it would have been a very different animal one way or another. That's not even to count that the characters would have looked different, and probably better, if Sal would have designed them."







While Sitcomics has a variety of humor titles, the shared hero universe are classic superhero tropes with sitcom twists. To that effect, while The Blue Baron is the leader of the Heroes Union, and has the superhero starter pack of flight, super strength, super speed and near invulnerability, the book sees him currently in a "Freaky Friday" body swap situation with 13-year-old Ernie Rodriguez.







"I was happy to get in on the ground floor with him. I like that he's doing family-friendly comics and that he's trying to think outside the box and have fun with these types of concepts again, instead of doing some darker version of a superhero world.







"I like that each book has a different approach and a different voice. He's now starting to work with different writers. Todd DeZago is working with him on Startup. The project I'm working on right now is Heroes Union—which is basically the Justice League, with Blue Baron and the rest of the other heroes—and this one is placed before 'Blue Baron' #1, so it's the real Blue Baron in his own body, leading the team. It's co-plotted and scripted by Roger Stern. There's a lot going on in the Sitcomics Universe for people who are fans of 70s and 80s Marvel, and want to check out something that is not as dark and dreary and deadly as some of the stuff going on now."







While the universe is still unfolding through the books, Henry has the backstory of the world laid out and is gradually filling readers in on the heroes' past.







"He's keeping a close eye on the bricks of his shared universe. A lot of things haven't been done in sequence because of how the books were launched. There are flashbacks in the first issue of 'Blue Baron' to the end of this Cosmic Crusade, which is where they pick up the energy being who is part and parcel of the body swap between him and Ernie.







"It's really solid storytelling. The characters are fleshed out for me, and I'm enjoying getting to know them, and I enjoy visiting with them. No villain is a throwaway because we'll be touching back with them, but like Control Freak in issue 2 has such a distinct voice, and there is a background suggested for him. Darin is able to do all of this in dialogue because he is a professional writer and a TV producer.









"Where 'Blue Baron' is omniscient narrator when there's a narrative at all, 'Startup' is first-person narrative and I was fascinated with the fact that he has a largely-unseen third-person narrator in 'Headhunter.' It just works incredibly well, and keeps you very engaged."





Frenz has not only been designing the heroes for his own book but works with Henry to design all of the heroes and villains in the universe.







"When we were working on the original contracts, what I wanted was something that would be similar to what I would get at Marvel. Any character that I design, if that character is licensed outside of the publishing, I would get some small percentage. If there is ever a line of action figures not made by Darin himself, if these characters are licensed out for other things, whether it's TV, movies, whatever, I would like some small percentage.







"What that also turned into was also me designing characters for other people's books. That way he's kind of keeping it all in-house. Instead of having to share that type of arrangement with each of the artists, he comes to me with new characters even if they aren't for my book, with that same process of character description, their powers and the disparate design elements that we try to mash all together. It is a wonderful creative challenge."







Frenz is confident that as more readers discover these adventures—available for download on the Sitcomics website and as 64-page Binge Books in select comic shops—the quality of the stories and the enthusiasm of the creators creating them will help build the audience.







"I've always believed that that was one of the things DeFalco and I had going for us. If you are genuinely enjoying the work, then it can't help but come through on the page. That is also true of the Sitcomics, all the better because there is a lot of fun to be had."