Ock's Garden

by Mebreb

After his suit is sabotaged by his employer, Otto depends on him for money and disposable air filters only his company provides, but Otto revolts with plans for an underwater paradise suited to his condition; meanwhile, Peter Parker, who has a personal relationship with Otto, plans on catching him, but is troubled by what to do with him once he's caught.

I have long considered publishing a story centered around comic book characters outside of adaptions and cartoons, and I had quite a few ideas, as always - one in which Batman and Superman sit down for a potluck dinner and discuss the efficacy of superheroics, another in which them and Spider-Man all lived in the same cit(y/ies), a story in which Kamala Khan is taken under the wing of Black Mariah, and a total rewrite of the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl series that has become so different from the source material that I was thinking of making it an "original" (heavy quotes) story. Either way, it was up in the air as to which I would make first.

This is not how I wanted this to happen.

The story was my invention; the piece itself was going to be a collaboration between me and someone else on the same Discord server as me - I really liked his art, he said he liked mine more, and we were both aspiring comic book writers, so he was to write the first draft of a comic using an outline and detailed suggestions I gave him while I started drawing up the designs, maybe storyboard here and there, and we'd both get to work on finishing the draft while I drew up the line art and he inked it. Seemed easy enough. I procrastinated as always and he didn't talk about it at all when I brought it up (among other topics), but it was okay, it was just a rocky start.

Then it turned out he was lying about his age to get on our 18+ server, saying he was 18 a year ago when he was actually 17, but hey, he was eager to grow up and be with people who liked the same things he liked, and it was only one year and he's 18 now, so I let it slide.

Then it came out that none of the art (or very little, if any) he had showed us was his.

This devastated me - still does as I'm writing about it.

Who can I actually trust, now? Sure, he's not the one in charge of line art in our collab, but what if he steals a line from another Spider-Man fanfiction? What if he keeps lying about something completely different? What if he steals my story, posting it elsewhere and claiming it to be entirely his? I can't have any of this.

So now I'm posting it here, in full prose, foreword for chapter one just to get ahead of the curve. I have not read anything written by this collaborator for this project, mostly because he hasn't shared anything with me, but also because doing so would leave me liable to accidentally steal some of his writing (and possibly others') in making my own version of this story - a story I need give credit to no one else for save Ringo Starr, Stan Lee, and Steve Ditko (and let's face it, WAY more people are involved in inspiration than we'd like) though he would still rightfully credit me in continuing his version, if he does intend to finish the five pages he has now.