I decided to get rid of some of my comic books lately, so I found some Spider-Man comics that I didn't want anymore. I had tried to get into Spider-Man, I really had, but for some reason I never saw the appeal.
So I tried to give them one more chance. Most of my Spider-Man comics are from the 1990s, when it wasn't uncommon to have many-parted stories, even ones spanning up to five different series, so that you have to subscribe to five different series just to see how it ends. (Superman comics were really bad about this in the 90s, but Spider-Man apparently did this too.)
So I picked up a standalone comic (Web of Spider-Man 92, September 1992), thinking that I didn't have to worry about not catching up. But somehow, Peter Parker was still bothered, apparently, by something that happened in the last comic (probably in many previous comics). I had seen no indication on the cover that it was continued from the last issue of WOS, or from another series.
And yet I found myself thinking, "Who is Betty and why does she blame him for her husband's death?"
And then I remembered that this had been typical for any modern Spider-Man comics I had seen. Here are my thoughts on the character:
1) The Bold And The Bugbrain: He lives in a daytime drama.
I realized that this was the problem with Spider-Man for me: He always had some shit to deal with. There was always something going on, I was always plunked down in the middle of an ongoing story, and if I recall right, it had been happening since the 1970s (in the comics; I was born in 1991).
And I don't care for this approach to storytelling. I have my own shit to deal with, and now I have to deal with Spider-Man's? I like my peaceful life; why would I escape into one filled with interpersonal drama?
Sometimes his personal problems are related to his villains, sometimes they are not. And while superpowers, insanity, and accidents that drive people to evil corruption can sometimes make things much more interesting, underneath it all, it's still drama. With a big enough budget and a long enough run time, any soap opera series would go into every one of these plotlines. It's a glorified super-powered soap opera.
2) The count of his friends can rival Game Of Thrones (and it's just as bloody and complicated).
What made the Winter Soldier storyline, in both the movie and the Captain America comic books, so addictive, wonderful, and heart-wrenching was the fact that it was Bucky who was corrupted. Bucky, Cap's sidekick from the beginning--the very beginning in 1942! This was a rare storyline to pursue for Cap, and it had so much history behind it.
It became great, because Captain America was treated like Spider-Man--only they did it rarely, and with so recognizable a character. Imagine if Uncle Ben came back from the dead as a brainwashed assassin that Spidey had to fight. Or Aunt May gets brainwashed, because that's actually someone we know better. How awesome would that be?
And yet Spider-Man has SO MANY friends, that it becomes hard to keep track of them all, or to care about any of them.
3) Flash Thompson was not a bully, he was preserving his own soul.
And when they're not being killed or kidnapped, they're turning evil at alarming rates. Doc Ock, the Lizard, Norman Osborn, Harry Osborn, even the parasitic alien goo that comprises half of Venom--I am not even a Spider-fan, and I could name five off the top of my head! Even if you're living tar from outer space, the minute you befriend Peter Parker is the first step in your downward spiral into madness, your first handshake the dreadful sign of your inevitable and inescapable corruption.
Flash was perhaps afraid to get close to him, and perhaps he was onto something. He knew that Peter was the Horcrux of a tiny, radioactive, eight-legged Voldemort. (Voldemorachnid?) I would love to know if the evil spider who bit him had previously murdered Ant Man.
Spider-Man has so much going for him, especially all of the many, MANY silly and colorful villains. He is the Flash of Marvel. I should love him. And I do--when he isn't weighed down by his wife wanting a divorce or his aunt possibly having cancer or him feeling responsible for his girlfriend's death. And I have to go pretty far back to get the purely fun, colorful crimefighting of yesteryear. I think even in the 60s, there was still a bit of drama.
When Harry Osborn became the new Green Goblin, that was a great concept and storyline. But they did that kind of thing too much. Now everyone around him is either going to become a villain, or get mixed up with one.
4) He appeals to a victimhood mentality.
And everyone is inevitably going to get mad at Pete for something that isn't his fault. (He's such a "nice guy," after all.) He's sometimes the avatar for a certain kind of male. The kind of male that the internet first called "nice guys," then called "neckbeards," and now I believe they're called "fuckboys." But whatever you call them, these are the guys (usually young, but they can be into their thirties and beyond) who are always a victim. Something is always happening to them, and it's always someone else' fault.
The most famous and common example is that the women they like "always pick the assholes." (I once misread that phrase, and thought someone was complaining that so many women were literally picking THEIR OWN ASSHOLES, like someone would pick their own nose. I was horrified, for one very long and unpleasant minute.)
Or that the woman they are currently with, is somehow ruining their life, and why can't these women just treat them right, because they're nice guys, after all? Apparently not hitting women is enough in their minds.
Usually, these men are blaming women for either not being attracted to them, or once they are with them, not giving them enough sex or making reasonable requests to help with the children or household tasks.
Spider-Man himself is not a professional victim--he tries to help those who cause him harm, not blame them. But I think he appeals to these types of men, because something is always happening to him that is not his fault. It's always someone else who is evil or reckless with their experiments or carrying their emotions of grief too far. It is very rare that anything is his fault. (And let's be real--do we really expect him to give up fighting crime to spend more time with Mary Jane? MJ is meant to be seen as unreasonable. The only time I really saw any fault with him is when he lied too much in one issue, and learned he had a problem.)
I have personally heard a Spider-Man fan or two describe themselves as a "nice guy" unironically. But Spider-Man sets an excellent example for how to deal with--how to try to help--those who cause you grief through no real fault of their own. Yet the danger is that he's too perfect, and everyone around him is unreasonable. And that "everyone around me is unreasonable" is what fanboys will ultimately take from it.
5) He has a rare mother figure.
He also has a mother figure sometimes mentoring him, which is so rare for a male superhero. Most of the time he has the mindset of trying to take care of the helpless little woman (even when he was a teenager). But occasionally Aunt May dispenses advice which is unintentionally useful in his crimefighting.
I am tired of seeing male superheroes obsessed with their dead fathers. Especially Superman, who never even knew his biological father (his sperm donor), but obsesses over him, even comically arguing and taking advice from a computer simulation of his ghost--but cares nothing for his dead birth mother (egg donor). He never knew her, but he never knew his sperm donor, either. And he constantly shits on his adoptive family by not acknowledging them as his parents, when they raised him from a baby! They weren't abusive or neglectful, so why aren't they his parents?
And there's also Batman, who also seems to worship his father an inordinate amount compared to his mother--and he knew both of them until he was about ten.
So, even though Spider-Man obsesses over Uncle Ben, when Aunt May is still alive and ready to dispense wisdom and good advice, it's refreshing that he has a "mother." And it's very rare in comics that any female would not be a young, pretty love interest (yes, I've heard of those gross movies)--even though he seems to have to take care of her when she should be taking care of him.
(Even when he is still a boy, and she seems elderly but able-bodied--because he has a penis, I guess. And she can cook and clean a large house, but cannot even be a part-time receptionist, because she lost all job skills upon her marriage.)
At least in the beginning, Aunt May played a much bigger role than either Martha Kent or Aunt Harriet. (In the comics, at least--does anyone even remember Aunt Harriet, other than in the 1960s Batman TV show?) I just wish that he would have consistently looked up to her as the mentor figure she could have been, rather than obsessing over one short sentence uttered by his dead uncle. (Because other than that, what do we really know of Uncle Ben, anyway?) Uncle Ben may have been the reason he became Spider-Man, but the living Aunt May should have been the reason that he continued fighting evil.
My relationship with the character of Spider-Man is...complicated. I wish I could just tell him to lighten up, to stop feeling so responsible for taking on other people's drama. Any time he has a simple, angst-free superhero storyline, I gobble that shit up. But unfortunately, that excludes most of his comic book history. I'm limited, basically, to anything done for little kids--though I don't mind terribly, but it would be nice to have grownup storylines without teenage angst. We need a mixture of light and dark, not all dark all the time.
I realize I'm generalizing very much here. I can't read all of the Spider-Man comic books ever published, or even most of them. All of his adventures could be crammed into ten very busy human lifetimes. He's like a friend that I like as a person, but don't like to be around because I don't want to take on his burdens and constant life drama.
I hope for all of our sakes that Spider-Man is allowed to retire his Midas Touch of Evilness when meeting new friends, has a happy marriage, doesn't have to worry about his elderly aunt, and also fights challenging bad guys against insurmountable odds.
Maybe some people actually like that his inner demons make him more "relatable," but it just makes me want to avoid him so that I don't have to hear about his depressing life--while not even being able to help him.
Spidey deserves to be happy for a while, in his personal life. And we deserve to see him happy.
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