2012 Was A Bad Year To Be Spider-Man (Spoilers)

I grew up in something of an unpleasant household. If you've ever seen the movie Ordinary People, it's not entirely dissimilar. My mom was full of fake emotions and cold smiles, her live-in boyfriend is a total goddamned tool (and looks like Richard Belzer) and I was stuck there, in that. One of the only ways out was reading comics.

The first one I fell for was Spider-Man sometime in the early nineties right before the big comic book boom. Superman flew, which wasn't very realistic. Batman, though cool, wasn't as cool without powers. Spider-Man was something of a happy medium. He swung around, did amazing feats of gymnastics, ran his mouth at the villain of the month and could lift a car over his head. Sounds good.

I think my first issue was Spectacular Spider-Man #180 which was part of the relentlessly dark Child Within storyline. But despite the fact I was introduced to the wise-cracking wall crawler during a story with such light topics as child abuse, neglect and adulthood guilt - I fell in love with the character and how he moved through the plot. He swung around the city worried about the rest of his life, not unlike how I got around school worrying about home. He was always outmatched by the villains but always walked away, I'd scrap through some fight in the locker room and still make it home. We had similarities.

I read all the Spider-Man comics that came out then. My favorite was either "Amazing" or "Spectacular" depending on the storyline, with the generic "Spider-Man" title in third and the rather blasé "Web Of" title a distant fourth. It was a lot to juggle but thankfully my grandfather adored taking me to the comic shop every week. I have many very strong memories of swinging by T&S Comics and Cards and Dream Factory back in those days.

I ran with Spider-Man until about 1999, so it was a good eight years of my life. I picked up a lot of back issues and trade paperbacks. There was a point that I could tell you the writer and artist on any issue if you told me the title and issue number. My favorite artists was Sal Buschema; when I wanted to be a comic artist his Spidey art was probably my biggest influence along with Bruce Timm's designs on Batman: The Animated Series. I don't draw much anymore, but when I do, those thick blacks and square jaws come out all over again.

A couple years after high school, the first of the Raimi movies came out and I fell hard all over again. The first film (and very, very much the superior second) were goddamned love-letters to the fans. It was as if Raimi went into my brain and pulled out everything right and pure and wrapped it up to hand it to me. "This is for you," he said to me, in a way, not really, but sort of, "everyone will love it but only you will understand it completely."

Arrogant of me? Yes. But that is how deeply those three films spoke to me. I'm not some genius that sees them for what they are and no one else does - but my appreciation may run deeper than most.

This last movie, directed by Marc Webb, was a boring attempt to out tween all the bad supernatural romantic adventures of late. Think of Twilight, swap out the vampirism with spider-powers and you get the jist. However, in the making of the movie, they forgot it was about Spider-Man and not about Peter Parker having a severe case of Aspergers. The film is less about being heroic (and indeed does many unheroic things) and more about someone who is both somehow nerdy and attractively edgy, managing to get a girl (Emma Stone, the one bright spot in a flaccid film) he has no right to deserve because all he does is emotionally take advantage of her. (If you don't believe that last part, the movie ends with him saying "I can't see you anymore" and then 2 minutes later with "But I can't keep that promise" which is way too many mixed signals for anyone, let alone a teenager!, to decipher without an Enigma Machine)

It's obvious that the producers (the same people from the Raimi years) wanted to go left where Raimi went right. The Raimi movies were about heroics and responsibility and proper Horatio Alger themes: Peter gains his powers by accident, loses who he is to them, regains himself when he loses his Uncle to his own inaction and then has many other adventures (Note to self: Spider-Man 2 is more of an origin story than the first one. Make separate entry about just that.). There is also a light/dark segregate father dynamic (Norman Osborne versus Uncle Ben), the legacy of a family line (Harry vows vengeance against Spider-Man, Peter vows against vengeance by being Spider-Man) and all sorts of undercurrents and glimpses of understanding as to why the character has lasted as long as he has. Its almost a Hercules tale: the man with incredible strength and powers is only as heroic as his smallest deeds. After all, Spider-Man lays Norman Osborne to rest in his own highrise apartment.

The most recent film unbinds these ideas entirely. It is actively unheroic. The one example needed is how they handle Uncle Ben's death. In the original 2002 film, Peter watches his uncle die and in a fit of rage, chases the killer to a warehouse where he punches him repeatedly out of grief. In the new film, after Uncle Ben is shot, Parker dons a disguise and runs around New York for nights on end against blonde men who vaguely look like the one who killed his uncle.

The 2002 movie was a crime of passion.
The 2012 movie was an act of unheroic vengeance, willfully acting out for a long stretch of time (days? weeks?) against people of a certain stereotype.

That isn't heroic at all. That isn't Spider-Man.

And now for Amazing Spider-Man 700, where the nefarious Doctor Octopus has switched brains with Peter Parker. Thats right, old Doc Ock is now Spider-Man. I'm not sure why someone thought this was a good idea but I suppose the logic was it didn't sound quite as stupid as the Clone Saga? But the kicker is that Doctor Octopus (now seen as Spider-Man) kills Spider-Man. Well, everyone in New York sees it as Spider-Man killing Doctor Octopus but you get my point.

First off, thats all sorts of ugly. Spider-Man isn't The Punisher; he doesn't kill people and as evil as Doc Ock has been, he's never been much for murder either. He was more of a Mad Scientist type, so he was slightly more cerebral than, oh, The Joker or Sin-Eater or whatever. He was always more interested in making his evil plot work than filling body bags.

But the real point to be made here is this: as a plot, no one would care, but it is probably the worst and most terrible way to end a title after all these years.Your (real) hero dies. The villain wins and impersonates your hero and blah blah blah.

Now we all know this won't last. Peter Parker will come back by some horrible story plot with magic or Thanos or zombies or whatever the flavor of the month is. But did they have to can the book too? Look at the note they're ending the legacy on. Issue 700 is what closes out the title after over 40 years of running and was often Marvel's flagship book and it all amounts to a giant middle finger.

And I take it personally. I have to. I've invested a lot of my own identification (by proxy) in the rights and wrongs and trials of this character. I don't go so far as to say these people are the be-all, end-all and they're ruining the character forever but I do think they're harming it a great deal and pushing the character too far from its center construct. I do think another push this hard would end up making old Web-Head into something near unrecognizable. And where that character goes, so does a part of me - and I am not that kind of Spider-Man.

(Oh, and just in case it didn't occur to you: that means Spider-Ock is sleeping with Mary Jane which is some form of rape if you give it an even cursory glance. So, thank you Marvel and writer Dan Slott for being creepy. Ew.)