FRED Entertainment

If we can judge by the publication known as the Newspaper of Record, then comics’ bid for mainstream cultural acceptability is rapidly increasing in momentum. On Sunday, July 11, the cover story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine was devoted to graphic novels, including interviews with Joe Sacco (Palestine), Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), Art Spiegelman (Maus), and Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan) (all of whom will be reviewed in this column eventually; I’m in this criticism business for the long haul) and Alan Moore (about whom I’ve already written a considerable amount). The piece’s author, Charles McGrath, is no less than the former editor of The New York Times Book Review, and he ventured that “it’s not too soon to wonder what the next new thing, the new literary form, might be,” following the decline of the novel. ” It might be comic books,” he said, and although he did condescend to the medium at times, to put it mildly (“and if the highbrows are right, they’re a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit”), it was overall a very positive piece.

Speaking of the Times Book Review, on Sunday, July 18, it ran two pages surveying a wide range of comics in book form, including the first volume of Fantagraphics’ Complete Peanuts (another future Comics in Context topic). (This confirms what I’d long thought: if the Times was ever looking for a comics reviewer, I’d never find out in time to apply.)

And then, on Monday, July 26, the Times‘s business section ran a report from the San Diego Comic-Con, focusing on movies adapted from comics, including an interview with Frank Miller, who is co-directing an film of his own Sin City with filmmaker Robert Rodriguez. The Times noted, “Mr. Miller. . .commands a nearly mythic status among comic book fans as the creator, writer and illustrator of the Sin City series of graphic novels. . . ” Actually, I think it was Miller’s work on Daredevil and Batman that made him “mythic” (see Comics in Context #30, 31 and 34), but never mind! The Times came close enough! This year’s San Diego Con, from what I’ve read, represents further progress in publicly showcasing the movement of material that originated in comics into the cultural mainstream via film and television.

Well, I couldn’t get to the San Diego Con this year (It’s a long story; next year I’ll definitely go ““ I hope.), but maybe I can find some local event celebrating comics that might offer some compensation. Perhaps I can locate another public vehicle for advancing the cultural profile of comics. There was the third annual MoCCA (Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art) Art Fest, which proved to be a great place for renewing contacts with old friends in the comics industry who’ve been dispersed over the years. But is there an event outside the comics world that would pay homage to the medium?

Could this be it? Beginning in June, the Museum of Television & Radio has been staging a retrospective called “Look! Up at the Screen! It’s Superheroes on Television” at both its Manhattan and Beverly Hills locations; the retrospective runs through October 10. This seemed to be good news indeed.

Before many screenings at the Museum, it runs a video clip of actress Candice Bergen asking us if we knew that before the Museum’s founding, over twenty years ago, there was no institution for the preservation and study of America’s cultural heritage of radio and television programs. Hence, the Museum is a pioneer in the serious appreciation of these forms of American popular culture. In their library I’ve watched examples of high art on television (like Ingmar Bergman’s production of Euripides’ The Bacchae for Swedish television, believe it or not) and videos of Museum seminars about prestigious series like The West Wing. But I’ve also viewed videos of Museum seminars on the writing of science fiction for television (with such luminaries as Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and J. Michael Straczynski) and on fantasy genre series including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Shadows, and Xena; Warrior Princess. The Museum thus pays respect even to genres to which cultural arbiters often condescend. In another example, some years back the Museum staged a soap opera retrospective, even publishing a book of academic essays on the subject. It has held retrospectives on animation from Hanna-Barbera, Jay Ward and Cartoon Network; its library holds a colossal supply of Simpsons episodes.

Surely, I thought, the Museum of Television & Radio will treat the superhero genre with the same dignity and scholarly intent that it has bestowed upon so many other television programs and genres. Attending the various programs in this superhero retrospective should provide ample compensation for not making it to San Diego this year.

But it didn’t. Oh, the Museum is providing plenty of material for me to write about over the coming weeks, and I’ve quite enjoyed some of it. But this “Superheroes on Television” went deeply wrong, as you shall see over the course of these next few columns.

MUTANTS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

Arriving at the Museum’s Manhattan building on a Saturday in June, I started out with the daily program called “Superfun for Families,” billed in the retrospective brochure as a “superhero-themed screening appropriate for all ages!” This day the Museum was screening an episode of Goosebumps, based on author R. L. Stine’s series of supernatural tales for children.

This particular show was titled “The Mutant Attacks,” and its protagonist is a boy who reads superhero comics., or, rather, super-villain comics. His favorite comic was “The Masked Mutant,” so presumably the makers of this episode had some awareness of X-Men. The comic’s artwork was in the style of a run-of-the-mill 1990s Image imitation. But they’d missed the main point of X-Men. The Masked Mutant was a villain, and the implication was that mutants are bad guys. And how many comics have villains as the title characters?

As is to be expected, our protagonist was to some extent a walking cliche of a comics fan: he was out of shape and something of a social misfit,. There is an attractive girl who tagged along with him on his adventure, and, of course, she made fun of his interest in comics. But the comics fan did indeed prove to be the episode’s hero.

Initially this episode bored me. Children’s shows aren’t made for adults, of course, but I like to think that the best children’s literature, whether Lewis Carroll or L. Frank Baum or J. K. Rowling, has imaginative and stylistic qualities that will interest adults as well. But as the episode proceeded, it did prove to have points of interest. The premise was intriguingly spooky, reminiscent of Twilight Zone plots: the comics fan sees the Masked Mutant’s headquarters and discovers he is being drawn into the world of the comics.

At times the episode used a special effect to show how reality looked to our protagonist as he was drawn (so to speak) into the world of comics: he saw huge spots before his eyes, meant to suggest the tiny dots formerly used to print colors in four-color comics, so beloved by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. This, of course, is long dated, but demonstrates how the concept of what comics are like, originating in the mid-20th century, has persisted for decades in the popular imagination. Now came the best part of the episode: exploring the Masked Mutant’s headquarters, our protagonist came across his captive, a superhero with the nonsensical name of the Galloping Gazelle, played by Adam West, the television Batman of the 1960s! Here was West again, decades later, still employing his wonderful deadpan delivery to convey an ironic tone that adult viewers would more readily recognize and appreciate than the kids watching the show.

This led to the cleverest bit in the episode. With the Gazelle free, the comics fan attempts to become his new sidekick and tries to keep up with his hero as he athletically makes his way through the Mutant’s lair. But the kid, as noted earlier, is out of shape and soon covered with sweat. The Gazelle, annoyed, advises him (in West’s tones of understated exasperation) to start working out. I found this amusing, taking it not as a cheap shot at the overweight (and the kid was not actually fat), but as an affectionate acknowledgement of reality. Growing up we may identify with the hero’s kid sidekick, going off on exploits with the senior hero. But if we were really going into action, we’d be more like this comics fan than the athletic figure like Robin we imagine ourselves to be.

After a brief tussle with the Masked Mutant, the Gazelle decided he was “too old” for this sort of thing and took his leave. Unfortunately, that was the end of Adam West’s contribution to the episode, and the Goosebumps makers did not cast the villain nearly as well. The Masked Mutant himself simply indulged in hackneyed cackling without a trace of wit.

Unable to overcome the Mutant physically, the comics fan plays trickster instead. This is a familiar fairy tale device: tricking the villain into defeating himself, as with Rumplestiltskin. Indeed, that’s how Superman regularly beats Mr. Mxyzptlk (tricking him into saying his own name). Even in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, Wotan captures the dwarf Alberich by tricking him into using his powers in a self-defeating way. So the comics fan persuaded the (incredibly stupid) Masked Mutant that he was actually a stretchable hero like Plastic Man. To cope with his supposedly rubbery foe, the shapeshifting Masked Mutant turned to acid, inadvertently dissolving himself. Yes, it’s a fate similar to that of the Wicked Witch of the West, though Dorothy did not intend to melt her nemesis. It’s rather odd that this children’s program shows its kid protagonist intentionally bringing about his adversary’s death.

At the episode’s end we see that the comics fan really has gained Plastic Man-like powers: he stretches on-camera, using up the rest of the episode’s miniscule special effects budget. I get that this is a metaphor to show that through his actions he actually became the hero he wanted to be. But I wish there’d been some logical explanation. Were this indeed some sort of Twilight Zone for kids, rationales might be unnecessary; the Zone created an eerie world in which various accepted rules of logic and science no longer applied. This Goosebumps episode took a more matter-of-fact approach to its paranormal doings, that led me, anyway, to expect logical explanations: the hero’s final transformation seemed to come out of nowhere.

So, this was not an auspicious start for my viewing of the retrospective, but not without interest. Though recognizing that superhero comics genuinely evoke heroic aspirations in their readers, this Goosebumps episode still treated the costumed heroes and villains of the genre as silly stuff for kids.

And how did the rest of the audience react, you may wonder. This was “Superfun for Families,” after all. Well, I was the only person who remained in the screening room from the time I entered till the episode’s end. Some other adults came in, got bored, and left. There were no kids. This seemed ominous.

A LOST GOLDEN AGE

The next screening in the “Superheroes” retrospective was over an hour away, at 3 PM, so I found other, somewhat related programs with which to pass the time till then.

For one thing, for a long time I’ve thought that puppets are effectively cartoon characters in three dimensions. Puppets are to cartoons as sculpture is to drawing. So I don’t think that puppetry is out of place in a column that concerns itself with cartoon art, comics and animation.

In the fifth floor corridor, outside the screening room for Goosebumps, were a series of large color photographs of the Muppets and puppet characters from Fraggle Rock, Bear in the Big Blue House, and even a British puppet show unknown in this country, all under the exhibition title “Creating Characters That Entertain the World: Photographs of Characters from The Jim Henson Company.”

In retrospect, this seems ironic. It was this same day that I learned the old news (from February) that Disney had finally bought the Muppets (though not the ones from Sesame Street, who’d already been sold to Children’s Television Workshop by previous corporate owners) and the Bear characters. So this was really an exhibition of characters from the Jim Henson Company, Children’s Television Workshop and the Walt Disney Company.

At one end of the corridor was a video wall with multiple screens showing Of Muppets and Men: The Making of The Muppet Show, a documentary going behind the scenes at the Muppets’ classic 1970s television series. Of course it’s fun and interesting seeing the faces and hearing the real voices of the Muppeteers, though founder Jim Henson and his second-in-command, Frank Oz, were already familiar to me, and watching footage of the Muppeteers manipulating their puppets from below as scenes for The Muppet Show are shot. (Somehow I assumed that the puppeteers sat or crouched down, but instead they seem most often to be standing, and even walking back and forth, the puppets held high over their heads.)

If I saw this documentary when it was first televised, I would have had these same reactions. But now, decades after it was made, it takes on a new dimension. It’s a time capsule, capturing what may, in retrospect, be the high point in Muppets history. Jim Henson, the creative visionary who founded the Muppets, died abruptly in 1990, but here he is, on video, alive, enthusiastic, and at the height of his artistic powers. Frank Oz is now primarily a live action movie director, most recently for this year’s remake of The Stepford Wives, but there he is in the documentary by Henson’s side, still a full-time Muppeteer providing major creative input into their projects. The Muppet Show was at this time an astonishing, international success, shown in an extraordinary number of countries. Even with many “Muppet” movies still to come, this was arguably the peak of the Muppets’ success. And yet Henson’s organization is still a relatively small group, with what appears to be a genuine sense of community. On camera Henson talks about how the group is made up of people who like each other, and that their chemistry helps their work. Certainly what the documentary shows viewers bears this out: good feeling abounds. Now, it’s possible, even probable, that there were black sheep in this creative “family,” and one would expect that any proverbial dirty laundry would be edited out of this self-promotional documentary. Still, I’d like to think that the image Henson presents of his company at that time is basically true.

Now consider what has happened in the decades since this documentary was made. Henson passed away in 1990, and his children take over the organization and attempt to keep it creatively vital, moving into new directions while maintaining the viability of the classic characters. But there is no making up for the loss of the founder’s creative genius, as indeed there was not for the Disney organization after Walt’s death. And the question arises as to whether the Muppets are truly evergreen characters, popular with each succeeding generation, or whether they have become dated, at least until the right person comes along who knows how to revitalize the concept.

So, no longer as successful as they once were, the Muppets come under corporate control. First, in the 1990s, the Hensons sold off the Muppets and their other creative properties to a Germany’s EM.TV and Merchandising AG, only to buy them back, after the new owners proved their inability to manage these acquisitions effectively. Thereafter, in 2004, the Henson Company sells the Muppets to the Disney Company, which has long pursued them.

So, in June I read reports about the Muppets’ fate on JimHillMedia.com, a comprehensive online site of Disney-related news. According to him, the Hensons believed that the Disney Company would find the means to revitalize the Muppets for the new century, But, it would seem, apart from the Imagineers who design theme park attractions, Hill says in an April 16 article that “it’s becoming more and more apparent that the Walt Disney Company really doesn’t have a clue what to do with the Muppets.” Worse, due to lack of sufficient work for their company, Hill reports that two thirds of the Henson company staff may be downsized. Hill notes, “Most of these folks initially came to work for the Jim Henson Company because that was where the Muppets were. Now that Kermit and Co. will soon be heading off to Burbank, a lot of these people just don’t know what to do with themselves. They’re worried that ““ once the Disney acquisition deal is completed ““ that their jobs will be eliminated.”

This should strike a familiar note with readers of this column. Sounds like what happened in the world of comics, and more recently, at Disney Animation, ironically enough. It sounds like yet another case of people who got to fulfill their dream of working within a particular creative tradition and then had it taken away from them.

I recently watched a television interview with a filmmaker named Rick McKay, who had made a documentary called, Broadway: The Golden Years. Asked why Broadway’s Golden Age came to an end, McKay wisely pointed out that a Golden Age, by its very nature, must come to an end. In other words, no Golden Age lasts forever. Moreover, pointing out that the Golden Age of the movie musical lasted only fifteen years, McKay rhetorically asked if anyone involved in that particular Golden Age at the time would have believed it if you had told him that it was going to end “in ten minutes”? That’s true in my experience. When one is part of a creative enterprise enjoying success, it seems as if it will go on forever. But it won’t.

LUNAR TOONS

It’s still not yet time for today’s superhero retrospective main event, so I reenter the screening room for a showing of the first of Nick Park’s stop-motion animated films starring Wallace and Gromit, A Grand Day Out, made in 1989 by Aardman Animations for British television (hence its presence in the Museum’s collection). Park’s stop-motion figures are puppets of a sort, and hence could also be regarded as sculpted cartoons.

The two later Wallace and Gromit featurettes, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, are comedic thrillers, with outright villains, and dynamically staged, suspensefully edited action sequences. This first film is more of an exercise in gentle whimsy. All three films pull off the trick of appealing to adults as well as to children; in fact, my impression is that these films are intentionally aimed not at either audience but at both.

Appropriately, then, Wallace and Gromit themselves simultaneously partake of adulthood and childhood. Wallace, the human, is clearly along in years: he’s bald and has an old man’s voice. But there’s something childlike about him. Though he has a cerebral, adult profession, that of an inventor, he’s driven by appetite. Wanting cheese to spread on his crackers, Wallace decides to take a vacation to the moon, which, as we told as children, is made of cheese. (Actually, are we all told this, or are Wallace and I dating ourselves? Do today’s children still get told the moon is made of green cheese?)

So Wallace sets out building a rocket ship in his basement. Not only does he hold the child’s belief that the moon is made of cheese, but he also has a child’s incomprehension of the difficulties of going to the moon.

But perhaps this also parodies the way we’ve grown accustomed to the miracles of science. I recently saw a Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s 1970s play Jumpers, which contends that astronauts’ successful landings on the lunar surface demystified the moon, making it useless as a romantic symbol in the songs sung by the play’s heroine. The moon is no longer unattainable; going to the moon is no longer inconceivable. We grew so used to it we stopped going! Wallace wants to go there, but displays no awe at the thought. His attitude is the same as if he were taking a trip to any of the Earthly vacation spots he had been considering. Actually, maybe even going elsewhere on Earth wouldn’t give him any sense of wonder either. He’s basically going to the moon as a substitute for visiting the supermarket: he’s looking for a place to get cheese so he can have a picnic.

Another childlike aspect of Wallace’s world is that animals, including his dog Gromit, can possess human intelligence. Gromit can’t talk, but he can read, and though Wallace is the inventor, Gromit is clearly the more practical of the pair. Some people treat pets like substitute children, but Gromit seems the more “adult” of the two, with his silent, ironic reactions to Wallace’s naivete. (This becomes clearer in the next film, in which it is Gromit, not Wallace, who first recognizes the criminality of the villain, a penguin boarding in their house.)

Wallace’s attitude towards the moon, as if it were a combination of neighborhood park and cheese shop, might also be intended as a satire on British provincialism. Significantly, the interior of Wallace’s rocket ship is a cozy sitting room much like the rooms of Wallace’s own home. It’s as if travel consisted not of exploring different cultures, but of transporting one’s own environment and lifestyle somewhere else. I also recently saw the original 1950s film adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days, in which world traveler Phileas Fogg insists on having his British menu for dinner every day, no matter where he is. It’s like the stereotypical image of British explorers dressing up for teatime in the jungle. Now, long after Britain’s imperial age, it’s the middle-class Wallace and his pet having cheese and crackers on the moon. And yes, I am well aware that this parody of British attitude towards other countries could equally apply to Americans’ similar sort of provincialism.

Could A Grand Day Out even be a gentle jab at imperialism and the British Empire? After all, Wallace and Gromit go to the moon to exploit its cheese resources, oblivious to the desires of any natives they may find there. And they do indeed come in conflict with one of the natives. Oddly, the native is a machine of some sort. Wallace invents and uses machines, so perhaps it makes sense that his nemesis is a machine with a mind of its own.

Oddly, this moon machine seems very Earthlike. It looks like some sort of kitchen appliance, it has a drawer and wheels, and it is activated by inserting British coins! Its existence seems to reflect Wallace’s own inability to imagine a truly alien environment. Since Wallace inadvertently activates the threat by putting coins into the machine, there’s a bit of a Frankenstein motif here.

The moon machine also proves to be something of a counterpart to Wallace: it wants to go on vacation, too. And, as if proving the cliche that grass is always greener on the other person’s side, whereas Wallace wanted to go to the moon, the machine, studying his travel brochures, wants to go skiing, presumably on Earth.

For some moments, the moon machine poses a menace to Wallace and Gromit, trying to prevent them from escaping in their rocket ship. But, after ripping strips of metal from the rocket ship, the machine realizes it can use them as skis. No longer resentful of the two invaders, the machine gestures a happy farewell to Wallace and Gromit. So in this film there is no real villain, unlike the implacable evildoers in the following films in the series. The film leaves the moon machine happily skiing over the lunar hills (which don’t really exist), and perhaps we are meant to ignore the inevitability that the machine will eventually stop when it needs a new coin (as we’ve seen earlier in the film).

There are only three significant characters in the entire film, and Wallace does not talk all that much. The great animated shorts of Hollywood’s classic studio years followed in the tradition of the live action silent comedies of the 1910s and ’20s. This is especially noticeable with characters who don’t talk, like Tom and Jerry and the Roadrunner and Coyote, but the craft of constructing and timing visual gags is evident even in talk-heavy cartoons in this tradition, like Bugs Bunny’s. The Wallace and Gromit featurettes often, as in A Grand Day Out, maintain a certain British reserve and understatement, in contrast with the in-your-face slapstick of the American cartoon tradition. But the Wallace and Gromit shorts take the same care in creating humor and characterization and suspense through visual terms, and the climactic tumult of the later shorts matches the larger than life action of the Hollywood cartoons. Gromit is a latter-day silent comedian, neither talking nor barking, communicating through understated facial expressions and body language even when enacting elaborate stunts: he’s sort of a canine Buster Keaton. The Wallace and Gromit animated shorts capture a mastery of visual comedy and storytelling that often seems absent from recent animation; I’m looking forward to their forthcoming feature film, 2005’s ominously titled Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

SUPERHEROIC UNMENTIONABLES

With the time for the afternoon’s main presentation drawing close, I head downstairs to the first floor’s Steven Spielberg Gallery (the Museum has some high profile contributors), which held another part of the retrospective: an art display titled “Saturday Morning Super Cels: Madison Avenue Meets the Superheroes.”

It was not so very long ago that it seemed that any newspaper article about comics had BAM! POW! ZAP! in the title. Headline writers everywhere appeared to think this was clever and original. But in the last several years the sound effects faded away, I noticed at first and was grateful, but I now realize that over time I had taken the headline writers’ newfound respect for the subject for granted. I had forgotten what it used to be like.

To walk into the Spielberg Gallery, however, was to suffer flashbacks. There they were atop the long display texts: pointy balloons with WHAM! POW! PLONK! and the like.

The Museum’s brochure for the retrospective describes this art exhibit thus: “See eye-popping animation cels from various Saturday morning superhero cartoons and commercials from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. . . .” Dear readers, you need not fear that I was in any danger that my eyes would pop out of their sockets and get inadvertently trampled on the floor by the crush of comics enthusiasts, eager to gaze upon dazzling examples of animation art. In fact, much of the art was from Filmation’s DC superhero cartoons, which is less likely to pop one’s eyes than to glaze them over from ennui.

The wall texts disagree with my assessment. One asserts that “the studio’s superhero series of the late 1960s and early ’70s as seen here in examples from Aquaman, Batman and Green Lantern remain cherished fan favorites for the vividly realized look of these classic comic-book characters.” Now I am well aware that virtually any form of comics-related material has its devotees. But I can’t say that I know anyone who “cherishes” Filmation superhero cartoons. The artwork on the walls is bland, mediocre and undistinguished, lacking in any distinctive style. The television sets in the gallery, playing endless loops of the actual animated cartoons, serve as reminders of just how dull and uninspired they were.

And yet the wall texts praise the “strong graphic design and liberal use of rotoscoping” ““ tracing live action movement ““ in the Filmation superhero cartoons. The wall texts acknowledge that rotoscoping is “controversial.” Actually, my impression is that most animation aficionados consider it just plain bad.

Now, whoever wrote these wall texts does have more knowledge about comics history than I would have expected from the Museum. The anonymous author credits the late Julius Schwartz as editor of stories that inspired the early DC superhero TV cartoons (see Comics in Context #32). The wall texts state that in these cartoons, “the lighthearted adventures. . .harken back to the optimism, whimsy, and enthusiasm of classic ‘Silver Age’ comic books (roughly covering the late ’50s through the late ’60s), in which definitive versions of many classic heroes were established.” Yes, but there’s a decided difference between the classic Schwartz “Silver Age” stories and these early TV cartoons. Schwartz’s stories were ingeniously written and stylishly drawn, playing not to the lowest common denominator in the audience, but reaching out to the more intelligent readers, old and young. The Filmation and later Hanna-Barbera Super Friends cartoons look dull and have dull stories; small children might like them but will quickly outgrow them. They are examples of what the general public has long thought superhero stories are: mediocre material lacking in depth or artistic value.

Now there are some features of this exhibit of genuine interest to longtime comics enthusiasts. Here, for example, are drawings that longtime Marvel artist Herb Trimpe did of the Hulk for commercials for Post’s Honeycomb cereal. The wall text calls Trimpe “a legendary comic-book artist.” Well, Trimpe’s comics work on the Hulk is certainly classic, memorable, and distinguished. But is he a “legend”? The Trimpe art displayed here is craftsmanlike but hardly his best, despite the ecstatic somersaults the wall text’s writer seems to have turned in praising it.

I was surprised that the wall texts noted that “Trimpe was one of many older artists laid off by Marvel in the early 1990s when falling comic-book sales forced the company to file for bankruptcy.” That’s true enough; perhaps the anonymous writer saw the article that Trimpe wrote about the Marvel downsizings in The New York Times a few years ago. And were Trimpe or any of them hired back when Marvel financially recovered? The wall texts do not address the subject.

Elsewhere in the gallery comics aficionados will find something else of interest: drawings of DC’s Teen Titans for a projected 1974 Hanna-Barbera animated series that never got made, even Titans characters who are now as obscure as Mal. The drawings were done by Mike Royer, who is perhaps best known as a longtime inker of Jack Kirby’s work, or, rather, as the wall text calls him, the “legendary artist Mike Royer.” Another legend! If Trimpe and Royer are legends, what does this make a truly great artist like Kirby? A myth?

In describing the Teen Titans drawings, the wall texts note there is currently an anime-influenced Teen Titans animated series on Cartoon Network, and that other teen versions of DC heroes have appeared on the live action TV series Superboy (in the ’80s) and Smallville, and the animated Batman Beyond. Yes, indeed. And are any of these series represented in the Museum’s retrospective. No.

But doesn’t Smallville represent a serious, psychologically perceptive reworking of the Superboy concept for teens and adults? Don’t Batman Beyond and Warners’ other recent superhero animated series demonstrate a level of sophistication in writing, art design, and animation technique far beyond the level of any of the Filmation DC shows? Wouldn’t anyone with a reasonably developed sense of appreciation of cartoon art prefer seeing an exhibit of superhero artwork by Bruce Timm and other contemporary Warners Animation artists? Surely examples are available; there used to be loads of them for sale only several blocks away at the Warner Brothers Studio Store on 5th Avenue before it closed.

But the guiding principle behind this exhibition appears to be nostalgia for juvenilia. Another subject covered in the gallery is superhero artwork done for Underoos, children’s underwear. The wall text notes, “Froot of the Loom has also introduced an adult line of Underoos in classic superhero characters, betting that even adults still long to be their favorite superheroes.” (I leave it to my readers to imagine what it would be like to take someone back to your apartment for a romantic evening and discovering, when he/she undresses, that he or she is wearing superhero adult Underoos. Seems to me that might kill the moment.)

The Museum’s retrospective brochure observes that “the spectacle of superpowered ‘long underwear’ vigilantes has resonated with audiences of all ages and inspired debate and analysis in the halls of academe.” Indeed, I agree, speaking as someone who is about to undertake just such analysis in academia. The brochure acknowledges that superhero sagas can be “enjoyed as escapist fantasy or pondered as archetypes of modern myth. . . .”

“But,” the wall text instructs museumgoers, “let’s not get too high-flown. The best value this work embodies is fun.” The text refers to “the invitations from Underoos and Post Cereals to become your favorite superhero. . . .”

That’s my problem with this retrospective. The Museum recognizes that the superhero genre has mythic depths worthy of serious academic study, and chooses to ignore that very fact. The same Museum that directs serious attention to other children regards the superhero genre merely as fodder for small children and adults seeking ironic humor. The retrospective ignores mythic underpinnings in favor of adult Underoos.

But the retrospective will get better, as you shall see in the next installment.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

Superman traditionally fights for “truth, justice and the American way,” and he belongs to the Justice League of America. Captain America wears a costume patterned after the American flag and upholds classic American ideals. Will Eisner’s superhero version of Uncle Sam is literally the spirit of America. And now, Spider-Man is being portrayed in his movies as a hero who represents America.

Not so long ago this would have seemed so unlikely. Superman and Captain America are establishment figures, acclaimed by the American public of their fictional worlds. Spider-Man is far from being a member of the establishment. He is pilloried by the news media, in the form of J. Jonah Jameson and his Daily Bugle. Spider-Man is mistrusted and feared by much, perhaps even most, of New York City’s citizenry. Often during his career he has been an outlaw, wanted by the police for crimes he did not commit. He is a vigilante, operating without either the official sanction granted to the Fantastic Four and the Avengers, or even the unofficial cooperation Commissioner Gordon gives Batman.

At the end of Superman II, the title hero carries the American flag back to the White House, having thwarted the takeover of the country by General Zod and his cohorts from the Phantom Zone. As if echoing that image, the first Spider-Man movie ended with Spider-Man executing a spectacular series of web-slinging maneuvers amid the Manhattan skyline, culminating with a shot of Spider-Man and the American flag. At the time the film came out, I assumed that this was a patriotic gesture by the filmmakers in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

One of Marvel Comics’ own principal responses to 9/11 was J. Michael Straczynski’s Amazing Spider-Man issue set amid the ruins of the World Trade Center. It was Spider-Man’s series, not Captain America’s, that was chosen for such a story. I would guess that this was because Spider-Man has become Marvel’s flagship solo star.

And now, Spider-Man 2 also ends with flag-waving. (I offer my usual caution: this column about the movie will discuss plot developments and the ending, things that those of you who have not yet seen the film may not wish to read about yet.) As Spider-Man, with his renewed dedication to his crimefighting career, swings through the city, alerted by police sirens to a new mission, the audience sees American flags hanging over one of Manhattan’s main streets. (Intentionally or not, this concluding shot reminds me of similar images that conclude the current Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective of the American Impressionist Childe Hassam: his most famous works are patriotically-inspired paintings of large American flags hovering above Manhattan’s streets.)

The movies’ director, Sam Raimi, and his collaborators are clearly, intentionally making a point about Spider-Man as a symbol of America. It would seem that Straczynski and others at Marvel may be consciously or unconsciously moving towards the same idea.

So what is it that makes Spider-Man a symbol of America?

Part of it is that Spider-Man seems to strike a chord in viewers following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. (In this column we’ve seen the influence of 9/11 in Chris Claremont’s X-Men, Neil Gaiman’s 1602, and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again.)

In Newsweek’s cover story on Spider-Man 2 (June 28, 2004), writer Sean Smith contends that “Much has been made of the fact that Spider-Man was the first post-9/11 blockbuster, and the conventional wisdom is that the film was a phenomenon because America needed heroes again. But maybe it’s something more. To the rest of the world, the superhero symbol of the United States is Superman ““ broad-shouldered, unconflicted, virtually indestructible. For decades, we’ve preferred to see ourselves that way, too. Spider-Man is none of these things. He’s burdened by self-doubt. He wants to do the right thing, but isn’t always sure what that is. He’s constantly forced to choose between helping others and helping himself. He looks tough, but he’s easily injured. In America after September 11, Superman was who we wanted to be. Spider-Man was who we were.”

Critic Andrew Sarris in The New York Observer (July 8, 2004) likewise notes that, unlike Superman and Batman, Spider-Man in the new movie “is strikingly vulnerable ““ we get to see him in a state of powerlessness and helplessness….”

For Smith, to turn to Spider-Man is to recognize our limitations as a nation. For New York Times columnist and media critic Frank Rich, Spider-Man is a role model for post-9/11 Americans. In his July 11, 2004 column Rich declares that “Spider-Man wants to vanquish evil, but he doesn’t want to be reckless about it. Like the reluctant sheriff of an old western, he fights back only when a bad guy strikes first, leaving him with no other alternative.” (Rich has here stumbled onto one of the links between the superhero genre, a heroic myth for the contemporary urban United States, and that earlier myth for a more rural America, the western.) Reminding his readers that Spider-Man stars in a Fourth of July movie, Rich continues, “As a man locked in a war against terror, Peter Parker could not be further removed from the hubristic bravura of Mr. George W. Bush and his own cinematic model, the Tom Cruise of Top Gun. There’s nothing triumphalist about Spider-Man. . . .”

Indeed, since the movies’ Spider-Man just sees himself as doing his duty, he does not rejoice in his victories over the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus. In the films, moreover, these were both men whom he liked before the accidents that drove them criminally insane. And in the comics, though Spider-Man may have a good laugh over discomfiting a villain, he doesn’t take time to boast or celebrate: there’s always some new problem lying just ahead.

Rich concludes about Spider-Man 2, “It gives us a selfless wartime hero unlike any on the national stage, and it promotes a credo of justice without vindictiveness.”

Yet though the Spider-Man 2 movies came out in 2002 and 2004, they are mostly faithful to the spirit of the Spider-Man of the comics, who first appeared in 1962, in the midst of President John F. Kennedy’s administration, which proudly asserted that America “would pay any price, bear any burden” to defend freedom.

How odd that Spider-Man, as described by Smith and Rich, was a product of that time. Or is it? The debacle of the Bay of Pigs invasion had occurred the year before. 1962 was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world came to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Whether in 1962 or 2004, Spider-Man counters the notion of the American hero who is omnipotent, who is always right, and whose confidence in his goals and choices is unshaken. Perhaps this reflects Stan Lee’s well-known midlife creative crisis just before he co-created Fantastic Four in 1961, when he questioned his own purpose in continuing to work in comics. On a broader scale, perhaps the creation of Spider-Man anticipates the shift in liberal political thought over the course of the 1960s: by the end of the decade millions would be questioning American involvement in the war in Vietnam.

There’s still more to Spider-Man 2‘s revisionism towards America’s standard self-image. I was struck and surprised by something that Peter Parker / Spider-Man tells Mary Jane Watson, the woman he loves, towards the end of the second movie.

Up to that point the film has shown how Peter’s commitment to rescuing people from danger as Spider-Man has had serious negative repercussions on his everyday life. He has been fired from his job, which couldn’t have paid much to begin with; he is failing his courses at Columbia University; he is disappointing and even alienating people he cares about, including Mary Jane herself. He is virtually alone, nearly broke, seemingly doomed to failure in his education, and hence in his future career as a scientist, and in his personal life if he continues along the path of being Spider-Man.

Nowadays, after four decades of Spider-Man 2 comics, with several new issues every month, writers would probably think it boring to keep writing about the perennial misfortune that Stan Lee put into Peter Parker’s life. But the filmmakers did a great job of sharpening our awareness of Peter’s continual troubles, presenting a whole spectrum from minor, annoying mishaps (like the scene in the laundromat) to major concerns, like Peter’s guilty awareness of the deaths he helped bring about: those of his Uncle Ben and his friend Harry Osborn’s father (whom Harry did not know was the criminal Green Goblin). One can see how this continual drumbeat of adversity wears Peter down to the point of renouncing what he regards as the source of all his problems: his life as Spider-Man.So Peter literally throws away his costume, in a new version of Stan Lee and John Romita, Sr.’s classic comics story, “Spider-Man No More,” intending to lead a successful, normal life.

And Peter finds that he can’t: there is a limit to his ability to ignore the urgings of his conscience to help the people around him. The turning point comes when Doctor Octopus abducts Mary Jane right before the eyes of Peter Parker (who at that point seems as if he might have literally lost his super-powers). He resumes his Spider-Man persona and abilities. Later, Peter explicitly tells the rescued Mary Jane that he has learned that one has to do what is right even if it means giving up the “dream.”

This is really an astonishing statement. The concept of the “dream,” or, rather, the “American dream” of success, is so thoroughly a part of American culture, and hence of American popular culture as well. In America, it is said, with ambition, talent and perseverance, anyone can become a success in his career, anyone can become rich, and anyone can even become President, recognized by the rest of the populace as their leader. Despite all the social changes over the last several decades, people in America are still expected to marry the person he or she loves, ideally for life, have children, and get a house in the suburbs.

Typically, we would expect a movie hero to do the right thing, overcome his opponents, and get the girl, win the acclaim he deserves, and gain material rewards as a result of his efforts.

The “dream” is even part of the X-Men legend. Professor Xavier and his students strive towards achieving his vision of a world in which mutants and “baseline” humans live together in peace and harmony, however distant the realization of that dream may be in the future, if ever.

But in Spider-Man 2 Peter Parker rejects the American dream, at least as a goal for himself. He tells Mary Jane that there is something more important than “the dream,” presumably meaning success in leading a “normal” life and even in romantic love. What Peter sees as more important is doing what is right; this is his reworking of his late Uncle Ben’s guiding maxim that “With great power must come great responsibility.”

In his review of Spider-Man 2 in The New York Times (June 29, 2004), critic A. O. Scott says that in the first movie, “the hero was forced to choose between superhuman powers and the earthly charms of Kirsten Dunst,” by whom he means Mary Jane, the character this actress portrays.

His use of the word “earthly” to describe Mary Jane is intriguing. As Spider-Man, Peter Parker is driven by the demands of conscience: having inadvertently been responsible through inaction for the death of his uncle, Peter refuses to allow any other innocent person to come to harm if he can help it.

Uncle Ben has become a saintly figure, perhaps literally so: he even makes an appearance, actual or imagined by Peter, from beyond the grave in this second movie to advise Peter. (The parallel is the late Norman Osborn’s similar visitation ““ real or imagined ““ to his son Harry towards the end of the movie, casting Norman in the role of a devil. Whereas Ben beckons Peter to follow the path of what’s right, only to be rejected, Norman tempts Harry towards vengeance, and Harry is on the verge of succumbing.)

By resuming his duties as Spider-Man, Peter chooses the path of conscience. He is following a higher moral calling than that of most people. In his dedication to moral ideals and responsibilities, Peter/Spider-Man is following what could be termed a spiritual path. Mary Jane could indeed be described as “earthly,” not simply because she represents potential sexual fulfillment for Peter, but because a successful relationship with her is part of the “dream” that Peter believes his life as Spider-Man prevents him from having.

I am reminded of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in its later seasons, in which one of the supporting characters abruptly has an epiphany, and realizes that Buffy will never have a good, prosperous job. The reason is that she has to devote most of her time to the higher purpose she has been assigned: the role of the Slayer in combating supernatural evil. I’ve long thought that Buffy is influenced as much by Spider-Man 2 as by X-Men: here’s a case in point. Season 2 even ended with a variation on “Spider-Man No More,” with Buffy, her personal life having collapsed in ruins, takes a bus out of town, abandoning her duties and even as we learn in the first episode of Season 3, her identity. (In that same episode she undergoes the same kind of moral reawakening that Peter has in Spider-Man 2 and resumes her Slayer career.) Occasionally the Buffy season would even remind the audience that with her life of continual combat, its heroine could not expect to live even into middle age.

Leading his life as Spider-Man thus becomes an ongoing form of self-sacrifice for Peter Parker. He gives up his own chances for conventional forms of success in order to ensure the safety of others, so they can lead normal, happy lives instead.

Whether in the comics or the movies, Spider-Man 2 is not an explicitly religious series. But superhero stories are a form of secular mythology, and they do deal with moral values. In sacrificing the normal goals of material success and sexual fulfillment in order to pursue a higher moral purpose, Spider-Man is even like a priest or monk. George Lucas thinks along the same lines in his Star Wars mythos, depicting his Jedi Knights as celibate members of a pseudo-religious order dedicated to serving the Force.

Or think of the end of The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn receives the conventional rewards for heroism: kingship, marriage to his true love, acclaim by his people, wealth. As for the two lead hobbits, Frodo and Sam enact a similar archetypal pairing as that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the quester pursuing a vision of duty, and his loyal, more practical-minded servant (hence Sam’s continual references to “Mr. Frodo”). Sam is the more “earthly” one of the two, and it is he who achieves a conventional middle-class vision of happiness as his reward: a wife and children and their own home in the ‘burbs, er, the Shire. In contrast with these two, Frodo, permanently changed by his experiences, apparently cannot return to a “normal” way of life or find happiness and fulfillment there. Instead he ends up sailing off with Bilbo, Gandalf and the elves to a land of the immortals, which, especially considering that Bilbo seems near death, appears to be a metaphor for the hereafter. Having followed something of a spiritual quest (to destroy evil), Frodo can no longer stay in the material world.

So “earthly” Sam finds love in the mortal world; “spiritual” Frodo does not. Similarly, whereas George Lucas leads us to expect a possible romance between Luke and Leia in the original Star Wars, he ends up establishing them as brother and sister. The Jedi Knight (and spiritual quester) Luke remains single (in the movies, anyway), and Leia instead becomes romantically involved with the decidedly “earthly” Han Solo.

If J. K. Rowling follows this archetypal pattern, who do you think is more likely to wind up as Hermione’s boyfriend in the last Harry Potter book: Harry or Ron?

(And now to go off on a momentary tangent, comparing the Tolkien and Rowling mythologies to Spider-Man reminds me that these two fantasy writers both employ gigantic spiders as horrific monsters. Aside from E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, spiders tend not to be positive figures in fiction. Though this may not have been Stan Lee’s conscious intention, I wonder if part of the reason for the general mistrust of Spider-Man in his series is the fact that people have a negative reaction to spiders, especially if they are as big as or bigger than human beings.

Comics aficionados may be so used to Spider-Man that they overlook the idea that a human being who scurries up walls and shoots webbing might well seem monstrous at first glance. Stan Lee has stated on numerous occasions that he initially met resistance to naming the character “Spider-Man” because he was told nobody likes spiders. And in Spider-Man’s comics stories, most people don’t like Spider-Man.)

Though written in the 1950s, The Lord of the Rings first achieved widespread popularity as a cultural phenomenon in the 1960s, as Spider-Man did. Recently seeing the Spider-Man 2 movies and rewatching the recent Rings movies, I am struck by a major parallel. Frodo does not embark on his quest out of a sense of adventure or a longing for glory, but out of a sense of moral duty and a realization (that others confirm) that he is the only one capable of bearing the evil Ring to destruction while resisting being corrupted by it (better than others could, anyway). He takes no pleasure in his quest: being the Ringbearer is a burden that increasingly weighs down upon his spirits, inducing anguish, depression, and even, towards the end, despair. Like Peter in “Spider-Man No More” and Spider-Man 2, Frodo even tries to give up this moral burden (as when he offers the Ring to Galadriel) only to discover that he can’t. In the third film and book, when Sam has carried the Ring for a while, Frodo even takes it back from him, explaining that the Ring would “destroy” his friend. (Surely some critic has likened Frodo’s dilemma to the Gospels’ scene in the Garden of Gethsemene.) As noted above, bearing the Ring has rendered Frodo unfit for conventional happiness in the “normal” world: he is sacrificing himself so that Sam and others can enjoy the kind of happy, normal lives he will never have.

So too, as I explained in last week’s installment, the movies’ Peter Parker seems to take no real joy in being Spider-Man. Watching the first film again last week, I noticed that sometimes Spider-Man utters an excited whoop when he swings through the city, but that’s not dramatically interesting. In the first film Spider-Man also makes some stabs at the familiar Spidey witty repartee, which falls flat. In the second film the whoops and most of the attempted witticisms are gone.

Now Spider-Man’s “power” and “responsibility” are both burdens, ruining his personal life. A. O. Scott rightly observes in his review that Peter is suffering from “depression.”

That reminds me of the controversial sixth season of Buffy. Normally in the first five seasons she, like Spider-Man in the comics, took a certain pleasure in exercising her powers in battle while verbally jabbing at her opponents with jokes. But in Season Six, though the word is rarely used, Buffy falls into a serious state of depression and increasingly neglects her Slayer responsibilities; even after reaccepting these duties, she remains somber in outlook in Season Seven, far removed from the master of repartee of the earlier years. And remember how the TV series ends: now that other women have been endowed with Slayer powers, Faith and Willow point out to Buffy that she is no longer the sole “Chosen One” for her mission, and we are left with the sight of Buffy smiling in relief that her burden has been lessened.

No such luck for Peter Parker in Spider-Man 2, who resumes his moral responsibilities but does so realizing he has to surrender the “dream.”

This is true to the spirit of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s first Spider-Man 2 story in Amazing Fantasy #15 back in 1962. This remains a startlingly dark and disturbing story. The first movie, which retells Spider-Man’s origin, includes his redemption by becoming the hero who defeats the Green Goblin and saves Mary Jane, a tram full of kids, and many others. Lee and Ditko’s first Spider-Man 2 story provides no such happy ending: it concludes with Spider-Man’s discovery of his own role in his uncle’s death, and with the hero walking into the darkness of night, weighed down by a sense of patricidal guilt and remembering Ben’s words about responsibility. It is clear at that moment that Spider-Man’s crimefighting career will really be an endless effort at expiating his own sin. (The second movie has a strong scene in which Peter confesses to Aunt May how he failed to stop the Burglar who killed Uncle Ben. She eventually forgives Peter, but it is clear he has not forgiven himself.)

The comics’ origin story even addresses the topic of the “American dream” of fame and fortune. Spider-Man/Peter initially uses his new super-powers for personal gain. In the first movie Peter simply enters a wrestling contest to win enough money to buy himself a new car with which to impress Mary Jane. The wrestling world he enters is a tawdry, small time milieu. In Lee and Ditko’s origin, Peter thinks bigger: he goes on from the wrestling match to launching himself into a high profile show business career, appearing on television. But, though this is more upscale than the wrestling, Spider-Man’s show business career is still portrayed as crassly materialistic, and worse, as immoral. In the movie Peter Parker lets the Burglar escape out of a sense of resentment towards the man the Burglar robbed, who had just cheated Peter. In the comics version, it is show biz Spidey, a male diva in the making, full of his own ego, who lets the Burglar escape out of a sense that he’s too important to sully his hands with matters that are none of his business. So we see that the dual personality aspect of Spider-Man/Peter has already emerged. In fact, show biz Spidey was far different in personality from everyday Peter than superhero Spidey is. Show Biz Spidey really was Peter’s version of Mr. Hyde: after all those years of being bullied, now he turns arrogant, taking on the same mindset as the Big Men on Campus who lorded it over him. Despite his claims of wanting to make money for Ben and May, this Peter Parker was really out for Number One. (In the 1980s Peter B. Gillis wrote a remarkable What If story in which Uncle Ben was not killed, and Peter Parker became a nasty, amoral Hollywood mini-mogul.)

Ben’s death shakes Peter out of his complacent, egocentric selfishness. Show Biz Spidey was a particularly American form of the dark side of the ubermensch concept: the man who sets himself above other people as their superior. After Ben’s death and his capture of the Burglar, Spider-Man recognizes himself as a member of the community of mankind. He will sacrifice his own happiness and welfare to ensure that no one else comes to harm.

Ironically, as Lee and Ditko begin showing in Amazing Spider-Man #1, after Ben’s death, once Peter dedicates himself to helping others, his show business career collapses, largely due to the way J. Jonah Jameson turns the fickle public against him. When Spider-Man was chasing fame and fortune, the public loved him; after he becomes a true hero, Jameson accuses him of being merely a “glory-hound.” It’s as if Spider-Man will pay for the rest of his career for that aspect of his initial arrogance as well.

So it is that Lee and Ditko quickly establish the money worries that have plagued Peter Parker off and on ever since. The first movie was remarkable in dealing with this theme of people’s economic vulnerability.

Uncle Ben was downsized at an age when it would be difficult for him to find a new job. Mary Jane must work at a downscale waitressing job, clearly beneath her real abilities. Jameson characteristically tries to pay Peter as little as possible for his photos, and even tries to persuade him that working freelance, rather than as a regular staff member, is a Good Thing. (And doesn’t that hit home with some of us?) Even the wealthy Norman Osborn, at the other end of the economic spectrum, faced the threat of being forced out of his own company. (This was one of the reasons his mind snapped and he became the Green Goblin.) The second movie continues the theme of economic instability. While Peter’s contemporaries are doing better than he is (Harry was born rich, Mary Jane is doing well as an actress and model), Peter loses his bottom-of-the-barrel job as a pizza delivery boy. Unable to get a loan from her bank, Aunt May loses her home. (How can Peter afford attending Columbia University? Though the movie does not say so, he must be on full scholarship, which he presumably would lose if he keeps failing his courses.)

(Here’s another tangent. Why is it that Spider-Man 2 shows Mary Jane acting onstage in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest?

I expect the ghost of Dr. Frederic Wertham might say this is a coded indication of gay sensibility in the film, but I don’t think so. One easy answer is that Earnest is in the public domain, so the filmmakers didn’t have to pay for the rights to excerpt a play. Nor did screenwriter Alvin Sargent have to invent an excerpt from some fictional play. In his column in The New York Times (July 11, 2003) critic Frank Rich points out the film’s positive attitude towards literature. “In Spider-Man 2 they seem determined to remind us that it is a civilization, not merely a crowd of extras, that is the target of attack. The hero, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), turns to poetry to woo his girl next door, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). She is an actress appearing in The Importance of Being Earnest” Rich might also have mentioned that Dr. Octopus’s wife Rosalie is an English teacher with an especial interest in the works of T. S. Eliot; it is after she dies that he goes mad, as if having symbolically lost the sensibility she represented.

But here I think is the real reason Earnest turns up in Spider-Man 2. In an excerpt we see Mary Jane perform, there is a reference to “secret lives.” Earnest is a comedy in which the two male leads tell false stories about themselves, and one even adopts a false name, in order to court young women (including the one MJ plays). In other words, this is a play involving secret identities. In the end one of the male leads even discovers the truth about his mysterious parentage, and hence his true identity. So surely you can see the relevance of Earnest to the story of a young man with two identities who loves a young women, and how they both come to accept his dual personas.

Spider-Man debuted in 1962; compare him to another iconic pop culture figure who first made the transition from novels to the movies that same year: James Bond. Not only is Bond presented as the embodiment of cool, which Peter Parker has never been, but he is also an emblem of economic success. Just how Bond does it is unclear: either he is independently wealthy, gets paid an enormous salary for a government employee, or has an unlimited expense account. Yet Bond seems to have all the trappings of wealth and the high life that he could want, as well as an endless succession of women as lovers. As noted, this is decidedly not true of Spider-Man. Then again, though serving his country, Bond is not particularly idealistic or spiritual: he is in fact a cold-blooded killer. Though he operates on behalf of his nation or the free world, Bond seems unconcerned with the welfare of individuals he does not personally know, whereas Spider-Man would risk his life for a stranger as a matter of moral principle. Bond has an “earthly” moral code and “earthly” rewards.

The ’60s were a time of prosperity, and Bond fits right in. Perhaps Peter Parker’s money worries reflect the fact that Stan Lee was a child of the Great Depression of the 1930s. (Now, of course, the movies’ concern with economic hardship reflect the problematic state of the U. S. economy since the year 2000.) But Lee and Ditko also seem to be questioning what is the point of following a career track to prosperity if it means sacrificing morality? In this, the Spider-Man 2 comic, created in the early 1960s, seems to anticipate the attitudes of the counterculture that arose among Baby Boomers later in that decade. (Many of you may wish here to consider how Lee’s and the Boomers’ attitudes towards careers and wealth may have changed again following the 1960s.)

But, you may argue, is the “dream” really out of reach for the movies’ Peter Parker, at least as far as true love is concerned?

Recall how the end of the third Star Trek movie explicitly reversed the apparent moral of the second. In the second “the one” ““ Spock ““ sacrifices himself for the sake of “the many.” In the third, “the many” ““ Kirk and the “Enterprise” crew ““ risk their lives for the sake of “the one,” to bring Spock back to life.

Similarly, the end of Spider-Man 2 reverses the seeming point of the end of the previous movie. At the end of the first Spider-Man 2 Peter rejects the idea of a romantic relationship with Mary Jane and tells her they can only be “friends.” He’s decided that if any of Spider-Man’s enemies found out who he was and that he loved her, her life would be endangered. (And indeed, the Green Goblin had nearly murdered her earlier in the movie.) I wasn’t the only one dissatisfied with this ending. Indeed, Peter’s happy smile as he walked away from the deeply distraught Mary Jane in the cemetery seemed to convey the wrong message: that loving a woman wasn’t important compared with Guy Stuff like beating up super-villains.)

But in the second movie, though Peter tries to keep Mary Jane from learning he is Spider-Man, she nonetheless learns the truth. (This is another parallel with Tim Burton’s Batman.) He insists that they cannot become a couple, and, indeed, she’s already been attacked in both films by super-villains who know she’s connected with Spider-Man/Peter Parker.

And so Mary Jane is set to marry her alternate choice, astronaut John Jameson, son of Jonah. There is a fancy wedding scene, conveying that the two Jameson men and their social circle represent the Establishment in wealth and prestige. Marrying into this world would be achieving the American dream of success. And the traditional end of a comedy is a wedding, about which the community gathers.

But this is the Wrong Wedding: this is the Old Order that Mary Jane must abandon, and so she does. Instead Mary Jane never arrives at the ceremony, but runs off in her wedding gown. Critic Andrew Sarris correctly points out to the feminist angle here: “If Mary Jane is to leave him her fianc¿ (at the altar as so many of her Hollywood sisters did in the past), she’ll have to do it on her own and without any help from Peter or the scriptwriters.” It’s entirely her decision. It’s like the end of The Graduate if Katharine Ross’s character had run out on her wedding without Dustin Hoffman’s character prompting her to do so.

Fleeing a ceremony exemplifying wealth and social success, Mary Jane arrives in the realm of poverty, the world of a person excluded from that society: Peter Parker’s apartment. There she tells him that she chooses him as the right man for her, and that she is willing to risk the possible dangers he warned her about. It’s notable that she’s still in the wedding gown: this scene isn’t literally a marriage, but figuratively it is the wedding that concludes the film, the union of the hero and heroine. She is in a sense proposing to him, and he accepts.

And why does this work for the movie? In his review of Spider-Man 2, Andrew Sarris gets the point exactly: He notes that Spider-Man and Mary Jane each at times face possible death, “a fate they face with superheroic sangfroid. This is the grace note of their final union ““ Mary Jane Watson is found to be worthy as much as he is found brave enough to make a commitment to his sweetheart, despite the danger in which his crime-fighting prowess places her. We’re back in the Middle Ages of knights and lady loves. . . .” Significantly, Sarris goes on to speak of “the overwhelming spirituality of the camera’s love affair with Ms. Dunst. I haven’t seen such luminous close-ups since the great screen stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Who would have thought that Mr. Raimi. . .would light up the screen with such a chaste depiction of love, and without a trace of lechery?”

Spider-Man 2 is not following the archetypal pattern of separating the “spiritual” higher moral mission from the “earthly” life of love and family. Peter and Mary Jane can be united because she has effectively joined his mission. Her courage and the strength of her love for Peter enables her to be willing to accept the potential dangers he and she would face together. As Sarris says, she has proved “worthy.” She participates in his mission by accepting it, and becoming Peter’s confidant and main support; maybe that’s one reason Sarris senses a “spirituality” in the way Mary Jane is depicted in the film. Sarris is also right that Peter demonstrates bravery in accepting Mary Jane’s offer of romance: having lost Uncle Ben, he is now risking further emotional pain should harm befall Mary Jane.

Now one might say that the happy ending of Spider-Man 2 is cheerfully ironic: Peter Parker had to renounce the “dream” in order to receive it. But has he really achieved the “American Dream”?

The Times review of political writer David Brooks’ book On Paradise Drive (June 23, 2004) quotes Brooks as writing, “Born in abundance, inspired by opportunity, nurtured in imagination, spiritualized by a sense of God’s blessing and call, and realized in ordinary life day by day, this Paradise Spell is the controlling ideology of American life. . .Just beyond the next ridge., just with the next entrepreneurial scheme or. . .the next political hero. . .or the next true love. . .there is this spot you can get to where all tensions will melt, all time pressures are relieved, and all contentment can be realized. . . .” The reviewer, Joyce Maynard, then asks, “Who would ever mistake that for a description of any country but the United States?”

That’s not Peter Parker’s United States. He’s never going to arrive at Paradise. The day after the final scene of Spider-Man 2, he’ll still have trouble making his rent, the Daily Bugle will still be smearing his reputation, and he still risks being gunned down any night by any common crook.

The difference is that now he has a loving companion with whom to share his life. Sam Raimi told Newsweek that “Peter’s living a life out of balance. He thinks he’s got to make this journey alone, but he doesn’t realize that to love someone is nor to shield them from the truth, but to share it with them.”

Yet there is no guarantee of living happily ever after with Mary Jane. Shortly before the final scene of Peter and MJ’s union, we see Harry Osborn confronting the (real? imagined?) ghost of his father, symbolically seeing Norman in place of his own reflection in a mirror, and (with further symbolism) finding the Green Goblin’s equipment behind that mirror. Even as Peter and Mary Jane happily acknowledge their love for each other, Peter is aware that Harry knows he’s Spider-Man, whom he holds responsible for Norman’s death. And Harry knows that Peter loves Mary Jane. The very kind of danger that Peter fears for MJ is already arising. (And how about the appearance of Dr. Curt Connors, complete ““ so to speak ““ with missing arm, in the new movie, in a clear set-up for Connors’ other self, the Lizard, to show up in Spider-Man 3?)

So Peter and Mary Jane face a future far from “paradise,” and perhaps it will never be attainable. At least they will find comfort in making the journey that Raimi mentions together.

So what kind of American hero is Spider-Man? Spider-Man is the hero of mature disillusionment, who strives to do what’s right despite the realization that simply having power does not ensure happiness, that one can make damaging mistakes, that one’s ability to change the world is necessarily limited, and that earthly “Paradise” may be forever out of reach. Spider-Man is the American hero who places morality above material success, who will sacrifice his own happiness for the welfare of the community of which he is a part. Spider-Man is not the ubermensch of the United States as the world’s only super-power. Spider-Man is the American Everyman, who would rather struggle in leading a morally upright life than lead a comfortable, morally complacent one. That’s the spirit of democracy, a system in which people, no matter of what social or economic level, ideally work together for the common welfare. In the comics and in the movies, Spider-Man 2 acknowledges that not everyone will achieve the “American Dream,” but there are more important things about being an American, and that with sufficient moral dedication, anyone can act heroically. Peter Parker is repeatedly castigated ““ even by comics writers and movie critics ““ as a nerd, a dork, a loser, a misfit. To understand Spider-Man 2 properly is to realize that dividing people into winners and losers according to their degree of “earthly” success is irrelevant. It’s how one handles the responsibilities that his or her abilities (powers, if you prefer), however great or small, give him or her that’s important.Spider-Man 2 thus communicates a surprisingly subversive point of view towards conventional thinking about the “American Dream.” Certainly it’s amazing that Sam Raimi and company can convey this message in a big budget movie produced by corporations like Sony and Marvel. The Newsweek cover story informs us that Tobey Maguire “earned only $4 million for the first movie,” was contracted to make the second film “for only $8 million,” but ended up getting “about $17 million.” Seems far removed from the philosophy of the movie, doesn’t it?

Spider-Man was a hero created in the 1960s who is vitally relevant today. And perhaps he is a pop culture figure who draws on an archetype that underlies another heroic figure who has fascinated readers for centuries. In the July 12-19 issue of The New Yorker, critic Anthony Lane, discussing Spider-Man 2, writes, “There is only one young man I can think of who was more torn about his purpose in life, and he, regrettably, was taken off the case by Laertes.” Lane is talking about Hamlet, and Frank Rich also described Peter Parker’s “inner equivocation he suffers over his role as a superhero” as “playing Hamlet.” I noted two columns ago that Stan Lee has said he was influenced by the bravura of Shakespeare’s language. In Peter Parker’s character, the 1960s youth who, as Roger Stern points out in that same column, questioned everything, perhaps we see another, possibly unconscious, influence of the Bard on the founder of the Marvel Age of Comics.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

What better subject could there be to mark the first anniversary of this column than the new Spider-Man 2 movie? Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times proclaimed it to be “the best superhero movie since the modern genre was launched with Superman (1978).” Critic Richard Schickel of Time (July 5, 2004) went even further, pronouncing it “probably the best special effects extravaganza since Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

In the immediate aftermath of seeing Spider-Man 2, I think it’s too early to judge whether it reaches a status as exalted as that. My enthusiastic responses on seeing the movie are still relatively fresh in my memory. Time must pass in order to judge how it matches up against Richard Donner’s Superman or Tim Burton’s Batman or even the first Spider-Man movie.

But Spider-Man 2 definitely belongs in the first rank of comics-based movies. Ebert perceptively refers to the “classical workmanship” of the film’s director, Sam Raimi, and its writers, screenwriter Alvin Sargent, and the three noted superhero aficionados credited with the story: novelist Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) and the television writer/producer team of Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (Smallville). Spider-Man 2 was built to last; I have little doubt that it will indeed be regarded as a classic in decades to come, while various other comics-based movies that misfired will recede into obscurity.

From the very first installment of this column, one of its concerns has been how the mainstream media evaluate comics and comics-based movies and television. To my surprise, the major film critics’ reviews of Spider-Man 2 that I’ve read have been warmly enthusiastic, with only occasional, minor traces of condescension towards the material.

Why is this? In Tom DeFalco’s book Comics Creators on Spider-Man (see Comics in Context #44), he observes that many of the comic’s writers see themselves as writing “The Adventures of Peter Parker,” more than the exploits of Spider-Man. Raimi and his writers followed the same route to success. Spider-Man 2 has brilliantly staged action scenes, but not as many as one might have expected from this kind of action-adventure blockbuster. Raimi and cohorts so successfully seize the audience’s attention with the story of Peter Parker’s life that it becomes the basis, indeed, the heart of their film. It’s what Ang Lee and his collaborators tried and failed to do with their Hulk movie: they neither created sufficient empathy for their lead characters nor successfully created suspenseful, exciting action sequences. Raimi’s new film succeeds on both counts.

What various critics said in their reviews bears this out. In Newsweek (June 28, 2004) Jeff Giles expresses his welcome astonishment that Spider-Man 2 is “a summer action flick that’s actually smart and deeply felt.” He goes on, “For a man directing a Fourth of July movie, Raimi spends an unusual amount of time letting emotions have center stage” and credits Raimi and company “for hunting for the highest common denominator” in their audience. Schickel comments that “the effects, though handsomely managed, don’t overwhelm the story and characters.”

Ebert notes that “the dialogue is more about emotion, love and values,” and asserts that “The movie demonstrates what’s wrong with a lot of other superhero epics. They focus on the super-powers, and short-change the humans behind them. (Has anyone ever been more boring, for instance, than Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne?)” Comics enthusiasts with knowledge of important work done with Superman and Batman will challenge Ebert’s assumption. But it is thanks to the example set by Stan Lee’s groundbreaking work with Spider-Man in the 1960s that later writers would delve into the personalities of the longrunning DC heroes.

Even New York Times critic A.O. Scott warmed to Spider-Man 2. The title of his review (June 29, 2004) sums up the point that the others are also making: “Putting Action after Feelings of a Superhero.” He declares himself “happy to report” that the movie’s “distinguishing features. . , are strong characters and honest feelings.” In contrast to other summer blockbusters, in Spider-Man 2, he says, “the extravagant action sequences are subordinate to the narrative rather than the point of the movie,” which he calls “a touching and disarming love story, full of grief, longing and sweet confusion.”

I wonder if there’s something more behind the positive critical reception that Spider-Man 2 has received. Perhaps it’s that there have been enough superhero movies over the last several years that film critics have grown more accustomed to the genre, and less likely to dismiss it out of hand. There have also been noteworthy recent movies in similar genres, like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter films. They’re learning how to “read” these genres. Rather than being put off by the costumes and fantasy elements, they’re learning to see the emotional and psychological elements underlying them. Scott refers to Spider-Man 2 as a “superhero allegory” with “surprising emotional realism.” “Allegory” is technically not the right word, but he is right to view this superhero story as a metaphor for emotional realities. In other words, they’re learning to appreciate Stan Lee’s achievement in transforming the superhero genre into a means of personal expression.

Spider-Man 2 is an excellent movie, possibly better than the first, as various critics have contended. But the first Spider-Man movie was quite good, too. Perhaps the real difference is that mainstream reviewers have grown more open to taking movies like these seriously.

THE FILM’S FOUNDATION

Possibly expecting Spider-Man 2 to be a kiddie movie, Times critic A.O. Scott brought his nearly eight-year-old son to a screening. Scott reported in his review that his son said afterwards, “But there was one part. . .that I really didn’t like.” Scott explains, “That was when Peter Parker threw his costume in the trash and declared that he was ‘Spider-Man’ no more. ‘He can’t do that,’ my son complained. ‘It’s not right. We need Spider-Man.'”

The string reaction Scott’s son had to this moment testifies to the ability of Spider-Man’s co-creator Stan Lee at his height as a storyteller to tap the emotions and concerns of his audience. Spider-Man 2 takes as its villain Doctor Octopus, an early creation of Lee and artist Steve Ditko. But the heart of this movie derives from Lee and artist John Romita, Sr.’s classic story “Spider-Man No More!” from The Amazing Spider-Man #50 (July, 1967).

In fact, I was surprised on the Saturday morning after the movie’s opening to see John Romita, Sr. appear on the Today show. The program did a split screen, placing Romita’s drawing of Peter Parker walking down the alleyway, his costume stuffed in a trash can, against a still image of the same scene from the film; Raimi had recreated the image exactly.

Actually, in the first Doctor Octopus story (Amazing Spider-Man #3, July 1963), he initially bested Spider-Man so badly that Peter Parker decided to quit his superhero career. It was listening to a speech given by the Human Torch (who is the same age as Parker but had been in the superhero business a bit longer) that refired Peter’s determination to carry on as a costumed crimefighter.

“Spider-Man No More” was a more thorough, far more dramatic treatment of the same idea of Peter Parker giving into despair, this time due not to defeat in combat but by the emotional and psychological toll that his years of being Spider-Man had taken on his personal life. I expect it is no coincidence that “Spider-Man No More” appeared in the fiftieth issue of the magazine. Stan Lee presumably sought to create a landmark event in the life of Spider-Man suitable for marking the anniversary of this unexpectedly successful series.

It likewise makes sense that Sam Raimi and his collaborators chose “Spider-Man No More” as the basis for their second movie. The first was about how Peter Parker became Spider-Man and a crimefighter; the second is about the point at which he wonders if he made the right choice for his life, whether it is worth the price he has to pay in his personal life, and whether it is still possible to go back.

I have a great deal to say about Spider-Man 2, but before I discuss the surprisingly iconoclastic themes of this movie, I want to devote this column to a different subject: the ways in which the movie versions of Spider-Man and his leading lady, Mary Jane Watson, differ from the traditional versions in the comics. The changes lead to somewhat different interpretations of these characters in the movies, as you shall see. (And, as usual, it will help if you’ve seen the movie first, since I will discuss much of the plot.)

PETER PARKER ZONES OUT

The first Spider-Man movie inspired some controversy by changing the nature of Spider-Man’s webbing. In the comics, Peter Parker devised “web fluid” which he projects from “web-shooters” in Spider-Man’s gloves. In the movies, Peter’s own body generates the web fluid, which shoots from his hands. This had a precedent: in the 1990s writer Peter David had his co-creation, Spider-Man 2099, the web-slinger of an alternate future, generate his webbing the same way. Similarly, the movie Spider-Man has tiny (presumably retractable) claws on his hands (and, I assume, his feet) that enable him to cling to walls. This, too, follows Peter David’s example with Spider-Man 2099. (But can these tiny claws really extend through the soles of his boots?) Back in the 1980s The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe instead stated that Spider-Man somehow (psionically, I’d think) controls the interatomic attraction between himself and the walls he clings to, but Marvel writers have taken no notice of this.

I would guess that Stan Lee wanted Spider-Man’s webbing to be artificial because he might have thought it too grotesque to have the fluid emerge from Spider-Man’s body. People who criticize the movie’s changes in the webbing argue that the fact that the comic book Peter invented the web fluid demonstrates his scientific brilliance. Indeed it does, though it is somewhat hard to believe that, once he was endowed with his spider powers, Peter succeeded in figuring out how to create this amazing webbing virtually overnight.

Longtime Spider-Man readers are familiar with scenes in which Spider-Man runs out of web fluid. I wonder what the equivalent would be for the movie Spider-Man. Does he lose weight by generating lots of web fluid? Could he dangerously dehydrate himself by expending too much of the fluid? If he creates a large web, does he feel hungry or thirsty?

Spider-Man 2 persuades me there is at least one advantage to the movies’ version of the webbing. In this second movie Spider-Man does indeed come up empty on a few occasions when he tries to shoot webbing. Roger Ebert said in his review that “It’s kind of neat that Spider-Man never does find out why his web-throwing [sic] ability sometimes fails him.” In fact, a doctor explains the reason onscreen. Peter’s doubts about whether he should continue his career as Spider-Man are subconsciously blocking his ability to produce the webbing.

Now, consider what the web fluid looks like before it solidifies into webbing. (In his review in The New Yorker, critic Anthony Lane jokes that he’s glad the movie wasn’t titled Spider-Man 2: Still Not Quite Sure What to Do with All His Sticky Stuff.)

There may be a conscious or subconscious sexual metaphor behind this sticky near-white liquid Spidey shoots. (Consider too the scene in the first movie, in which Peter tries to keep Aunt May from seeing the “experiments” he’s conducting in his room, which we see filled with those sticky strands of webbing.) So, Spider-Man’s self-doubts are rendering him symbolically impotent. It’s likewise significant that it is when Doctor Octopus kidnaps Mary Jane that Peter’s powers finally return full force, as if in a surge of sexual feeling for her.

Spider-Man’s self-doubts even prevent him from clinging to walls, So the tiny claws must indeed be retractable and have failed to emerge. Actually, in this case the Marvel Universe Handbook’s implication that Spider-Man’s clinging abilities are psionic would have worked even better in this context.

What surprised me is that once Peter gives up being Spider-Man, he has to wear glasses again. In the comics, Peter still wore glasses after gaining his spider-powers, but, after breaking his glasses in one issue, discovered that he no longer needed them. There was no explanation, and it’s likely that Lee and Ditko simply thought he’d look better without them. In contrast, the first movie made it clear that the metamorphosis Peter underwent after being bitten by the genetically altered spider cleared up his faulty vision.

To prove to the movie audience that Peter has not just returned to wearing glasses on a personal whim, when his powers fully return, Raimi gives us a shot from Peter’s point of view, demonstrating that now his vision is blurry with the glasses, and clear without them.

This all reminds me of a theory that John Byrne had about Superman: that his powers were actually psionic. Byrne never explicitly stated this in any of his Superman stories (DC surely would not have let him), but he implied it in a story line in which Superman becomes an amnesiac on Apokolips and is unable to utilize his powers.

So it would seem that when Peter gives up his Spider-Man career, he actually loses his superhuman powers. This takes Stan Lee’s original “Spider-Man No More” story even further on a literal level. Does this mean that all the physical changes that Peter Parker underwent have gone into a sort of remission? Is it possible those tiny retractable claws have entirely ceased to exist?

It also takes “Spider-Man No More” further thematically. It suggests that Peter has chosen to revert to the person he was before he became Spider-Man, the kid in the glasses. In becoming Spider-Man, Peter not only gained superhuman abilities but also, eventually, his sense of duty and responsibility. In forsaking his life as Spider-Man, Peter is rejecting that sense of duty. The super-powers can be read as metaphors for the ability of an adult to effect change; certainly Spider-Man’s sense of duty stands for an adult’s moral responsibilities. In abandoning his Spider-Man career, Peter may be consciously seeking a normal life, but symbolically he is attempting to return to childhood. And this can’t be done.

Certainly Raimi and the writers make clear that giving up being Spider-Man doesn’t solve Peter’s personal problems: they immediately show him experiencing yet more examples of his characteristic bad luck. One could argue that giving up being Spider-Man is a necessary step in his maturation: that he must reconnect to people in his personal life and pay attention to responsibilities at work and school and to his friends and family..

But in showing Peter visually reverting to his pre-Spidey self, the kid in the glasses, Raimi & Company are making clear that he has really taken a step backwards, retreating from personal growth.

They also strongly dramatize the power that guilt has on Peter Parker’s psyche. Take the scene in which Peter witnesses a mugging and forces himself to walk away without intervening. If this happened to non-super-powered people like you or me, we probably couldn’t do anything to help save looking for a policeman. But this scene reminded me of something I see every week: people who pass by beggars on the street without even acknowledging them. Peter Parker cannot so easily ignore other people in distress.

Later, Peter comes across the scene of a building on fire with people trapped inside. This should remind the viewer of a similar situation in the first movie, in which Spider-Man went to the rescue. Raimi dramatizes Peter’s crisis of conscience in this second fire scene. Peter begins to pull open his shirt, as if by automatic reflex, and is surprised to remember he isn’t wearing his costume, or, metaphorically, he has given up that side of his identity. But he nevertheless goes into the burning building as himself and rescues a child. Peter learns afterwards that someone else died inside; perhaps had Peter come as Spider-Man with his full powers, he would have found and saved this victim, too. So arguably once again someone has died through Peter’s failure to act as fully as he could have. It is as if signifying that until Peter reassumes his Spider-Man persona, his efforts to fulfill his moral duty will be inadequate.

Over the Fourth of July weekend I looked in on some episodes in the Sci-Fi Channel’s The Twilight Zone marathon, and came across Rod Serling’s episode “Walking Distance,” in which an adult in what today would be termed a midlife crisis literally travels back in time to the days of his childhood and discovers he cannot remain there. Serling’s closing narration acknowledges the longing to undo “growing up” and rejects it as impossible.

In making Spider-Man’s powers dependent on the state of Peter Parker’s psyche, Raimi and his writers are saying that Spider-Man is more than a set of physical powers. Being Spider-Man is a state of mind. In this movie Peter Parker tries to repress the Spider-Man side of his personality, and it works for a while. But in the end he has to accept that Spider-Man is now who he is; he cannot go back to the time before.

In Amazing Spider-Man #50 Stan Lee gave Peter’s decision to be “Spider-Man No More” a twist that the movie does not deal with at all. The comics’ Peter convinces himself that being Spider-Man was actually a sign of immaturity, and that by giving up his costumed career, he is putting childish things aside and facing adult responsibility at last. Perhaps this is a metaphor for the adult who faces such difficulties in achieving the idealistic goals he had as a youth that he is tempted to abandon their pursuit and settle for a more practical way of life. Perhaps “Spider-Man No More” reflected Stan Lee’s own, well-known doubts in 1961, the turning point of his life, as to whether he should continue writing comics. One could even read this story as a metaphor for the superhero comics reader’s own dilemma as he grows older: am I getting too old to be reading this stuff?

But the comics Peter Parker had gotten it backwards. Even if the superhero genre began as a means of entertaining children, the Marvel Revolution redefined the superhero as a sign of accepting and implementing the responsibilities of adults to their community. The moral ideals we are taught as children retain validity in adult life. Stan Lee in the comics and Sam Raimi in the movies may treat Peter Parker’s “Spider-Man No More” identity crisis in different ways, but they, and Peter, end up with the same solution.

LAUGH, SPIDEY, LAUGH

New Yorker critic Anthony Lane comments that “What with the mournful [Alfred] Molina,” who plays Doctor Octopus, “the hazed-over [Kirsten] Dunst,” who plays Mary Jane, “and the puffy uncertainties of [Tobey] Maguire, “who plays Peter Parker, “we in the audience are the only ones who still believe, without qualification, in thrill and spill.”

Lane is onto something here. Something important is missing from the portrayals of all three major characters.

Certainly the two Spider-Man movies convey great, visceral joy in the scenes of Spider-Man swinging through the city on his webs, conveying the kind of speed and acrobatic movement that the static comics page can only begin to suggest. In the first film Peter Parker had moments of infectious glee as he tested out his newfound ability to leap from building to building.

But apart from that, the movies’ Peter Parker seems to take no pleasure in being Spider-Man. The joyfulness of the spectacular web-swinging sequences is the director’s, the CGI crew’s, and the audience’s, but Spider-Man himself does not indicate he’s enjoying himself.

Similarly, Spider-Man 2 is full of humor. Whereas in the first movie J. Jonah Jameson seemed a peripheral character, here he comes into his own as the colorful comedic figure we know from the comics. (Indeed, Raimi and his writers seem to make a point of giving all the recurring characters more to do, ranging from Aunt May’s greatly enlarged role to Betty Brant’s getting more scenes in which to do walk-ons. The movies’ Norman and Harry Osborn may not have the kind of hairstyle that Steve Ditko gave them ““ in real life, does anyone? ““ but it’s amusing to see a live action Betty Brant sporting her distinctive Ditkoesque hairdo.)

The movie gets plenty of comedic mileage out of the everyday mishaps that beset Peter Parker in both his identities. One high point is the scene in the elevator after Spider-Man, temporarily unable to emit his webbing, has to use it to get down from a high building. Unwilling to consider the possibility that this is the real Spider-Man, his fellow passenger assumes Spidey is a masquerader and asks about his costume. A weary Spider-Man, perhaps grateful for someone to talk to, confesses to certain uncomfortable aspects of his outfit.But notice that even here, Spider-Man is not making jokes. He’s simply stating the truth, which turns out to be funny. In his first battle with Doctor Octopus at the bank, Spider-Man gets off a few lame bits of repartee. Otherwise, this Spider-Man is no comedian at all.

In my review of Tom DeFalco’s new Comics Creators on Spider-Man, I noted how writers Marv Wolfman, Roger Stern, and Paul Jenkins all emphasize the importance of Spider-Man’s sense of humor. Stern speaks of the side of Spider-Man’s personality that he compares to Bugs Bunny. Like Bugs, Spider-Man outwits and mocks self-important, violent, often bigger opponents. This should remind us that Spider-Man is what Kurt Busiek has called an “urban trickster.” He’s a positive, benevolent version of the trickster archetype. (The Joker is a negative version.) Hence, humor is an essential part of his character. Jenkins even argues that it is Peter Parker’s ability to laugh at his misfortunes that enables him to act as Spider-Man.

The first two movies portray their villains, Norman Osborn/Green Goblin and Otto Octavius/Doctor Octopus as modern Jekyll/Hydes. This, indeed, is true to their origins in the comic books. But Spider-Man/Peter Parker also has a dual personality. The difference between Spider-Man and these two villains is that in the villains’ cases, the evil personality entirely supplants the good one. In contrast, Spider-Man’s persona and Peter Parker’s are integrated with each other. But the movies treat Spider-Man as exhibiting the same personality whether he is in costume or not. He may act in a more spectacular manner as Spider-Man, but he still seems as introverted, even glum, as Peter Parker does.

In contrast, in the comics, Spider-Man and Peter Parker are traditionally portrayed as different aspects of the same personality. (Marv Wolfman points out in DeFalco’s book that the two sides of Peter/Spidey even have different styles of humor.) Spider-Man is more extroverted, more uninhibited, and, wearing his mask, can get away with saying things that the more subdued Peter wouldn’t. Like a comedian who uses jokes to cope with his unhappy past, Peter Parker finds a means of escape from life’s everyday miseries through becoming Spider-Man. This certainly does not mean that Spider-Man never has problems or suffers tragedy. But as Spider-Man, Peter Parker can swing acrobatically around the city, and physically defeat his adversaries in combat. The comics have long made the point that Parker enjoys the freedom that being Spider-Man affords. And certainly Parker exults in Spider-Man’s humor. Being Spider-Man is a release for the usually downtrodden Peter Parker.

Spider-Man is not only in the tradition of Bugs Bunny, but of live action silent movie comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd: “little guys” who contend with bigger, more powerful opponents and end up performing spectacular physical feats. Spidey is also fits into the tradition of the fast-talking comedian in talking pictures like Bob Hope or Woody Allen, who makes fun of his adversaries. Whereas Hope and Allen portrayed comedic cowards, Spider-Man is like a fusion between the smart aleck comedian and the traditional action hero. He can outdo his nemesis both verbally and physically.

Spider-Man’s sense of comedy is also yet another factor that set him apart from the stolid DC superheroes of the time like Superman. It’s true that Batman and Robin from the 1940s to the end of the 1960s would engage in humorous banter while fighting bad guys. But Stan Lee’s Spider-Man had an individual style all his own, or, rather, Stan Lee’s own, which subsequent generations of Spider-writers learned to imitate. That style has been watered down over the decades, until today there’s nothing vivid or surprising about Spider-Man’s repartee in the comics. Maybe that’s why Spider-Man isn’t witty at all in the movies.

Lee and Ditko’s 1960s Spider-Man was an ironic take on the standard conventions of the superhero genre. Irony can be grim: Peter Parker was inadvertently responsible for the murder of his uncle. But irony can also be humorous, as in Spider-Man’s jibes at his enemies or at the absurd aspects of the idea of a guy dressing up as a spider to fight crime. Irony is part of Stan Lee’s and Spider-Man’s world views. Spider-Man’s humor expresses an important side of his outlook on life. Spider-Man’s comedian side is such an essential part of his character that it’s baffling that the movie almost entirely ignores it.

Perhaps it has to do with Raimi’s focus on the “great responsibility” theme. His Spider-Man is so focused on his moral duty, and so driven by guilt, that being Spider-Man is no emotional release for Peter Parker at all. The Spider-Man costume is merely his uniform for doing his job. In or out of costume, he is still the same gloomy soul.

Maybe this will change. The Spider-Man of the first movie decides that his duty precludes the possibility of love with Mary Jane. By the end of the second movie, Parker has decided he can have both. I wonder if in the third movie he will have achieved enough balance in his life that he can allow himself to make jokes, to cast off inhibitions, and, when he is not beset by disaster, to have a good laugh.

YOSEMITE OCK

In Newsweek‘s June 28, 2004 cover story on Spider-Man 2, Alfred Molina says, “I felt very strongly about keeping the rather dry, sardonic humor he has in the comic books.” To which my reaction was: what the hell is he talking about? Stan Lee’s Doctor Octopus is not known for having any sense of humor, and subsequent writers have followed his lead. He instead indulges in Lee’s standard kind of dialogue for his more intelligent villains: a combination of chest-thumping boasts, egocentric self-praise, grandiose visions of his goals, dire threats, contemptuous insults, and boilerplate bluster. Maybe this is the sort of thing Molina finds funny, but it doesn’t fit the description of “dry, sardonic humor.”

However, Molina is on target with his other observation about Octopus in Newsweek: “He’s a bit like Richard III, who tells you exactly what he’s going to do, how he’s going to do it, and how he feels about it. Like all great villains, he’s completely transparent.” In DeFalco’s book, Stan Lee talks about how Shakespeare’s language influenced his own writing. While Lee’s Doc Ock doesn’t reach the grandiose heights of Doctor Doom, Molina is quite correct in intuiting that Lee was attempting to endow Ock with an elevated, theatrical speaking style comparable to that of Shakespearean villains. (The comics’ Spider-Man is Shakespearean in his own way, with his characteristic self-searching soliloquies.)

As I mentioned in one of my 1602 columns, this kind of stylized language seems to be out of favor nowadays, and all too often Lee and other Marvel writers made it seem corny. But Doc Ock’s tirades are important to the comedic side of Spider-Man. Ock is Spider-Man’s straight man, as are many of Spidey’s other foes. Doc Ock represents the dark side of the ubermensch concept: the superhuman who sees himself as superior to ordinary people. Spider-Man, though, is the superhuman as everyman, who remains down to earth, grounded, one of us, and who fights on our behalf. So it is right and appropriate that Spider-Man forsakes dramatic, elevated language for colloquial humor, and cuts Doctor Octopus’s self-important boasting to ribbons with his sharp shafts of ridicule. It’s like Yosemite Sam yelling that he’s the roughest, toughest, sharp-shootingest hombre west of the Rio Grande, only to be informed by Bugs Bunny, “What a maroon.”

In an interview she gave before the first Spider-Man movie opened, Kirsten Dunst said that she originally thought she would be playing Spider-Man’s first real girlfriend, Gwen Stacy. Now there is testimony to the strength of the Spider-Man legend in American popular culture. Baby Boomers may not like to think about it, but Gwen Stacy died before Kirsten Dunst was born. And yet Dunst knew about Gwen.

Yet perhaps Dunst was intuiting something about the Mary Jane of the movies. The movie MJ has the same name and hair color as the original comics’ Mary Jane. As in the comics, the movies’ Mary Jane lived next door to the Parkers, had an unhappy family life, and went into acting and modeling. She eventually learns that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, and by the end of Spider-Man 2 Dunst’s MJ even calls him “tiger,” the comic book Mary Jane’s trademark pet name for Peter. (“Oh, Peter,” Gerry Conway once had the comics’ Mary Jane affectionately say, “I call you tiger because you’re not.”)

But other than that, the movie Mary Jane is very different from Stan Lee’s co-creation. The original comics version of MJ did not go to high school with Peter, though the Ultimate Spider-Man continuity makes her his classmate.

More importantly, the movie Mary Jane does not have the sassy, sensual, good-humored personality with which Stan Lee endowed her, and which won over readers’ affections.

In the original comics Peter Parker did not meet Gwen Stacy or Mary Jane Watson until he started college. While Steve Ditko was still drawing and plotting the series, Gwen began as a variation on Peter’s high school classmate Liz Allan: a snooty girl contemptuous of this new arrival. Subsequently, under the team of Stan Lee and artist John Romita, Sr., Gwen evolved into Peter Parker’s first true love. Lee and Romita turned her into their image of the perfect woman: beautiful, sweet, without faults. Lee says in the DeFalco book that Gwen was the woman Peter should have married.

In contrast, Mary Jane appears to have been the “Bad Girl,” or, rather, the “Not-as-Good Girl” to serve as counterpoint to Gwen’s “Good Girl.” Mary Jane was a “party girl,” though she wasn’t really bad. In 1960s comics under the Comics Code, she could hardly be “bad,” anyway: she couldn’t have been shown sleeping around, although her dalliance with Harry Osborn did not reflect well on her. Gwen and Mary Jane were like Spider-Man’s answer to Betty and Veronica in Archie, or maybe like the 1950s-1970s versions of Lois Lane and Lana Lang. Each duo was competing over the hero, but readers were meant to see Betty and Lois as the worthier of each pair.

What made Mary Jane less perfect than Gwen by the standards of that time was her apparent lack of moral seriousness: the early MJ just seemed to be out for a good time. The 1960s Mary Jane was also more sexually aggressive than Gwen. There was no hint that any of these characters were sleeping together, but it was very clear that Mary Jane exulted in the sexual side of her being. Despite her equally short outfits, and a particularly sexy dance sequence early on (Amazing Spider-Man #47), Gwen was more decorous about such matters.

So Gwen was the Ideal Girlfriend, but, not surprisingly, Mary Jane was more vivid and interesting as a character; her scenes were more fun to read than Gwen’s. As Lee acknowledges in the DeFalco book, the readers responded to Mary Jane more than he had intended.

As a genuine traditionalist, Roger Stern, as he states once more in the DeFalco book, has long opposed Mary Jane’s marriage to Peter in the comics. Stern still realizes that Mary Jane was the (rather tame) “Bad Girl” to Gwen’s “Good Girl,” and insists that Mary Jane should only act as a “spoiler” who resurfaces from time to time to complicate Peter’s life.

In the early 1970s John Romita and writer Gerry Conway decided to shake up the Spider-Man series by having the Green Goblin kill Gwen. This took place in the celebrated sequence at a New York City bridge (in Amazing Spider-Man #121-122 in 1973) that was restaged, with Mary Jane and a happier denouement, in the first Spider-Man movie. (Writer Gerry Conway, who killed Gwen and ““ temporarily, as it turned out ““ Norman Osborn, and turned Harry Osborn into the second Green Goblin, is the great unacknowledged source for the two Spider-Man movies.)

This storyline assured the immortality of Gwen Stacy as a character. Stan Lee had put Gwen up on a pedestal, and it worked in a decade before feminism took hold in American popular culture. But perfect Gwen was too two-dimensional to work as a character in later decades. Killing her off was the best thing for her character. It seems more appropriate for Gwen to seem perfect as the saintly deceased girlfriend, an icon rather than a living human being.

With Gwen gone, Mary Jane was the obvious candidate to become the series’ new leading lady. Conway even did a sequence that seems to anticipate the future, in which Peter, grieving over Gwen’s death, enters an apartment and a somber Mary Jane closes the door after them. Even despite a long period in which Mary Jane was absent from the series, no other credible candidate for leading lady emerged. (Anyone else remember Cissy Ironwood? You see my point.) One could even argue that the Black Cat took over MJ’s role as the Bad Girl, and the Cat really was bad: she was a criminal and she slept around!

By introducing the idea that Mary Jane had figured out that Peter Parker was Spider-Man, Tom DeFalco set the character on her new path in the comics. He also established her unhappy childhood and the nasty father who turns up in the first movie. DeFalco turned Mary Jane into Peter’s confidante, who shared his secret and could empathize with his unhappiness thanks to her own. Mary Jane now had a new depth and seriousness that made it easier to regard her as a potential leading lady for the series. Unlike Gwen, Mary Jane had proved capable of growth and evolution as a character. Although DeFalco had not intended it, he had set her on the road that led to her marriage to Peter in the comics later in the 1980s.

In his subsequent graphic novel, Spider-Man: Parallel Lives, Gerry Conway took DeFalco’s concept further, establishing that MJ had learned that Peter was Spider-Man on the night of Uncle Ben’s death. Conway made it clear that Mary Jane’s carefree “party girl” persona was a construct like Peter Parker’s Spider-Man identity. It was her own “mask” through which she could escape for a time from the unhappiness that scarred her childhood. Of course, MJ’s public persona involved a constant, irreverent wit. It was a variation of Stan Lee’s sense of humor, just as Spider-Man’s was.

So, Conway’s point was that Peter and Mary Jane had each developed dual identities, and that they were actually soulmates, made for each other.

But just as the title character of Spider-Man 2 lacks his comics’ counterpart’s rapid-fire repartee, the movies’ Mary Jane shows few signs of the irreverence and extroverted sexuality that made the comics character so appealing and distinctive. In fact, the filmmakers could easily have tied the movie MJ’s insistence on marrying John Jameson to the comic book MJ’s carefree, fun-seeking public persona. In denial about her continuing feelings for Peter, the movie Mary Jane could have assumed her happy-go-lucky facade in trying to convince herself and others that she’d just go on to the next good marital prospect.

No wonder that the first movie’s Green Goblin ended up dangling MJ from a bridge. It seems appropriate that Kirsten Dunst goes from Mary Jane’s deep red hair in the first film to a blonder color in the new movie. Is Dunst’s character really closer to being Gwen Stacy than the original Lee-Romita version of Mary Jane Watson?Yet the movies don’t turn Mary Jane into the idealized figure that Gwen became. Though in the second movie her face seems to be on posters all around the city, the films’ Mary Jane remains grounded and down to Earth. Peter Parker never told Gwen Stacy he was Spider-Man; perhaps, in keeping with attitudes in the 1960s, he thought she couldn’t handle the truth about him. (Women were considered fragile back then: Peter feared if his Aunt May found out he was spider-Man, she would drop dead!) In the comics, Mary Jane discovered his dual identity on her own, eventually grew to accept the fact, became Peter’s confidant and their friendship evolved into love. She could share his troubles, whereas we never found out whether Gwen could.

The movie Mary Jane proves equally capable of accepting Peter as Spider-Man, and in fact, insists that she can share his potential dangers of his life. In this she is indeed like the Mary Jane of the comics as the character evolved in the 1980s.

And has anyone noticed how the end of Spider-Man 2 duplicates the end of Tim Burton’s first Batman? In each case, the masked hero does not want to reveal his secret identity to the leading lady, but she finds out anyway. Each film ends with the leading lady committed to a relationship with the costumed hero, and waiting as he goes off on another mission. But as Alfred drives her away, Vicki Vale seems accepting but not entirely happy about the situation; she will not return in the next Batman film. On the other hand, Mary Jane enthusiastically approves as Spider-Man, in response to a police siren, swings out to help. This is a partnership that could last.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

On the very day that Spider-Man 2 opened, I filled out and handed in the necessary paperwork for teaching my course in “Comics as Literature” at New York University this fall. NYU is the model for Empire State University, where Peter Parker attended college in the comics. In the movies, however, Peter attends my own alma mater, Columbia University. (Though the movie doesn’t say so, he must be on full scholarship. How else could he afford it?) Nowadays I live not too far from Forest Hills, the site of Peter’s high school, Midtown High (before the current Marvel administration transplanted it to Manhattan, perhaps hoping no one would notice). All this and I share Spider-Man’s first name. Talk about parallel lives.

If you’re interested in the course, it’s listed at NYU’s website.

–Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

To review a superhero movie like the brand new blockbuster Spider-Man 2 for this column, I intend to examine it in the context of the comics upon which it is based. What does Spider-Man 2 draw from the history of over forty years’ worth of Spider-Man comics? How does it reinterpret the comics’ themes and characters, for better or for worse?

The opening credit sequence for both Spider-Man movies prominently feature the line “Based on the comic book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.” (You’ll notice that’s significantly not the same as “Based on the comic book series created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko,” which, presumably, would have a different legal meaning.) Lee and Ditko created Spider-Man, but the movies also draw on elements of the series as they evolved over the following four decades in the hands of a long succession of other writers and artists. (For example, the climactic confrontation in the first movie, with the Green Goblin threatening to drop Mary Jane Watson from a New York City bridge, is an uncredited reworking of Gerry Conway and Gil Kane’s story of the death of Gwen Stacy in the comics.)

By examining these different writers’ and artists’ intentions in chronicling Spider-Man, we can gain insights into how the series has changed over the years, and how Sam Raimi’s movie versions reinterpret this long heritage.

The DVD set for Columbia and Marvel’s first Spider-Man movie includes a featurette on the history of Spider-Man in the comics. Stan Lee is interviewed, of course, and, not unexpectedly, Spider-Man’s original artist, Steve Ditko, who has always refused to give interviews, is not. But John Romita, Sr., the second artist on Amazing Spider-Man, speaks on camera. As for Lee and Romita’s successors on the characters, the documentary leaps through time to Todd McFarlane, who drew Spider-Man in the late 1980s and early 1990s. John Byrne, who worked on Spider-books shortly before the current Marvel administration took over, shows up. And everyone else in the documentary is a writer, artist, or Marvel executive who has worked on Spider-Man in recent years.

This, it would seem, is the official Marvel history of Spider-Man in the comics. There are the hallowed days when Stan Lee wrote the series, and there’s Now, with, it would seem, almost nothing (and no one) that the present Powers That Be consider to be of note in between. I have encountered this corporate sort of attitude before: that what is published Now is better than what was published Back Then before We took over. But this is not necessarily true.

Those who find this version of history to be so riddled with gaps as to resemble Swiss cheese should instead direct their attention to a new book by one of the people omitted from the Spider-Man DVD. Titan Books has just published Comics Creators on Spider-Man, a collection of interviews with Spider-Man‘s leading writers and pencillers by Tom DeFalco, who himself was an important editor and writer on the character.

Perhaps more importantly, DeFalco was also a longtime editor in chief at Marvel, who restored stability and communal feeling to Marvel editorial after the end of his predecessor’s troubled regime, and presided over one of the publishing division’s most prosperous period. Nonetheless, in yet another example of the Bizarro World rules that now govern the comics business, all that DeFalco is currently doing in comics is writing a series he co-created, Spider-Girl, a well-crafted series about an alternate timeline in which Peter Parker has a teenage daughter who has inherited his powers and succeeded him as a costumed crimefighter. (Marvel has recently released a digest-size paperback collection of the first Spider-Girl stories, if you’d like to see for yourself.)

But just as another Spider-editor in exile, Danny Fingeroth, found a new outlet for his knowledge and experience in comics by writing Superman on the Couch (see Comics in Context #41), Tom DeFalco has now compiled this excellent new book about Spider-Man, with interviews that are unfailingly informative, good-humored, and entertaining. It may amuse American readers that this book about a leading American superhero, since it is published by Titan, a British company, is full of British spellings (like “colour” for “color”).

Now you may ask why Marvel doesn’t publish a book like this itself. That’s a good question, but perhaps it’s just as well they didn’t. DeFalco leaves no gaps in his coverage: he deals with every period of Spider-Man’s comics history from his 1962 debut right through the present. There’s no Ditko interview, of course, and an editor’s note explains that contemporary Spider-Man writer J. Michael Straczynski declined to be interviewed. But virtually every other living major writer and penciller associated with Spider-Man is in the book. I would have liked to have seen interviews with some of the principal editors in Spider-Man’s history. such as Jim Salicrup and Danny Fingeroth, as well. But I can understand that there might not have been room, and the creative roles of editors Salicrup, Fingeroth, Ralph Macchio, and even DeFalco himself, are often mentioned by the interviewees.

This is not necessarily a book for people who only know Spider-Man from the movies or even from Spider-Man comics of the last few years. Though DeFalco provides helpful sidebars explaining various characters and story lines from the Spider-Man canon, this is the sort of book that contains not one but two discussions of a character as obscure as the Rocket Racer. So this is really a book for comics aficionados who already have some sense and knowledge of the four decade sweep of Spider-Man history and want to learn more. I would like to think there’s enough of an audience for this sort of book. Its potential readership could range from old-time fans who may no longer read Spider-Man comics but want to read more about the stories they remember from past decades, to new readers who are beginning to explore Marvel’s Essential and Masterworks reprint collections and want to learn more about Marvel’s rich past.

Unlike many interviewers in the comics press, DeFalco gives the reader a sense of what his interviewees are like as people: he asks them how they first discovered and came to love comics and the Spider-Man series in particular. He questions them about how they broke into comics, and I find it interesting to see how the process changed so considerably over the decades. Len Wein’s interview disturbingly points out how DC was initially more resistant towards the wave of Baby Boomers seeking to break into comics: he recalls that he and his friend, fellow writer Marv Wolfman, were unjustly suspected of stealing artwork from DC and fired simply because they were young. But Marvel seems to have been more welcoming, and DC eventually became more open to new talent. Even into the 1980s, it was still relatively easy to break into comics, with people working on fanzines, making personal contacts in the business, and sometimes even being invited to apply for a job. (That’s how it happened to me.) But times changed as the business grew: J. Marc DeMatteis reminisces affectionately about a devastatingly critical letter Paul Levitz sent him about his first submission in the 1980s, and artist Mark Buckingham recalls how formidable the odds against breaking in appeared by the decade’s end. By the end of the book, Brian Michael Bendis is saying how it took him nine years of trying to become an “overnight success”!

Not surprisingly, DeFalco is interested in exploring the craft of writing and drawing comics, so people seeking to make their careers in the business may find helpful hints from this book. (However, considering the depressed state of the business, maybe they should look elsewhere than comics for work! In his interview Ron Frenz recalls how he gave up a steady job in animation to go into comics. It’s hard to imagine someone doing that nowadays.)

Now, this is not a book that deals in the kind of lit crit analysis that is the stock in trade of this column. Nonetheless, there are gems to be mined in each of the interviews in DeFalco’s book. Let me be your tour guide and point out and comment on some that impressed me. (And then go get the book and find your own favorites.)

The interviews are arranged in chronological order, from the earliest people who worked on Spider-Man to the most recent. Hence it is Spider-Man’s co-creator, Stan Lee, who leads off the book. Now Lee’s interviews vary considerably in quality. There are those in which he is clearly just recycling his rote answers perfected over the decades of talking to the press. But Lee can be much more forthcoming and insightful when speaking with an interviewer with real knowledge of comics and with whom he feels comfortable. Tom DeFalco, his longtime professional colleague, with whom Lee has even worked on stories, fills the bill. I find DeFalco’s interview an illuminating supplement to themes in Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon’s admirable biography of Lee (see Comics in Context #15 and 16).

Asked about influences on his writing, Stan Lee names Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs (as if to support Alan Moore’s theory that these authors wrote stories that were forebears of the superhero genre) as well as Mark Twain (which may benefit students of the history of American humor who may try to draw a line from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to Peter Parker). Lee cites great pulp characters who were proto-superheroes, including the Shadow and (of course) the Spider.

“Believe it or not,” Lee continues, “I also read Charles Dickens”; oh, I believe it. Dickens wrote fiction published in serial form, combined melodrama and humor, wrote coming-of-age stories about young heroes, set much of his work in the great metropolis of his country, and, consciously or intuitively, continually wrote stories along mythic patterns. Certainly I see the connection.

As for Shakespeare, Lee said he didn’t understand most of it until later in his life, but that “I loved the sound of his verse, the rhythm and the way his words came together. . . . That kind of dialogue sounded so dramatic to me. I’m kind of corny myself so I related to it.” This also makes sense. Lee’s understanding of Shakespeare’s content may be limited: I hope he’s joking in his apparent inability to distinguish between great poetry and “corn.” Still, he is clearly influenced by the sound of his language, in his grandiose story titles, in the elevated language of characters like Thor, the Silver Surfer and Doctor Doom, and even in the colloquial humor of characters like Spider-Man and the Thing, serving a similar purpose as the prose dialogue of Shakespearean clowns.

One potentially touchy topic is the question of whether Lee considers Steve Ditko to be Spider-Man’s co-creator. Lee’s answer is revealing in its ambiguity. He accepts Ditko’s contention that he is the co-creator because he designed the character’s visual appearance. In that respect, Lee agrees that Ditko is co-creator; here he is perhaps also bowing to the current belief in the comics industry that the original artist should get creator credit. Nonetheless, Lee also notes that “in my heart of hearts, I still feel that the guy who comes up with the original idea for something is the guy who created it.”

Showing his way with words, Lee describes his intention in creating Spider-Man with admirable conciseness: “I just wanted to do what I thought would be the first realistic superhero.” Of course, the Fantastic Four had preceded Spider-Man, but this nonetheless sums up perfectly what the revolutionary impact of Spider-Man was for solo superhero series.

Yet Lee also points to how what seems a revolutionary event in American popular culture may not appear so dramatic, even to its own instigator, at the time. Recalling how there were new trends for different genres in comics every few years, Lee says that when Fantastic Four became commercially successful, “I just assumed that it was the time for a superhero trend. I never thought it would last more than two or three years, if that long.” What might he have done differently had he known these characters would still be popular forty years hence ““ and making millions for their owners?

Lee also shows us that a writer’s creations do not always work the way he (consciously) intends them to. Asked to compare Spider-Man’s first real girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, to Mary Jane Watson, Lee praises Gwen as an ideal woman and declares that she would have made “the perfect wife” for Peter. Yet he confesses that despite his efforts with Gwen, the readers preferred Mary Jane, whom he describes as “hip and cool.” Perhaps the readers were right: Gwen was depicted as Lee’s idea of the Perfect Girlfriend, coming off as rather two-dimensional, whereas Mary Jane, freed from the necessity of acting the moral paragon, had more sheer vitality as a character, and seemed more real. It’s strange, then, that in the movies Mary Jane may have her comics namesake’s acting and modeling career, but lacks her humor and “cool.” It’s as if Kirsten Dunst was really cast as Gwen; no wonder her hair gets blonder in the second movie.

I’m intrigued by Lee’s own ambiguity towards the comics medium. He says that, yes, indeed, “I was intentionally trying to write the kind of stories that older readers would enjoy.” In another perfect phrase, he sums up, “I tried to make them fairy tales for grownups.” And yet shortly afterwards he confesses that “I always felt that I’d eventually get out of comics. I never felt it was a job for a grown man.” Despite his achievements, he still feels this way, confirming one of the points that Raphael and Sturgeon make about him. Of course, DeFalco points out that Lee is still doing comics projects occasionally, and Lee good-humoredly agrees that despite his efforts to leave, he keeps being asked to do comics and probably will never get out of the business. (He does not quote Al Pacino in Godfather 3, but might as well have.)

The interview with John Romita that follows confirms some things I already had heard: that Mary Jane was visually modeled after Ann-Margret (though I didn’t know Romita was specifically thinking of her in the movie Bye Bye Birdie), and that Lee and Ditko had disagreed over the true identity of the Green Goblin, who Ditko had wanted to be a nobody no one recognizes. (But Lee and Ditko had already done that with the unmasking of the Crime-Master!)

I had always assumed that when Romita succeeded Ditko as Spider-Man artist, a conscious decision was made to make Peter Parker look handsomer and more muscular. So it was a surprise to discover that this is yet another example of how the Spider-Man series evolved in a way that the creators did not consciously intend. Romita confesses that “I tried like crazy to make Peter look skinny and narrow-shouldered, but I just couldn’t do it.”

Again, I already knew that it was Romita who proposed killing off Gwen Stacy to shake up Spider-Man’s status quo. But I hadn’t known till this interview that Romita had been inspired by the unexpected death of the heroine Raven Sherman in Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates decades before. Caniff had with one stroke endowed the adventure comic strip with greater capacity for realism and a wider, darker emotional range; Gwen’s death had a similar impact on superhero comics, as Gerry Conway’s interview in this book emphasizes.

It’s good to be reminded by Romita’s interview that the comic books of the Golden and Silver Ages were influenced by adventure comic strips in their own classic period in the first half of the Twentieth Century, a body of work of which most contemporary comics pros and fans have little awareness. Romita credits Caniff’s Dragon Lady, the memorable villainess from “Terry,” as an inspiration for his visualization of the Kingpin’s wife Vanessa.

Similarly, the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age were an influence on Romita, who explains that he modeled Gwen’s father, Captain Stacy, on the craggy character actor Charles Bickford. It’s intriguing to me that Romita partially based the Kingpin on another character actor, Edward Arnold, perhaps best known now as a corporate villain in Frank Capra’s movies.

And I find it amusing that in designing the visuals for Daily Bugle editor Joe Robertson, Romita envisioned him as an ex-prizefighter. Romita reports that Lee ignored this; the moviemakers certainly didn’t pick up on it, making their Robertson look rather out of shape.

I hadn’t read that many interviews with Gerry Conway, Lee’s first successor as writer of Amazing Spider-Man (not counting a short period when Roy Thomas substituted for Stan), so I was surprised by how intelligently analytical he can be.

Certainly, Conway pins down the difference between Stan Lee and the first two major writers to come to Marvel after the revolution he launched: Roy Thomas, a former teacher, and Denny O’Neil, a future teacher, both of whom were born in a period between Lee’s “Greatest Generation” and the Baby Boomers like Conway. “Stan was something of a primitive,” Conway accurately observes, “and I mean that in a good way ““ he worked from the gut, inspired by instinct. On the other hand, Roy and Denny were both intellectuals of a sort, and their work was more sophisticated. They brought a deeper historical and literary understanding to the material.” This distinction is to a degree true of the Baby Boomer generation of writers whom Thomas would bring into Marvel: they saw the potential for building their own works of personal expression upon the imaginative foundation that Lee and his collaborators had laid.

Not only was Conway the first Boomer to write Spider-Man, but he reminds us that he was about the same age as Peter Parker at the time: still only nineteen! Boomers were growing up reading Silver Age Marvels in the 1960s and then taking over writing these very series in the 1970s.

Conway spends much of his interview discussing the death of Gwen Stacy, and, in particular, the mysterious snapping sound when Spider-Man caught the falling Gwen. Though this would not be made explicit in the comics for decades, the “snap” suggested that the impact of Spider-Man catching the fallen Gwen was what actually killed her. Even more directly than in the case of Uncle Ben, Spider-Man had inadvertently been responsible for the death of someone he loved.

Conway says that he did not think through what it meant when he placed the “snap” sound effect in the scene. But he has enough insight into the writing process to realize “It’s one of a very few inspired moments in my career when my subconscious mind made a choice that meant so much more than my conscious mind ever intended.”

Indeed, Conway says that he was not fully aware of how that scene altered the history of superhero comics until he read Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’s Marvels, whose restaging of Gwen’s death is its climactic scene.

Referring to his own version of Gwen’s death, Conway asserts that “in that story, we introduced fatalism and despair into the comics universe.”

Indeed, when I’ve sought to figure out for myself exactly when the Silver Age ended, I come up with three landmarks: Jack Kirby’s departure from Marvel (To me, his “Fourth World” books for DC are not part of the Silver Age but of the period that followed), the end of Stan Lee’s run on Amazing Spider-Man, and the death of Gwen, which brought the optimistic spirit of the Silver Age to a decisive end.

Here’s another big surprise. I had always assumed that Conway had co-created the Punisher to be a continuing character, Marvel’s costumed counterpart to the Executioner, the leading character of a series of novels.

But no. Conway contends that he came up with the Punisher as “an afterthought to the Jackal,” the new criminal mastermind who first appeared in the same issue of Amazing Spider-Man. Originally Conway intended the Punisher to be “a one-shot character.” Once again, a comics character evolved in a direction that his creator had not originally intended. And indeed, the Punisher seems to me the most prominent Marvel lead character who has the least to do with the traditional Marvel spirit, as embodied in Stan Lee’s own scripts and characters.

Len Wein, like other interviewees from the 1970s, speaks of his awe at getting the opportunity to write Amazing Spider-Man. “I was scared. I wasn’t sure I was good enough.” This would be following in Stan Lee’s footsteps, working in the shadow of the classic stories he wrote. This is an awe that the first generation following Stan Lee, the Baby Boomers who grew up reading his comics, felt. It’s not something I detect in the interviews of the younger professionals here, or elsewhere.

Marv Wolfman introduces several recurring themes in this interview book. One is the question of just how old Peter Parker should be in the comics. Brian Bendis, in his interview in this book (as well as recently in his Comics series Alias) claims that Peter is now thirty! I’d be surprised if many others at Marvel agree; I think of him as no more than twenty-five. Considering how many interviewees here think that Peter should not have aged beyond his college years, it’s astonishing that he has nevertheless slowly grown even older over the decades.

Wolfman says that he once discussed this matter with Ditko, and they agreed that Spider-Man should have stayed sixteen years old. “Sixteen is the last year where you’re allowed to be a total foul-up,” Wolfman contends. “If he’s still fouling up as an adult, he just isn’t a hero anymore. He’s pathetic.”

Really? It’s good to know that adults never foul up. I wish someday I’d meet adults like that. I wish someday we’d even elect adults like that to national office. I somehow think that Spider-Man has relevance to people older than sixteen.

But Wolfman’s insistence that Spider-Man should have stayed sixteen may relate to his perception of a bigger, more serious problem: he says that “kids are no longer buying comics.” As a result, he says that series like Spider-Man are now aimed at an adult audience, and as a result “don’t sell or work quite as well.” Wolfman points out that series like Spider-Man can be written in a way to appeal both to younger readers and to older, more sophisticated ones. “I think we slowly weeded out the younger readers over the years by writing stories they couldn’t understand or be interested in,” Wolfman asserts.

I think Wolfman’s right about this. It’s important that Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies don’t make the same mistake. Middle-aged movie critics like them, and so do the small children I saw at the Spider-Man 2 showing I attended. But how many young kids would respond as enthusiastically to current Spider-Man comics, even the Ultimate versions allegedly aimed at new, young readers? I don’t know if the main problem is the level of sophistication. I suspect it’s that over the decades superhero comics writers, with their emphasis on psychological themes and angst, have neglected the craft of entertaining their readers. How many adult fans of the Spider-Man movies, who respond to the joyous web-swinging sequences, the kinetic power of the fight sequences, and even the sheer romantic fervor of the love scenes, would find anything in the comics that create the same visceral impact?

If the writers of the 1970s and early 1980s were intimidated by the idea of living up to Stan Lee’s example on The Amazing Spider-Man, Wolfman accuses more recent writers of straying too far from what Lee intended. Wolfman begins by talking about the necessity of getting a character’s individual speaking style correct: “If you don’t get the nuance of the dialogue right, the entire character falls apart.” (So, one might ask, does the movie Spider-Man, who refrains from his familiar Stan Lee-style witticisms, really sound like Spider-Man?) From there Wolfman moves to the greater issue that, as he sees it, “today’s writers are more concerned with writing a book in their own, individual style than in preserving a character.” Wolfman contends that various contemporary writers are more interested in “making a splash” in writing a long-running character than in maintaining the character’s consistency, and that “Strangely enough, the companies seem to encourage this attitude.”

Maybe that’s not so strange nowadays when characters get rebooted and revised over and over, or get spun off into alternate versions as in Marvel’s Ultimate books. Classic stories that shaped the characters’ personalities are summarily dumped from the official canon. Even Stan Lee’s own classic stories get rewritten, altering the dialogue he crafted to express the characters’ personalities.

Quite rightly, Wolfman declares that “Writers and artists should consider themselves temporary custodians of the characters, and changes should only be made for the long-term health of the title.”

The problem is that a lot of changes that people might well argue were mistakes ““ aging Peter Parker to (possibly) thirty years old, marrying him to Mary Jane, killing off Aunt May (temporarily, as it turned out) and then revealing his secret identity to her after her resurrection, and the infamous Clone Saga ““ were all made by people thinking they were good for the “long-term health” of the series! Even Stan Lee himself approved of the idea of Peter’s wedding! What’s really needed are editors and writers who have enough analytic ability to understand what makes the character and the series work, and enough sense of historical perspective to realize what kind of changes might be good in the short run but damaging in the long run.

One of the worst problems is the hubris of certain editors and writers who will kill off a character or destroy a major element of a series on the assumption that just because they think the character or element has run its course, no one else will ever want to use it or imagine anything good to do with it.

Wolfman also initiates what becomes a recurring discussion of Spider-Man’s sense of humor. It is, Wolfman says, the way for Peter to express his “inner silliness.” Wolfman incisively observes that “Peter’s jokes were very inward and almost negative towards himself. Spider-Man’s humor was exactly the opposite, because he was free to say whatever was on his mind.”

There’s a great deal to Spider-Man’s humor beneath the surface entertainment value. The humor is a form of release for Parker’s introverted, troubled personality. Certainly in his early stories, Peter Parker is shy, inhibited, even repressed. Becoming Spider-Man affords him physical release: swinging from rooftops, fighting his enemies. Spider-Man’s jokes provide a different kind of release. Rather than suffer in silence under life’s burdens, he can laugh at them. Instead of having to endure J. Jonah Jameson’s tirades as Peter Parker, he can pull pranks on him as Spider-Man. Peter Parker has to follow all of society’s rules; Spider-Man can merrily overturn them. Even as he physically battles adversaries like Doctor Octopus, Spider-Man verbally cuts them down to size. countering their egocentric bluster with witty ridicule.

The humor is a key to understanding that Peter Parker and Spider-Man represent different sides of the same personality. Wolfman realizes that Peter’s jokes should differ from those Spider-Man makes. Peter’s own jokes are self-deprecating ones, efforts to make light on his own troubles, which actually express the gloom and pessimism in his personality. In the wonderfully funny scene in the elevator in Spider-Man 2, in which Spider-Man makes fun of how uncomfortable wearing his costume could be, those are more like the kind of jokes that Wolfman attributes to his Peter side. Then again, perhaps that’s appropriate, since the other guy in the elevator doesn’t realize he’s talking to the real Spider-Man.

Usually, though, putting on his mask enables Peter Parker to act in a more extroverted, uninhibited, and daring way than he would in his everyday identity. The masked Spider-Man turns his humor outward: escaping his preoccupation with Peter’s miseries, he has no qualms about mocking other people who are deserving targets.

In his interview Roger Stern pursues this theme. “Being Spider-Man is a release for Peter.” Stern says, “He can put on a mask and get away with anything he wants. He can even act like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.”

Way back in the 1980s, in my column “The Enchanted Drawing” for the magazine Comics Feature, I did an article finding similarities between Bugs Bunny and Spider-Man. They’re both modern versions of the trickster archetype, little guys who outwit and outmaneuver bugger, stronger, more self-important opponents.

It’s a cliche, but with a certain degree of truth to it, that comedians ““ many of them at least ““ use humor to compensate for unhappiness in their lives. It’s certainly true of Spider-Man. It’s important to the concept of the character that Spider-Man is a comedian. So it’s strange that the movies mostly ignore this side of his personality. He can go completely berserk.

Recalling how he first became interested in comics, Stern recalls that “I started buying comic books because they were. . .just a dime! Anyone could afford that!” And thus Stern concisely sums up how the demographics for comic books have changed since the 1960s. Comic books have gone from being a source of entertainment that any kid could easily afford to an expensive hobby for adults with more than enough disposable income and time.

Stern is the sole interviewee to take a strong stand against the way that Mary Jane has evolved in the comics from the “party girl” whom Stan Lee first wrote. “She worked best as a spoiler,” Stern argues, “an old girlfriend who would occasionally appear to mess up Peter’s life,” and, indeed, that is how he used to write her.

It was DeFalco himself who revealed that Mary Jane had long known that Peter Parker was Spider-Man, and who filled in her personal background, revealing that MJ used her “party girl” persona as a means of escaping from her personal troubles just as Peter used the masked persona of spider-Man to rise above his own. Gerry Conway built considerably on DeFalco’s foundation in his Spider-Man: Parallel Lives graphic novel about Peter and Mary Jane. It was creating this other, more serious side to Mary Jane that made her later wedding to Peter in the comics possible, and in the movies the “serious” MJ has almost entirely supplanted Stan Lee’s original characterization of her. I rather wish that DeFalco and Conway had discussed the evolution of MJ, or that DeFalco had debated Stern on her characterization: one of the few important omissions in his book is its failure to more fully explore her personality.

My favorite part of Stern’s interview comes when he shows how though Spider-Man is an enduringly relevant character, thematically he is very much a product of the time in which he was created. “Spider-Man was a book about me!” Stern exclaims. “Spider-Man transcends my generation, but he was really the first superhero of the Baby Boomer generation. Superman and Captain America came out of my father’s generation, but Peter was a real child of the Sixties. He endlessly questioned what he was doing and why he was doing it. He questioned everything.”

That’s true indeed, but I’d amend what Roger says to make this point. The Boomers growing up in the 1960s embraced Spider-Man and his fellow Marvel heroes, and, like Conway, some Boomers soon found themselves writing these characters they so loved. But Spider-Man and the other classic Marvel heroes of the 1960s were created by Stan Lee and his contemporaries: in other words, by middle-aged men. The Silver Age Marvel heroes found an audience among the Boomers, but they were the creations of their fathers’ generation, the “Greatest Generation” that had grown up through the Great Depression and World War II. Couldn’t Spider-Man’s questioning of himself and his world also reflect Stan Lee’s own questioning of himself and the world having reached the midpoint of his life? Do Spider-Man’s ““ and, presumably, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s ““ angst, uncertainty and disillusionment reflect those of a generation who endured the Depression and World War but still found themselves dissatisfied in life, seeking to do what’s right but wondering which path to take?

In his interview artist Ron Frenz reminds us of an important point that many recent writers on Spider-Man (even in the movies) have forgotten. It seems as the decades have passed, adult life has taken on the value system of high school: it is now conventional wisdom to brand the school-age Peter Parker as a “nerd” or “geek’ (words that became popular after the 1960s), as if everyone had decided that Parker’s high school nemesis Flash Thompson was the arbiter of social standards.

Frenz points out that “If you look back on Stan and Steve’s original stories, you’ll see that he may have been introverted, intelligent and misunderstood but he wasn’t a nerd. . . He was just us. He was one of the many invisible people that populate a high school, someone for the popular kids to torment.” In other words, don’t blame the victim for his mistreatment by his tormentors. To condescend to Peter Parker is to miss one of the points of Stan Lee’s stories.

In his interview Len Wein laments that nowadays comics writers and artists don’t have influences outside comics. This isn’t entirely true: in the rarely-seen documentary I worked on, Sex, Lies and Super Heroes, Neil Gaiman, a contemporary comics writer who clearly reads much more than comics, makes a similar complaint about American comics writers before the medium’s British invasion.

Still, how often do you see an interview with a mainstream comics artist who talks about influences from in the fine art world? (Artists in that realm may not have dealt in the craft of storytelling through sequential art, but they surely provide examples in other aspects of art.)

At least in his interview in this book, Todd McFarlane refers to leading illustrator Norman Rockwell: it’s not Rembrandt, but at least it’s outside comics! And writer J. M. DeMatteis reveals that he based his interpretation of Kraven the Hunter in the classic “Kraven’s Last Hunt” on the works of Dostoevsky.

DeMatteis provides the perfect counterpoint to Marv Wolfman’s argument that Spider-Man’s struggle to do what’s right reflects only the mindsets of the immature teenager. Yet to DeMatteis, that struggle is “one of the reasons why I identify with him so much. I really strive to be a decent human being, to live my life the right way, but, God knows, I screw up as much as or more than anyone else. And when I do something that I think is wrong or if I hurt someone’s feelings ! can easily collapse into a puddle of remorse and guilt. Well, that’s Peter Parker! Stan Lee injected him with a very healthy dose of Jewish guilt.” Works for lapsed Catholics like myself, too. DeMatteis sees just why Spider-Man’s saga remains relevant for readers from teenagers through middle-age. (And again, remember that it was a middle-aged writer, voicing his own emotional concerns, who co-created Spider-Man in the first place.)

Artist Mark Bagley and writers Howard Mackie and DeMatteis each reminisce about the tremendous enthusiasm that they and their colleagues had about the notorious “Clone Saga” of the 1990s. It had by now sunk in that having Peter marry Mary Jane (a) made him too happy, whereas Peter works best as a character when he is plagued by life’s problems, and (b) made him seem too mature, whereas Peter Parker should always seem young. So it was decided to simplify Spider-Man’s history and revitalize the series by revealing that the Spider-Man/Peter Parker who had appeared in the comics since 1975 was really a clone. Thus the Peter who was happily married to Mary Jane could be sent off to live Happily Ever After with her, and the “real” Spidey could return to live the lonely, angst-ridden life that the creative team realized he should have. To his credit, editor in chief DeFalco initially resisted this idea, but he eventually gave in.

With perhaps bitter irony, Mackie reports that “The marketing and sales geniuses . . .wanted us to stretch the story out. ‘Do more clones. Clones are great, we love clones.” I find myself exasperated by the current conventional wisdom that the Marvel comics of the early 1990s were all dreadful books cynically churned out by greedy creative teams. Mackie and his cohorts make it clear that they thought they were engaged in an exciting, imaginative, genuinely daring creative project, and Mackie reminds us that initially it was a great commercial success. If everyone hated the Marvel books of the early 1990s, then who was buying them?

Yet as DeFalco and Stern agree in the latter’s interview, the Clone Saga was ultimately a bad idea. That was no surprise to me at the time: Marvel was effectively telling every Spider-Man reader who’d come on board after 1975 that the stories he’d read didn’t count! I suppose the real surprise was that whereas DC had gotten away repeatedly with consigning past continuity to oblivion, Marvel was unable to get away with a similar tactic.

But it’s interesting to read interviews like Mackie’s to see how so many creative people can get so swept up in enthusiasm for a direction for a series that only a few years later is regarded as so wrongheaded. Mackie also reports that he had wanted Peter and Mary Jane to have a child. Yet consider Danny Fingeroth’s persuasive case in Superman on the Couch that Peter should stay quite young, implying he should never get to the point of fatherhood. (It used to be that most people I knew in comics agreed that it was unfair to new, young readers to let the characters age just because we ourselves were getting older. High school age kids should be able to experience Peter Parker as their contemporary just as we did.)

DeMatteis, Bagley and Mackie all defend killing off Aunt May in the 1990s. Yet look at the ways that Paul Jenkins and J. Michael Straczynski have been able to use the character since her resurrection; the movies also underline that May had too much potential to be written out permanently.

Finally, the book concludes with several interviews with Spider-Man chroniclers of the new century. Writer Paul Jenkins discusses several recent Spider-Man tales of his own. Those of you who have read them will realize they demonstrate that neither the character nor his forty-two-year-old continuity is exhausted, and writers such as Jenkins can still turn out memorably good stories, some of which may eventually become classics themselves.

Jenkins brings the theme of Spider-Man as comedian to its culmination in the book, arguing that it is Peter Parker’s ability to laugh at his tribulations that makes it possible for him to be Spider-Man. I’d say that if Parker’s life sometimes includes tragedy, in part Spider-Man also represents the spirit of comedy.

Ultimate Spider-Man writer Brian Michael Bendis’s interview shows us how the Baby Boomer writers’ and editors’ insistence on aging Peter Parker eventually backfired on them. I have observed before that if one pushes a longrunning series too far in the wrong direction, it will eventually ricochet back. And so it is that former Marvel President Bill Jemas, believing that Peter Parker should still be a young student, created Marvel’s new Ultimate line of comics, with their own continuity, in which a high school age Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man in the early 21st century.

So now Marvel is stuck with its own version of Earth-2., and with both an adult Peter Parker and an adolescent version, each with a different and increasingly complicated history. This situation strikes me as being a time bomb that will eventually explode.

Bendis tells an affecting anecdote about being present when Stan Lee first watched the initial Spider-Man movie and seeing him choke up at the end.

Throughout DeFalco’s book there are the expected recurring references to the sad state of today’s comics industry. So many of the interviewees are no longer working for Marvel, and some are no longer even in comics. (It is good to see that Marv Wolfman report that he is writing episodes of Cartoon Network’s Teen Titans series. After all, the series is based on the version of the Titans he co-created in the 1980s!)

But all of them regard their time in comics and working on Spider-Man with affection. Spider-Man writer David Micheline tells in his interview how he once appeared on a panel with three prose writers and amazed them by saying he had written over five hundred published stories. That’s because he was a comics writer, and Micheline says, “I knew it wouldn’t last forever. I was appreciative of what I had when I had it.” Roger Stern exclaims to DeFalco, “Of course, I miss writing comics in general. It was the best job in the world!”

What Tom DeFalco has done in compiling this book of interviews is to showcase the history of Spider-Man comics as a great pop culture tradition to which all these writers and artists were significant contributors. Stan Lee handed the reins to Gerry Conway, and they have been passed down, decade after decade, to new writers and artists, right into this new century. Brian Bendis remarks in his interview that “A lot of pop culture only has a two-year shelf life nowadays. Things go away almost immediately. People love them and then they’re gone.” But Spider-Man has proved an exception. “I wasn’t joking when I compared Spider-man to Shakespeare earlier,” he tells DeFalco. “We have to acknowledge when something becomes a kind of mythology.”

Len Wein puts it best. DeFalco asked him what his favorite thing about his run on Amazing Spider-Man was. Len replies, “My favorite thing about the run is that I actually had a run. I was part of Spider-Man’s history… For the purposes of this discussion, let’s say that a full set of [Amazing] Spider-Man comics measures three feet on a bookshelf. Part of the joy I get from my time on Amazing [Spider-Man] is looking at those three feet and knowing that I wrote these two inches right here. Two inches in which I was part of the amazing history of this contemporary fantasy. I have contributed to the lore of an ongoing American myth, and that’s a great feeling.”

So how have Sam Raimi and his collaborators contributed to this great pop culture myth with their new Spider-Man movie? Keep what I’ve said this week in mind, and we’ll examine that subject in this column’s next installment.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson