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
Comments: 1 Comment
One Response to “Comics in Context #44: Weavers of the Webs”Leave a Reply |
October 7th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
While there has been some disservice by writers too eager to leave their own stamp on the character rather than honoring the foundation that comes before them, I find it amazing (to choose an adjective) that when you consider all the various incarnations of Spider-Man – comics, animation, film, etc. – that there has been as much consistency as there has been. When you compare Peter Parker to Bruce Wayne, who is sometimes almost unrecognizable from one version to another, the constancy of Parker’s basic personality and personal situations, and that of the feel and tones of the supporting cast, is remarkable. I think this says much about how powerful Lee’s initial storytelling on this character was.
My first issue of Amazing was #26, and I followed that title (and the spin-offs) for over 300 issues afterwards. When I gave it up, it wasn’t because I was tired of comics or the character. It just felt to me like Marvel in the 90’s (and I do note your comments about the sincerity of the creators at the time) was substituting sensationalism for good story-telling. Add to that the convoluted nature of the storylines, and the number of titles required to keep up with them, and I remember how relieved I was when I finally made the decision to let them go. Years later, when Ultimate Spider-Man was launched, the high quality of the plotting, dialogue and characterization (and I do know you’re not particularly a Bendis fan), had me excited to be reading monthly adventures of this long-time favorite once more. And while I do find the high school setting appealing (at least the way Bendis handles it), for me the real appeal was a chance to get in at the beginning once more, without decades and hundreds of issues worth of backstory to be bogged down by.
As always, thanks for a thoughtful and well-written column –
Rick B.