Why I'm done with Spider-Man

Kinda how I feel

    As you may have guessed by the title of this post this is going to be my first negative post on this blog and I really wish I didn’t feel compelled to write this. Even though I’ve gone into detail about my fandom for Superman, there has been one hero that I’ve been a bigger and more consistent fan of for more than twenty years. That being Spider-Man and I came by my fandom of the character honestly since I’m a second-generation fan of the character.

    So then why am I officially done with Spider-Man? Why have I now, after having survived The Clone Saga and the endless plotlines that were never resolved  during the 1990s i.e. the fate of baby May and the incredibly disastrous and frankly insulting One More Day storyline that has been ripped to shreds by 99.999% of fans have I finally decided to be done with Spider-Man?  

   Well, back in 2010 there was a sort of changing of the guard in the Amazing Spider-Man book, after being a book that would be put out three times a month and tackled by three different writing teams the reigns were taken by a single writer, that being Dan Slott. At the beginning of his run Slott took good ol’ Peter Parker somewhere he’d only really been once before: out of poverty. He gave Peter a good job that was in his field of science that over the years had been relegated to the background in favor of increased action and drama. No longer did he have to sell pictures of himself in action as Spider-Man to make ends meet, no longer would he grouse about not having two nickels to rub together to ride the subway. We as fans were getting something that we didn’t really get before, character growth.

One of the best scenes in the entire story!

    Slott’s run had more ups than downs, the event “Spider Island” while not the greatest story ever told was fun and in the spirit of what good Spidey stories should be and the end result proved that Spidey belonged in the upper echelon of the Marvel heroes and it even made longtime nemesis J. Jonah Jameson admit that the web-head may not be the menace he was always crowing that he was. He was flexing his science muscle and was dedicating himself to being a better hero and by proclaiming “No One Dies”. One of the big questions became how was he going to accomplish this really big mission statement? But then came “The Superior Spider-Man”.

    In a nutshell: a dying Doctor Octopus managed to insert his consciousness into the mind of Peter Parker and not only take over his body but effectively kill Peter Parker. This change prompted the cancellation of the longtime flagship Amazing Spider-Man book and the launch of the new Superior Spider-Man. My first reactions were to try to ride this wave to see what would happen, this may be interesting, and how will they bring Parker back? In the meantime we had this new Spider-Man with NO ONE in the Marvel Universe any the wiser that anything had changed.

Now where did I put that Parker swatter?

    However, as the story progressed it started to become very apparent that the end game to this storyline would not just be the victorious return of Peter Parker, but the return of the status quo of his life. Throughout the time that I was reading Superior I noticed that is seemed that Peter/Octopus was kinda skating on thin ice at work because of his connection to Spider-Man and his unpopular rise in the brutality level against his opponents. We noticed how he was coming off as more arrogant and rubbing people the wrong way, how other heroes were starting to distrust Spider-Man because of this sudden change in his personality and NO ONE BEING THE WISER AND THINKING SOMETHING MIGHT BE AMISS!

    And it’s that last point that really points the way to where I think this is going, the contrivance that something is going wrong in Spider-Man’s life and absolutely no one can help him in spite of their power and ability has been done before and was done fairly recently. In the rightly maligned storyline One More Day, Peter and Mary Jane Parker sell their marriage to a demonic character to save Peter’s elderly Aunt May from a fatal gunshot wound. The end result was that the pair had never married and Peter who at that point had become a science teacher at a high school and was living with the Avengers as a well-respected member was sent flying back to a down on his luck photographer whose identity no one knew. He was back to the status quo he’d been in before his marriage to Mary Jane Watson, and it seems that the end game to Superior may be to put him right back in that place.

This…is….absolutely…infuriating!

     Peter Parker is supposed to be the character that the average person can relate to, but with a few exceptions Marvel has written him in arrested development for over twenty years and every time they allow him to grow even a little they knock him right back down. Peter gets married to a beautiful woman and they seem to think “oh this isn’t realistic, an average guy like him would never be able to get a woman like her” and after he gets her they erase the whole thing. He gets a job that gets him out of poverty, he somehow loses it.

Ever get the feeling you're not getting anywhere?

    I realize that if he’s supposed to be relatable then he should have setbacks in his life like losing a job or the end of a relationship, but there are setbacks and then there’s being shuttled back to square one. There not allowing these things to end, they’re writing that they’ve never happened. So basically the folks at Marvel are saying that Spider-Man is a loser because average people are losers that can’t improve their lives. When Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created the character they would give young Peter Parker problems he’d have to overcome and when he’d get over those there would be more problems to rise above. He’d have setbacks of course but he’d get back up and overcome the setbacks as well. But for most of the last twenty years Peter Parker has been plagued with the same problems over and over and over again.

And I’ve finally had it, that’s never to say I will never pick up a Spidey book again but the way things are going I don’t think it’s very likely. The fact of the matter is I don’t want to read about a hero who is supposed to represent me who can’t overcome his problems. The fact that he’s supposed to be that representative and is that powerless I find quite insulting and it’s Marvel who’s throwing the insult, luckily I don’t have to sit there and read the insult so I’m done with Spider-Man. Quite frankly because of this editorial mandate that Peter Parker is supposed to be a perpetual loser he will most likely never be written the way he should be and I think the only way that it would happen is if someone wrote it for free. But with the minimum wage laws being what they are that’s not likely so I just want to say to anyone who may be reading this at Marvel you get a no-prize because you lost a true believer.

  Well at least there’s DC, Vertigo, Image, Dark Horse….eh, I think I’ll be just fine. Sorry for the downer blog, it was something I had to get off my chest. I promise that the next review will be something positive. ‘Til then, cheers!