I thought I’d share a nice Spider-Man comic I drew today. I wrote about comics last week and about how I thought Spider-Man stories were getting a little stale. So I decided to write and draw my own. Marvel, call me up! I’m totally free!
Probably one of the best Spider-Man stories I’ve ever read. By the way, I own all the rights to Captain Ham Sandwich. Not Spider-Man, though, that’s Marvel’s.
I used to love reading comics. Up until about four years ago, I spent the majority of my income on buying them. But then one day I found myself pretty fed up. I realized that I wasn’t really enjoying the bulk of my purchases. I came home from the comic book store one day with a bag full of mags, and I started leafing through all of my recently bought titles: the Amazing Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, X-Men, etc. And I just started thinking to myself, am I seriously still reading Spider-Man comics?
There’s nothing wrong with reading Spider-Man comics. I’m not trying to say that I had this moment of self-doubt because I suddenly realized that Spider-Man isn’t cool. I don’t care about what’s cool (well …) What I was thinking about was that Spider-Man has been around since the 1960s. And here I was still spending way too much money on reading his continued adventures. I had been a pretty faithful reader of Spider-Man since about the second grade. And over the years I had been given the collected works of all of the stories that were written before I was born. So with over forty years of Spider-Man stories stuck somewhere in my head, why was I still buying these books every week? What could possibly happen to Spider-Man now that hasn’t happened at least twenty-five times already?
And that’s basically how I stopped reading comics. I just finally understood that everything that the big comic companies were doing was just a rehashing of stories that had already grown stale probably close to a decade ago. I think that the powers-that-be were finally coming to grips with this little problem also. Towards the end of my dutiful reading, the publishers started to tweak the storylines in dramatic ways. Like Spider-Man revealed his secret identity to the public. It was in the papers. Or the Hulk turned red instead of green. Sounds cool right? Injecting some fresh ideas right? But these high-profile publicity stunts reeked of desperation.
And sure enough, while the characters may have changed briefly, superficially, the collective history of everything that they’ve been through was just too entrenched in popular culture to enact any meaningful, significant change. I remember about two months after I had seriously kicked the habit, I started going through some withdrawal symptoms. I found myself at bookstores, not comic book stores, just you know, like Barnes and Noble, my hands trembling as I browsed the chronically understocked comic book racks. I wasn’t going to buy anything, I swear. I just wanted to see what my old friends were up to while I was gone.
I’m not going to bore you with the extended details, but I remember standing at a bookstore one day while I was taking a three-hour lunch break from my mindless office job, leafing through the current issue of Spider-Man, reading about how this big fundamental change that took place in his life, his unmasking, his coming out to the public, had just been completely erased, like it never happened. And the creators couldn’t even think of a plausible or creative storyline to justify the whole world forgetting about his big reveal, so they wrote something absurd involving Spider-Man making a deal with the devil. Poof. Everything went back to normal. It was all a dream. Come on! At least make an effort to keep me wanting to be involved. But no. Spider-Man is still just a guy, perpetually in his twenties, swinging around New York, fighting the same bad guys, dating the same girl, quipping the same wisecracks since the 1960s. I don’t know, but it sounds like Spider-Man is trapped, stuck in a terrible purgatory, doomed to relive the same cheesy exploits, week after week after week, forever.
Can’t they just let anything end naturally, realistically, with the tiniest bit of respect? Everything today that was even once remotely great or interesting is dragged out entirely too long. The Office is still on TV, a shell of its former self, unfunny, unoriginal, just begging to be cancelled. But they’ll never cancel it. Dwight Shrute’s great-grandkids are going to be stuck selling paper on NBC, getting pranked by Jim and Pam’s great-grandkids. And they won’t even be new pranks. Just the same old pranks. Green Day is still around making terrible CDs, formulaic ballads and anthems that barely echo the once original recordings of almost a generation ago. But you know that Billie-Joe Armstrong isn’t going to stop touring. He’s not going to stop wearing eyeliner and singing “When I Come Around” to sold-out stadiums.
Somebody at Marvel Comics should write a story where Spider-Man is just sitting in a chair directly opposite the reader. The whole issue will be conversational, from Spider-Man to all of us. He’ll thank us for reading, he’ll reminisce about all the great times we’ve had together. It won’t be sad. We’ll always have our back issues. But then he’ll say goodbye and swing off into the sunset. And that will be it. Last issue. No more rehashed stories. Somebody, please come up with a new character that we can run to the ground for the next forty years.
It sounds like a good plan, but that last issue would probably fetch a really ridiculous price on the comic book market. And publishers would confuse that market price with demand for more Spider-Man. And not even a month later there would be rumblings and rumors about the Spider-Man relaunch. And he’d be back. And he’d be fighting the Green Goblin. Or Mysterio. Or the Lizard. Or the Shocker. Or Venom. Or his clone, evil Spider-Man. Or his clone’s clone, evil-evil Spider-Man, which, by the standard definition of double negatives, would actually be a good Spider-Man. So they’d team up and there would be two Spider-Mans for a while, but then the clone would die.*
*That clone storyline actually happened in the comics. Twice. Once in the seventies and once in the nineties.
For most of my life now, I’ve been preoccupied with a certain question: if I could have one super power, what would it be? This question is inherently difficult because there is always the argument over what constitutes just one super power. You might think it would be enough to say, “I’d choose the powers of Superman,” but what is Superman if not just a collection of various super powers? There’s the flying, the super strength, the ice breath. It’s a total copout. And that’s why Superman is just this huge loser. And that’s why all of the Superman movies are terrible. What about Spider-Man? He’s definitely got a lot going on, Spidey-Sense, wall-crawling, he’s kind of strong. But in this case I don’t think it would be fair to be limited to choosing just one of his kind of mediocre powers.
I think that in Spider-Man’s case, you could argue that his one power is a collection of weird spider-like attributes. All of his powers together make him a little more super than the rest of us. But then again, you have Superman, where any one of his powers would usually merit their own superhero. It’s obviously just a little too much. So when choosing super powers, I’m going to argue that it has to be something less than a god, but obviously more than a human. If you, after reading what you’ve read so far, say to yourself, “well I’ll just pick Batman, he’s pretty cool” then the joke’s on you, because Batman doesn’t have any powers. And if you really said that to yourself, and really didn’t know that Batman doesn’t have any powers, then something is wrong with you, because what, you’ve never seen a Batman TV show or one of the very successful Batman movies? Actually, Batman is super rich, which sounds about as realistic of a super power as any other.
My approach to the super power question has evolved as I’ve grown up. When I was little, it was enough for me to read Spider-Man comics and then wish that I could be Spider-Man. But he’s been around since the sixties, and after spending nearly two decades of my life following his many adventures, I’m just not sure that Spider-Man’s powers would be compatible with the kind of lifestyle I’m used to. Even if I were smart enough to invent my own web shooters, for example, which I’m not, I doubt that I’d have the balls to use them to jump off of tall buildings and swing around the city. What if I missed? I’d be dead. Maybe I’d sneak out of the second story of my house every now and then, but I probably wouldn’t, because there is absolutely no reason to. I’d most likely be more comfortable using the front door.
Now that I think about it, most of your classic super powers seem kind of just a little too much for what I would want in my life. I wouldn’t be able to pick anything too dramatic. What would happen if the media got wind of some guy that could suddenly fly or run at super speeds? The government would have that person confiscated and dissected very quickly. If I can fly, what am I supposed to do, fly away from a government fighter jet sent out to bring me in? I would need super speed on top of the flying, which would technically be picking two powers, which I already labeled as copping out. Also, if you could fly, and you didn’t have super strength, wouldn’t you have to keep yourself in ridiculous shape just to be able to go any significant distance? It’s like, everyone can run, but for how long can they keep it up? It has to be the same with flying. It just sounds like way too much work.
And then I think about the super powers that you could keep hidden, like mind reading, or invisibility. But I think that these powers would just suck the humanity out of me. If I could read everyone’s thoughts, I might not like what I’d hear. And unless I saw every movie or TV show before anyone else, I’d constantly have the endings of everything just totally ruined. And even if nobody saw anything before me, there would always be the chance that I’d run into one of the show’s writers, and then not only would that season be ruined, but all the potential ideas for any future stories would also be prematurely revealed. In the case of invisibility, I think that would turn anyone into a huge creep, because wouldn’t you have to be naked all the time? There are no easy answers here.
I think that what I’d like best is a really obscure kind of super power, one that would grab everyone’s attention as it was happening, but afterwards, everyone would just be kind of like, “eh, I’m over it.” I think I’d have to pick as my super power the ability to win at rocks-paper-scissors every single time. It’s the perfect supernatural gift for where I’m at in life right now. Just think about how many ridiculous chores or arguments I could completely avoid. “I don’t feel like taking out the trash either. Rocks-paper-scissor you for it?” And I can’t think of anything else I’d like to do more than to go out to a bar with a group of people and, after we’ve all had way too much to drink, making the announcement that I cannot be beat in rocks-paper-scissors. Everyone would object, thinking that I’m full of shit, and people would start lining up to prove me wrong. I wonder how many rounds I’d have to play before a hush would fall the entire bar, people slowly gathering around to see me beat the odds every single time, over and over and over again, and eventually someone starts clapping, until the whole place is going nuts and lifting me up on a chair parading me around the room chanting, “Rob! Rob! Rob!”