So big in nerd news earlier this month, Sony Pictures and
Marvel Studios worked out an agreement to more or less share Spider-Man. The
short version is Spider-Man gets to appear in Marvel Studios movies (most
likely starting with Captain America:
Civil War next year) and Sony Pictures gets to reference Marvel Studios’
continuity in their Spider-Man movies and maybe some cameo appearances by
Marvel Studios characters. Marvel will also be on hand to offer Sony useful
advice on making Spider-Man movies that don’t stink.
Actually, Amazing
Spider-Man 2 didn’t stink. It did very well, but it didn’t do anywhere near
as well as Sony Pictures wanted it to, which is one of the things that opened
the door to this deal.
(My take on Amazing
Spider-Man 2 was that it was a perfectly serviceable Spider-Man movie that
had the last half of The Dark Knight
tacked onto the end for some reason. This included killing off the female lead
(Rachel Dawes/Gwen Stacy) for no reason other than to clear the field for a
romance between the hero (Batman/Spider-Man) and a feline-based anti-hero
(Catwoman/Black Cat) in the next sequel and the mostly wasted late appearance
of a classic villain (Two-Face/Rhino).)
Anyway, one of the thing both studios agreed to was that
there would be yet another reboot of the Spider-Man franchise; this time with a
new actor playing a teenaged Spider-Man. This should come as no great shock if
you consider that Marvel Comics has spent four of the last five decades
rebooting, retconning and doing all kinds of flips and twists to get back to a
younger Peter Parker. “Back to basics” they always say.
Somebody once described Spider-Man as a coming of age story
that’s been going on for fifty years. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem
with Spider-Man.
In a coming of age story, a young protagonist strikes out
into the world and through experience comes to see the value in (or understand
the flaws in) the lessons given to him or her by a mentor/parent figure. Thus,
Luke Skywalker learned from Obi-Wan Kenobi to trust in the Force and Simba
learned from Mufasa that Scar was completely awful.
In the case of Spider-Man, Peter Parker learned from his
Uncle Ben that (say it with me) “with great power there must also come great
responsibility,” which joins “Play it again, Sam” and “Beam me up, Scotty” as
one of the greatest quotes never actually uttered by the character who made it
famous. (The other lesson is not to be the parent/mentor figure in a coming of
age story.)
|
When I was a kid, I saw this story on the Spider-Man cartoon. When that criminal ran past Spider-Man, I figured, "Ah, this is where he becomes a hero!" I was wrong of course. That twist at the end blew my mind. |
The problem with telling a coming of age story in an ongoing
serial (such as a comic book series) is that the main character has to, you
know, come of age. Then what do you do?
This issue first reared its head about ten years into the
run of The Amazing Spider-Man. In
real time, ten years is not an unreasonable span of time for a coming of age
story. In Peter Parker’s case, that saw him from high school through college
and living on his own. He had earned his reputation as a hero and had a serious
girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, whom it was all but inevitable that he would marry.
Unfortunately, establishing one’s reputation and getting
married are pretty much where coming of age stories end. There was only one
thing to do:
|
That's right; they dropped her off a bridge. Some would argue that Captain Kirk getting dropped off a bridge in Star Trek: Generations
was a more controversial bridge-related death, but I maintain that this
came first, had a longer-lasting impact, and was less ridiculous. | |
|
|
Gwen Stacy’s death at the hands of the Green Goblin remains
the biggest failure of Spider-Man’s career, even forty-plus years later. At the
time, it signaled that maybe Peter Parker had not come of age yet after all;
any hero who can’t even save the girl obviously still has a lot to learn.
Just like that, the coming of age of Peter Parker got to
chug on for another fifteen or twenty years.
But time moves on, even comic book time. In 1987, Peter
Parker married Mary Jane Watson. This was a thing that
was sort of inevitable, just as a marriage to Gwen Stacy would have been. In a
story about growing up, getting married is one of the things that happens. Even
as it was happening, there were Spider-Man writers and artists who were against
the marriage, but it was an editorial decree timed to coincide with the
marriage of Peter and Mary Jane in the newspaper comic strip.
Almost immediately, Spider-Man’s writers, artists, and
editors looked for a way to turn the clock back to their sweet, sweet coming of
age story because nobody wanted to read about a married Spider-Man. When I say
“nobody,” I mean nobody in the Marvel bullpen. As far as I can recall, there
was no outcry among the fans and readers of Spider-Man in 1987; mostly they
were content to roll with the new development.
Early on, the idea of killing off Mary Jane was floated and
then thankfully rejected. Killing Gwen Stacy had been a milestone moment in the
Spider-Man mythos, but it was something they could only do once. Having Spidey
fail the same way twice just makes him look like an idiot.
This is where the ongoing coming of age story starts to get
really wacky. In 1994, a story arc called “The Clone Saga” began. To make an insanely
long story short, it involved a clone of Spider-Man coming into Peter’s life.
The story arc was supposed to run a few months and end with the clone, named
Ben Reilly, revealed to be the original Peter Parker and Peter (now revealed to
have been a clone since the mid 1970s) and Mary Jane retiring to the west coast
to have a baby and end Peter’s coming of age story once and for all (getting
married is iffy, but once you have a kid you are by definition grown up) while
Ben stayed in New York as Spider-Man as the unmarried young guy finding his way
in life.
For reasons way too complicated to go into here, the Clone
Saga ran until late 1996 and ended with Ben having turned out to be the clone
after all and killed off, Mary Jane miscarrying, and the exact status quo of
two years earlier restored. Even Peter’s Aunt May, who had died peacefully in a
touching scene early in the arc somehow managed not to be dead. That was the
last time I was a regular Spider-Man reader. It was the last time a lot of
people were regular Spider-Man readers.
Further shenanigans ensued in recent years as Marvel gave up
and literally invoked the power of Satan to keeping Peter’s coming of age story
from ending.
|
I did not misuse the
word “literally.” Exhibit C: Mephisto. By this point they are jumping so high
over the (metaphorical) shark that they can’t even see the water down there. |
So, for reasons, the arch-demon Mephisto erased the marriage
of Pater Parker and Mary Jane Watson from history. It never happened, and once
again, Peter Parker is a young man alone in the big city trying to find his way
and learn the true meaning of great responsibility.
This one may stick for another ten years.
Peter Parker’s coming of age is existential horror story. Like
Peter Pan, Peter Parker is also a boy who can never grow up.