Geek Speak Comic

Superheroes at Lunch

I think the image of Thor eating a hamburger in the commissary is hilarious, but I’m not a well-adjusted human being. It may be important here to clarify that I really like Spider-Man. In the spectrum of superhero comic books, Spider-Man (whether it’s Peter Parker or Miles Morales) consistently comes in as one of my favorites. It’s fun to read a character who doesn’t take everything so very seriously, even though his own life is full of tragedy and hardship. Indeed, the fact that he continues to fight even through incredible adversity is a big part of what makes Spider-Man heroic.

With all of that said, and I’m talking directly to Marvel and Sony Pictures, here, with all of that said, please, for Odin’s sake, PLEASE, stop retelling his origin story. It’s sad, we get it. He gets these incredible powers, then fails to stop a petty criminal (who sometimes goes on to become a super-villain, depending on how Marvel has decided to retcon this story, this month), who then goes on to kill his uncle in a botched robbery/mugging/home invasion/car-jacking…sigh. From this he learns “with great power must come great responsibility” and goes on to use his powers to stop crime in an effort to ensure what happened to him doesn’t happen to anyone else, blah blah blah. Every time we go through this it diminishes the emotional significance of these events in Spider-Man’s life, and we just get tired of seeing it. Let’s face it, who wants to watch Peter’s nice uncle Ben, the man who raised this nerdy orphan and laid the ground work for him to become a hero, get shot and killed over, and over, and over?

The other problem with this is every time we’re taken back to his origin story, we have to back to Spider-Man being in high-school. I’m sorry, but the effect of that is perpetually making him Spider-Boy. For heaven’s sake, let’s move the story along and see what Spider-Man is like when he’s at his peak. I’d love to see a Spider-Man in his late-twenties to early thirties how has been doing the hero thing long enough that stopping petty crime is kind of beneath him now. It’d be really interesting to see a Spider-Man who made the decision to use his powers to help people all over the world, working in the military, or for an intelligence agency, or for S.H.I.E.L.D. Whatever it is, it would be nice to change things up. We’ve had over fifty years of Peter playing with chemistry sets and getting bullied in high school. That story’s been told. Let’s put it away for a while and see what Peter is like when he’s old enough to justify the name Spider-Man.