What Spider-Man Can’t Save
In which our hero contemplates a career writing about superheroes and pop culture—and imagines an ending.
“These people stole your future. These people robbed you of your destiny. The question is…do you want it back?”
—Ultimate Spider-Man (2024) #1, Jonathan Hickman and Marco Chechetto
Superhero comic books don’t have endings. They can’t—they’re meant to extend indefinitely from their point of origin, as the writers and artists who carry them come and go. Sometimes, however, they pretend to, because endings give a story meaning, especially in a genre that is constantly producing beginnings: New first issues, jumping-on points, primers, adaptations. Everyone wants you on the ride, and no one wants to tell you to get off. Endings, however, give a story meaning. I’m going to pretend: this is the last time I write about Spider-Man. So you should probably know about the first time.
Call it an origin story: I was out of work and filing for unemployment and bored out of my mind, and I had some opinions about Spider-Man. This is the sort of hubris it takes to be someone who writes on the internet for a living. It’s not that different from the kind that Steve Ditko and Stan Lee might have had when they imagined a kid who put on tights and swung from buildings. It’s why I’ve always related to Peter Parker a little bit. It’s why I still do, even though, as I suggested, I’m trying to put a stop to that.
See, this is the first of many great things about the character. He calls himself Spider-Man, even though, famously, Peter Parker is a teenager. He gives himself a name that is also an aspirational lie, the way someone (not me) who writes for a living might try on a more specific title, like “essayist” or “critic.” Of course, if you are stubborn enough and persist, eventually the rest of the world will call you what you call yourself, which means that becomes who you are, whether or not you feel you’ve earned the identity or not.
None of this was on my mind when I banged out roughly a thousand words at the kitchen table about Why Spider-Man Comics Suck Right Now. I could not tell you what possessed anyone to read it, but a lot of people did, including one editor who would find it a full year later, and eventually hire me to write opinions about basically all of pop culture. It’s kind of stupid, really. A spider may as well have bitten me.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about quitting what I started with that piece. Walking away from culture writing, seeing what kind of person I might be without it. (You know, like in Amazing Spider-Man #50, homaged in Spider-Man 2.) It was never just about Spider-Man, Spider-Man was just where I figured it out: stories meant the world to me. They helped me articulate what I believed, and learn what others believed. They were how I would wrestle with the world, try to get to the truth of it. Stories just don’t feel like enough right now.
