Spider-Man and Me

Swing to me at 3 or 4 years old and digging through boxes of my dad’s comic book collection. He told me I liked flipping the pages of Spider-Man the most.

Swing to me and my brother finding our first books in Christmas stockings and Easter baskets. (Rolled up issues of Spider-Man that my dad would take to read after we fell asleep).

Swing to me at leadership conferences and Boy Scout trainings and even on up to college Resident Assistant training, when asked who my role model was? Spider-Man. Haha. Okay, who for real? Like a real person. No one. Everyone I know disappoints. No one lives up to the values they preach.¹ No one but a fictional superhero. Spider-Man. Haha, okay.

Swing to comic books being the domain of nerds and mockable when I was in elementary school and junior high.

Swing to if you wanted a Spider-Man t-shirt or ball cap you had to buy them at a comic store and my parents got both for me, but I only wore them on camping trips because I would be teased for wearing them at school.²

Swing back to high school when I grew out of reading comic books.³

Swing to a Spring Break mission trip in the West Texas plains where I worked with other members of the United Methodist Campus Ministry to rebuild an old man’s roof and on the last day we crossed the border for shopping and lunch in Mexico and I saw kids running around in Spiderman costumes play fighting and my heart was warmed to know my hero had worldwide appeal.⁴

Swing to the summer of my junior year in undergrad when I spent the summer in New York City on a Campus Crusade for Christ summer project where each week my team partnered with a different city ministry and the first time I left the subway and walked up the steps out from below the street and stood on the corner blocking pedestrian traffic like every other tourist who annoys the New Yorkers rushing to work and stared at the tall buildings that towered so high I could not see the sun but what amazed me was the gaps between the buildings where I imagined Spider-Man swinging by overhead.

Swing to buying Spider-Man comics from a New York City newsstand so I could compare the skycape on the page to the one around me.

Swing to me helping my brother plane a door jamb with the wrong tool. My brother worked as the facilities manager for a community pool and the new door for the pool restroom was a few millimeters too wide. I thought I could help him trim it down with a pocket knife. I stabbed myself in the gap between my thumb and index finger. The blood squirt out in a thin arch, rising up and down before me, hitting the concrete before the dropped knife. I pressed a white pool towel on the cut and my brother drove to me the nearest urgent care. The doctor needed two layers of stitches, one inside the wound and another to hold my skin together. As he stitched me up, he kept exclaiming, “I’ve never had to do two layers of stitches before! This is amazing!” Luckily, I missed the nerves in my hand and it healed within a week or two. I still have the scar. But that summer I had been reading one of the cheap black and white collected editions of Spider-Man in the 60s. I had just read a story where Peter Parker broke his arm and used his power to help others in a sling. I believed the universe was a text. I wondered whether me gutting the gap between my fingers while reading a story with a similarly injured Spider-Man was God waving at me!

Swing to buying Spider-Man action figures not to play with but to display on my desk (or dresser).

Swing to the summer after graduating college I am working in Acadia National Park and reading Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ on a rocky cliff overlooking the Atlantic and a spider crawls across the page and I remember when James Jonah Jameson once tried to talk to spiders to get a message to Spider-Man and I wonder if that spider was another wave from God.

Swing to one of my roommates in Acadia’s staff housing posing my Spider-Man action figures in various sex positions for me to find every time I returned back to the room.

Swing to my best friend spending a week in LA to be an extra in the upcoming Spider-Man movie.⁵

Swing to Sam Raimi’s Spiderman being released in theaters and me waiting three weeks to see it so I could watch it with my brother because I worried if it was bad, no one would understand my complaints except for another Spider-Man fan.⁶

Swing back to that first movie and its theme of your blessings being your curses and your curses being your blessings and how completely I had already embraced that idea.

Swing back to that same movie and Peter Parker telling Mary Jane, “I said... uh... Spider-Man, I said uh... The great thing about MJ is... when you look in her eyes and she's looking back in yours... everything... feels... not quite normal. Because you feel stronger and weaker at the same time. You feel excited and at the same time, terrified. The truth is... you don't know what you feel except you know what kind of man you want to be. It's as if you've reached the unreachable and you weren't ready for it."

Swing to a college friend saying, “I saw the movie. Now I know why you love Spider-Man so much. You are Spider-Man.”

Swing to ubiquitous Spider-Man t-shirts and other merchandise and me complaining that someone shouldn’t wear a shirt adorned with Spider-Man’s image unless they also lived up to his moral standards; that if they didn’t believe that “with great power, comes great responsibility,” and tried to help others even if doing so hurt themselves, then they shouldn’t wear it.⁷

Swing to the first time I notice my wife in the AmeriCorps*NCCC van on our way to our first community service project and I am reading a later collection of those black and white Spiderman reprints and she asks what I’m reading and I say, “Spider-Man,” and thinking maybe it’d get her to leave me alone, “Do you want me to read it aloud to you?” and she said, “Sure.” And maybe she was joking, but I did, and she let me, and that’s when I noticed her, and thought to myself, “who is this girl, I should get to know her better.”

Swing to me buying a two foot tall Spider-Man figure that I hung from my kitchen cabinet that overhung the bar in my first apartment after AmeriCorps.

Swing back to me believing the text of the universe was like a melody repeating with variation and me identifying with Spider-Man and C.S. Lewis so much that I was convinced that the love of my life would die tragically after two years of joy together (like Gwen Stacy or Joy Davidman).

Swing to me receiving Spider-Man tchotchke from friends and family. Key chains. Stuffed Spider-Man figures. Pillows. Christmas ornaments.

Swing to me tossing out the embarrassingly large Spider-Man stuff collection and asking friends and family to quit giving me gifts.

Swing to Spider-Man 3 being released while I worked at an Outdoor Education Camp in Marble Fall, Texas and my wife getting our co-counselors to all wear Spider-Man t-shirts to see the movie on opening night. Two of the guys held me upside down so I could recreate the kiss from the first movie!

Swing to me no longer bothered to see non-fans wearing Spider-Man apparel.

Swing to my wife not dying after two years. (Thank God!)

Swing to me crying at the end of Spider-Man 3 because it recreated the moment from one of my favorite comics as a kid, Spectacular Spider-Man 200, where Harry Osborn stops trying to kill Peter Parker, and saves him instead.

Swing to my wife refusing to go to any more superhero movies.

Swing to me telling my parents to garage sale any comics I left at their home and me reading comics on an iPad.

Swing to me going years without reading Spider-Man, then subscribing to Marvel Unlimited for a month to binge years of what I missed.

Swing to me buying any new Spider-Man movie when first available.

Swing to me having kids and agreeing with my wife we don’t want them running around punching each other like her cousin’s kids, so we’re going to have a superhero-free household (well, the cartoons and movies, anyway).

Swing to me realizing I have grown into one of those disappointing adults. I have power. I am not responsible.

Swing to me discovering one of the best comic book runs ever, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, by Ryan North and Erica Henderson, which very consciously positions itself in the tradition of everything that made Spider-Man great. I bought the collected editions of those books to read to my daughter. (Squirrel Girls gets a bit of a pass because she tries to talk the villains out of a life of crime before punching them and well, we keep the books high on the shelf, and okay, I say they’re for my daughter, but everyone knows I bought them for me).

Swing to living abroad for half a decade and being uneasy at the ubiquity of US cultural exports.

Swing to me being uneasy with how the nerd culture of my youth is the everyone culture of my adulthood.⁸

Swing to me aware of the cruel lack of compensation comic creators receive for making the escapist dreams of the entire world.

Swing to me still believing the universe is a text but feeling illiterate.

Swing to me wanting to watch Colbert or Kimmel interview a movie star without including a superhero question.

Swing to me being sympathetic to the complaint that art should challenge and the not entirely incorrect criticism that superhero movies are made for children.

Swing to the biggest movie ever when Thanos snaps his finger and me crying when Peter Parker apologizes to Iron Man before turning to dust.

Swing to now, where my plan is to do a series of [Famous author/Work] and Me substack posts to talk about the important influences on my life and my writing, and figured I should start with the first story I ever read.⁹

Here’s to hoping when the Master Planner’s designs crush down upon us, we won’t give up, but can find the strength to push back and triumph and be heroes to our kids, our partners, our clubs, and you know, all the world; even if, even when, we know that in our heart of hearts, heroes aren’t real.

1. Friends would say their dad, but my dad lost his temper too much. Now, that I’m a dad, I suffer nightly existential crises after shower time, because I too, scream too much. Other friends might say Coach or Scoutmaster or Sunday school teacher, but I either observed too much temper lost over situations that didn’t deserve their rage or simply assumed, well if I only knew this adult better, s/he would also disappoint me.

Perhaps the flip side of this outlook is I seem to appreciate most the people and institutions who recognize my flaws from the outset. In college, I joined the bible club that didn’t dare let me emcee the meetings. I married a girl who wanted to keep me as a friend for more than a year.

2. I still marvel at the amount of comic apparel for sale at Target now.

3. Didn’t help that Marvel Comics swapped out Peter Parker for his clone during this time, so it was a good jumping off point.

4. Spoiler alert: seeing kids in Mexico wear Spider-Man apparel today demoralizes me.

5. If you pause it just right, you can see him during the Bruce Campbell hosted wrestling match.

6. We loved it. (Had minor reservations about the organic webs and Green Goblin’s costume, but didn't let them affect our enjoyment because the film really captured the essence of Spider-Man).

7. No doubt a sentiment shared by fans of Superman and his crest or Jesus and his cross.

8. But also… impressed? Grateful?

9. That, conveniently and perhaps unfortunately, never ends.