This is going to sound like the start of the strangest eulogy ever, but here it goes: my grandmother died this week, and it's got me thinking a lot about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man. She (my grandma, not Spider-Man) was a complicated woman who lived many lives in many places throughout her 86 years on Earth. Orphaned as a baby, she grew up in a string of abusive foster homes never knowing who her parents were, and never finding out, even as she continued to search for them all her life. Her upbringing left many scars, but the thing that really shaped her - the inciting incident of her origin story,🤪 if you will - was the trauma of never knowing where she came from.
My grandma wanted to live a big life (I promise I'm getting to Spider-Man, stick with me) and she was obsessed with leaving her mark on the world. She had countless jobs and aspirations over the years, but never managed to build anything resembling a career. She worked as a psychic for a while, convincing desperate people she had mystical insights into their problems. She studied philosophy and religion, and tried to develop relationships with artists and people she considered to be great thinkers, hoping that it would raise her status through association. She was a painter who made her own art shows when no galleries would host her work, and a writer who released her own novel when no publisher would publish it.
When I moved to California to pursue a film career, she hounded me about turning her book into a movie. For years, the only conversations we ever had were about using my meager connections to get her book optioned, and finally make a name for herself. After she died, my mom and I were on the phone, reminiscing about her life as you do when a family member passes on. “She wanted to be known as a great intellect, but she was just a person,” my mom said. “I don't think she ever knew who she was.”
Spider-Man 2 M🔥ade Me Decide To Go Bꦑack To Therapy
Insomniac’s game remindedඣ me that we are what we do, an💞d I’m determined to do better
Grandma was not a big Spidey fan, but I think 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the new Ultimate Spider-Man would have resonated with her. If you’re not into comic books you may not have heard that Marvel is relaunching its Ultimate Comics imprint, an alternate universe where classic Marvel heroes were reimagined and new heroes, like Miles Morales, were created. In the new incarnation, an Ultimate Universe supervillain called The Maker has discovered a new universe - Earth-6160 - and, through comic book machinations, has reshaped its history in such a way that no superheroes were ever born, created, or allowed to perform superheroism, including Pete𒉰r Parker.
Having never been bitten by a radioactive spider in high school, this new version of Peter Parker is a 35-year-old reporter working for The Daily Bugle with his Uncle Ben and raising two kids with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:his wife Mary-Jane. He’s all Clark and no Kal-el, but he’s also characteristically overwhelmed by his life and a tou⛎ch despondent. You can take the spider out of the man, but you can’t take the angst out of Peter Parker, it would seem.
We’re meant to understand that Peter is somewhat detached and withdrawn b🔯ecause he’s in the process of grieving for Aunt May, who was killed in a terrorist attack, but by the end of the first issue, the bigger picture comes into focus. Through further comic book machinations, the would-be heroes of this world - a young Tony Stark using the name Iron Lad and a Doctor Doom-ified Reed Richards - have discovered The Maker’s deeds and are now plotting to undo them and restore the world to the way it was supposed to be. They s💜end a message to Peter, along with a radioactive spider and a costume, and offer him the opportunity to reclaim the destiny that was stolen from him: to become the Spider-Man he was always meant to be. With some consideration and MJ’s support, Peter takes the leap, becoming Spider-Man once more.
This is the moment Peter learned who he is supposed to be.
It’s a compelling opening to this new Spider-Man’s story, and thematically it's working on a few different levels. There’s a core power fantasy at play, which is endemic to all superhero media, but recontextualized for this new version, this Spider-Dad. Like the rest of us, Peter is powerless to prevent the suffering in his own life, the lives of the people he loves, and the world. He couldn’t stop the terrorist attack that took his aunt, nor can he stop Kingpin and The Daily Bugle’s greedy board of directors from infringing on the integrity of the paper to appease advertisers.
This is a Peter Parker that has all of the responsibility and none of the power, and taking the spider pill will give him the ability to fight back, to pursue justice in an unjust world. That’s what people have always connected to about the character, but it's significant that this Spider-Man chose the hero's path, when all the others were set upon it by chance. That’s a fundamentally different starting point for the character that will undoubtedly inform where his story goes.
Power fantasies are the bread and butter of superhero comics, but there’s an even more relatable, complicated, and frankly upsetting theme at play here. When Peter accepts the call, it isn’t just on the promise of superpowers (though that would have been enough for most of us). Rather, it’s because he knows, deep down, that what Tony Stark is telling him is true. He has always felt that his life was meant to be more than this. His loved ones can see it too. Ben calls it “action in inaction” and tells him he’s sleepwalking through life, and MJ notices he’s walking arou🔯nd with a dark cloud, unsatisfied with who he is. When Peter gets the call from Tony, as fantastic and unbelie🌠vable as his story is, Peter doesn’t have any trouble believing it. He’s been waiting for this call his entire life.
Uncle Ben still gives great advice
There’s a couple of ways to read this. This notion that it’s not the mask that makes the hero, it's the person who wears it, is a frequent theme in Spider-Man stories, especially the movies. Both Spider-Man: Homecoming and Into the Spider-Verse explore these ideas, and you can read Ultimate Spider-Man #1 as further commentary on that theme. Whether by virtue of his nature, or in a ‘Web of Life and Destiny’ sense, Peter Parker was always meant to be Spider-Man.
But we don’t need to do a deep dive into the Spider mythos to understand what Peter is going through. Being dissatisfied with your mundane life and feeling like you were meant for greater things is a deeply relatable experience for many, and has🤡 been for a very long time. It cꦦan even grow into a gnawing, inescapable feeling that your life has turned out wrong, the way it did for Peter. The way it did for my grandma. So few of us are destined for a big life, yet so many struggle to escape the sense that we’re supposed to have one.
The millennial meme “waiting for my Hogwarts letter” describes the phenomenon exactly, but by no means does this kind of angst belong to my generation. As long as people have had dreams, people have had to lꦫive with watching those dreams slowly die to💖 the march of time. When Pete looks at himself in the mirror and says “Peter Parker, you are not getting any younger,” these are not the musings of a man who is embracing the aging process.
If you know, you know.
As my grandma got older, she started ma💜king up a lot of stories about her life. She’d talk about days we’d spent at a park I’d never been to, or vacation we took to places I’ve never been. She’d invent entire scenarios about meeting famous people or doing amazing things that my parents would later confirm never happened. They’d say grandma was getting older and forgetful, but it was more than that. As the years ahead of her became fewer, so did her opportunities to live the big life she always wanted. It was easier to put those fantasies she kept about herself in the past instead of the future. Peter’s lucky to only be 35. If he learned the truth as a 60 year old grandfather, it would have been too late.
There&rs𒈔quo;s a distinctly American quality to this ‘Big Life’ problem. The American Dream is so much grander than ꦬsimply life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - all things that Peter Parker had. It’s also a measure of success based on the values of capitalist culture, and a fallacious belief that you can do, and can be, whatever you set your mind to. We teach kids that they can grow up to be anything, so every kid wants to be a professional athlete, a singer, a movie star, an astronaut, or an artist. Some kids want to grow up to be a princess. I wanted to grow up to be Spider-Man. Pick out any class of Kindergartners and, statistically, nearly all of them are going to do mundane jobs and live unremarkable lives. Of course people feel dissatisfied with their nine to five. We were all promised so much more.
And while American-flavored, this is a universal part of the human condition. Ultimate Spider-Man&rsqu🎶o;s appeal is in the way that it validates those feelings and gives us an outlet to explore them. The book gives us a window into what it would be like to discover you really were meant for greatness. That that little voice in the back of our minds saying “surely this can’t be all there is” was right all along. It’s a level of wish fulfillment that is even more profound than ‘get cool powers, punch lots of bad guys’ that speaks especially to those of a certain age who have had to watch some dreams fade away. Maybe your Hogwarts letter really did get lost in the mail. Maybe you really are supposed to be a wall-crawler that protects the city𒐪 from terrorism and corporate greed. Maybe you will write the Great American Novel. But, y’know, probably not.
