Not even a third of the way through the latest celluloid installment of the Spider-Man mythos, this kid sitting next to me turns to his friend and stage whispers, “This is the best Spider-Man movie ever!”
I liked his moxie.
The day after this comment, my humble comic shop was deluged with Free Comic Book Day attendees, some of them even riding their own Spider-Man movie high. Many of them expressed enthusiasm for going to see the movie that day or had just come back from seeing it. Considering the money it made, I’m almost positive that everyone reading this article has seen the movie. But just in case, there’s a spoiler warning ahead as seeing these movie fans and seeing the comic fans got me wondering about the concurrent storylines being played out on screen and in the books.
Again, WARNING: lots of Spider-Man 3 talk to follow as well as points from today’s Amazing Spider-Man #540. See both and come on back.
Peter Parker faces a moral dilemna: someone has dearly hurt the person who raised him, their killer is on the loose and Spider-Man is out for vengence. His first reaction is to take them out once and for all and cause them as much pain as they caused him and his loved ones.
And here’s where the story divides. On one hand, we have JMS’s Amazing Spider-Man, wherein Aunt May’s been shot and we find out that the Kingpin ordered the hit before he went to Japan but then came back to deal with the Runaways and hire ninjas. Peter is overwhelmingly upset and has vowed to make whoever did this pay, and pay dearly. He goes interrogating the worst of the worst and crushes hands until he gets what he wants. Through some investigation, he finds out who pulled the trigger, hunts them down to a crowded subway station, and in a scene right out of Shane, tells the shooter he’s just beaten up pretty bad to pick up his gun. Before he can, the shooter is taken out by another shooter (failed Spidey-Sense, there), and the original gunman dies in the same hospital that Aunt May is barely alive in.
All of this sounds to me like the personal vengance issues shown in Spider-Man 3. In this story, Peter Parker specifically hunts down Sandman (retconned to be Uncle Ben’s killer) to make him pay for the life he took with his own. After a fight in the subway and sewers, Spider-Man drowns out Sandman and comes home to talk about it. He practially crows to Aunt May that he knows that Spider-Man killed Flint Marko, thinking she’d be happy for such justice. Aunt May (who’s incredibly sharp on the uptake) seems certain that Spider-Man wouldn’t kill people and calmly explains to Peter that “I don’t think it’s up to us to say who should live or die. …Vengeance is like a poison that can take you over, and turn you into something ugly.”
In the end, Spider-Man hears the wisdom of these words and chooses the moralistic approach of forgiveness towards Marko when facing him down again.
Both these stories have similar elements and deal with similar choices that the hero can take towards being just. But one is trying to make a deeper meaning to your standard comic action flick, and the other still has issues to go before a resolution is found. Knowing the character at heart, it’s a little strange to see Spider-Man pull his best Jack Palance impression because, like the movie states, we know Peter Parker to be a “good guy”. Relishing breaking someone’s hand to get information out of him because the guy is scum is something we’d expect from Frank Castle, not Peter Parker. His actions in Amazing Spider-Man are not that of a good guy, they are of a stressed out man on the brink who’s loose cannon attitude could cost him something very dear: his heroism.
I guess you don’t need an alien symbiote to bring out the worst in someone.
January 17th, 2011 at 1:38 pm
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