Fascism of the Bug

So, Spider-Man, right?

For years I’ve had the fantasy of saying something definitive profound and powerful about my favourite funnybook character, hoping to time it precisely with Stan Lee’s death, allowing for the inevitable wave of emotionality that would follow to make up for my lack of skill drive effort in articulation. Stan Lee would die, the world would react in genuine feigned sorrow, or shock, or anger, or judgement, and I would stake my claim on the biggest share of the pie, like Doctor Doom striding into Hassenstadt. I would lay my deep well of sorrows bare for the world to see, The Man being the catalyst to finally open up about how my life has been shaped by the tyranny of mom dad and Spidey, and bathe in adulation and admiration for my profundity.

For years I have fantasized about Stan Lee’s death.

He would be my Uncle Ben.

For of course Peter Parker needs Uncle Ben to die. A hero needs a burden to bear, to signify the enormous guilt and alienation that he resents the world for always having had to bear, that would otherwise be laughed off as quotidian trivial, that, exteriorised as a very visible yet never-spoken-of burden, shames the world into complicit hero-worship. A shared network of guilt; resentment-powered-selflessness.

And what would a superhero-nerd want more than to be just that, aspire to that, especially an increasingly alienated neuroticized jealous child struggling to balance evident care affection joy joy at the world infinite joy at in and with all that is, with the ever looming spectres of self and punishment?

But. See. Spider-Man, right?

Spider-Man is a showman. Spider-Man decides to use his powers solely for money, for himself (but of course not just for himself - he has a family to support; a hero must ever have that glimmer of conscience and selfless nobility). Spider-Man is shocked into greater righteousness by the violent removal of his guiding light, making him a greater presence in Spider-Man’s life than he ever was before. Spider-Man finds joy, joy in all things despite this burden. Spider-Man finds joy, joy at the world because of this burden. Spider-Man finds joy, joy with life in the singular, in itself, in its spiderweb creep of rapturous, liberatory connections. Spider-Man shrugs off the burden, an act radically altering himself and the Rand-tinged faux-Nietzscheanism of Steve Ditko (also recently departed), affirming not just himself but life. Spider-Man reacts to the system, he upholds slave morality, he traps escapees in his web enmeshing them in a jail prior to jail, he assaults his foes viciously with his barbs, unloading a rapid unhinged strand of sadism, constructing a weird brutal fascism of the bug. Spider-Man cries when he fails to save his true love. Spider-Man kills his true love. Spider-Man affirms himself through destruction. Spider-Man clones himself endlessly, even when seemingly through the agency of others. Spider-Man proliferates. Spider-Man is a menace. Spider-Man is monstrous, unworldly, otherworldly, doing everything a spider can, nothing a man should.

Spider-Man exists outside Peter Parker. Spider-Man is a tool, a concept, a facilitator, not defined by his relations. Spider-Man facilitates Peter’s heroism; but he can just as well and just as easily kill the hero, free Peter Parker from the tyranny of all-encompassing interiority, albeit briefly, all too briefly. Spider-Man can spin up compassion, creation, can facilitate the new as much as he is used to preserve the old; in this, in these, and only these, in flashes that unfortunately can never be sustained, Spider-Man is more than a fixed neurotic fantasy, the distorted joy of a deprived child: he is real, all too real.

Stan Lee joined Marvel, then Timely, in 1939, hired by his uncle as little more than an office boy at first, eventually getting to writing back up stories, eventually getting to create, eventually creating an entire universe of complex links that have now transcended the pages they were born in. He brought realism to superhero comics, suffusing four colour pages with real world anxieties, paving the ground for escapist fantasies that were deeper, and more insidious, in that they always thwarted or deferred the escape. He spun incredible yarns; with Jack Kirby, he launched a fabulous exploration of the unknown within and without the family, in Fantastic Four; with Steve Ditko, he embarked on a still unmatched depiction of the eerie, in Doctor Strange. The Hulk was unmoored, unmediated id; the X-Men were one man’s ego made manifest.

Throughout his life, he was a showman; constructing the image of an endless engine of creativity for Marvel and especially for himself - The House of Ideas - a recursive loop of creativity. He pioneered the Marvel method, and corrupted something that could have potentially destabilized the way certain creators are privileged in the process of the making of a comic book into a machine that would stabilize himself at the centre and hold him at the top, appropriating the work of numerous other creators, creating his own nemesis in Jack Kirby. He spent his last years in a continuous fall from grace, struggling over his legacy, an empire that could always only ever consume him.

Strangely enough, he never created Spider-Man.

Spider-Man lives in the same way Mickey Mouse does. But, surely, somewhere else, Spider-Man still lives, still spins. Surely, someday, he will kill the superhero, as he can, for the superhero must die.

For years I have fantasized about Stan Lee’s death, waiting for that inevitable, magnificent burst of creative energy that it would surely bring, waiting for it to liberate me, waiting also for it to bring me the adulation I so deeply desire.

But, Spider-Man, you know?

Wealth and fame he’s ignored. Not because he has a greater burden to bear, a higher responsibility to stick to. But because he can shrug them off, and then busy himself in the job of spinning.

Action is his reward.