Spider-Men: Closure

 WARNING: Contains spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home so shove off if you haven't seen it yet.

Throughout my life I’ve been a superhero fan. As a little boy in the 1970s I loved the Adam West Batman TV show and was a big fan of the Spider-Man cartoon (the one with the famous theme song). Me and my brother would lament the lack of decent TV on a Sunday morning (Saturday was the big day for that) and lapped up The Green Hornet re-runs in 1979.

Growing older this adoration waned but I still had a soft spot for Peter Parker and bought the Marvel comics with my paper round money in the early to mid-1980s (best being Web of Spider-Man).

Older still and the adoration became a background hum but there was still affection there for Spidey and it was because he was the most fleshed-out superhero I’d read about or watched. He loved his family, felt guilty for letting a criminal go who’d then gone on to kill his uncle, was loyal to his friends but ultimately he had his flaws.

In the early days of the 1950s and 1960s Peter Parker was nauseatingly wholesome. A boxing match with school bully Flash Thompson had Peter landing a knockout punch (after holding back on his superhero powers during the bouts) but being accused of cheating as Flash had been distracted just prior go getting KO’d. After all kids, cheating is horrid! Things slowly became less patronising but there was always that, somehow reassuring, twinge of Mr Do Gooder peeping out as the years became decades.

During the initial incarnation of Secret Wars, cosmic, clueless entity the Beyonder turned an entire building into solid gold and it was only the timely intervention of the Kingpin that stopped the global economy from collapsing (my favourite line being “which could happen if there were even rumours of its existence”). Parker was narked off that, for his trouble, Kingpin took five typewriters** that had been alchemised so, in a temper of indignant rage, Peter took a gold notebook that he knew would help pay for his Aunt May’s hospital treatment. He spent the next issue or two fretting and procrastinating over having taken the thing because, ultimately, it was a “wrong” thing to do. However he could also handle himself in a fight and was known to get nasty when doing so. After getting beaten down by a villain in one story, the cops offered to take over and Spidey said “After the beating I just took, he’s mine!”

He was sarcastic (punches Vulture while quipping “sorry about the fists friend but it’s cold enough up her without you flapping those wings around”) and flippant as Spidey and conflicted as Peter Parker.

I remember watching my first Spiderman film and it was fucking awful. Even as a kid, I knew that films could NOT portray what cartoons did so well and seeing one of the grown-up kids from The Sound of Music ponsing about in a Spidey suit that was baggy around the arse, did nothing except piss me off.

Then Sam Raimi made Spider-Man with Tobey McGuire and it was pretty good. The sequel rocked too and then the rather crap third one rained on the parade but it was still Spidey. There was talk of Jake Gyllenhall taking over if Tobey couldn’t get over his bad back for part 3 but this was all fun and we loved that special effects and the passage of time had made a Spider-Man film a pleasant and thrilling ride.

Then, there were to be no more Raimi films and Tobey McGuire was out of the picture.

Five years later they recast Spidey and Marc Webb took on the directing duties with Andrew Garfield another version of webhead.

When it came out it was mildly annoying to see that it effectively erased the old continuity that had ended only five years previously, by telling the origin story again but it was fun.

I never got around to watching Amazing Spider-Man 2 because, by the time I’d thought about it, they recast again and things then got very VERY irritating.

When a film or book fan becomes attached to a character, or a world of fantasy, they stick with them and want to watch them grow and be with them as they do. The Harry Potter novels and movies are so good because part of the ride is seeing Harry and his pals grow up and become adults. TV shows that I loved that were binned after only one or two seasons, now hold no love for me. The excellent Counterpart or The Bastard Executioner were stopped after their second and first seasons respectively and the connections and emotional investment I’d built up with the characters was now never to be revisited. They couldn’t go on because they were no more. Their lives were frozen before they could be finished.

When they reset Spider-Man with Andrew Garfield we all forgave them because, while we missed Tobey, we knew things couldn’t be like that any more. So we switched our emotional investiture to the new version and then that got killed off too. No finish. No end and no closure. For either incarnation.

While I still love Captain America: Civil War it bugs me when we are reintroduced a-fucking-gain to Peter Parker (although thankfully this time they skipped the origin story and made Aunt May a MILF) and were supposed to ignore everything we watched and enjoyed before and simply pretend it never happened.

I never watched Amazing Spider-Man 2 because I didn’t see the point. The events of that film were now in a limbo. Non-canonical and existing in a vacuum. The only way I could begin to reconcile this was by believing that just maybe these things had happened the way they did in the Marvel comics multiverse.

Marvel Zombies is a dark, satirical take on the superhero genre (Spidey is a zombie and still feels guilty but it’s because he ATE Aunty May and Mary Jane) but it set up the Ultimate Universe (a cash cow created to reset, recast and retell a whole heap of superhero stories) as co-existing with many others, with mainstream Marvel as Earth-616.

And then, in their almost impossible quest to outdo Avengers: Endgame, Marvel came up with not only a wonderful idea for a new Spider-Man movie but one that finally gave long sought-after closure to fans of the previous two Spidey film series.

In this latest offering, Spider-Man: No Way Home, the multiverse cracks open and a whole heap of bad guys from other universes come through, wanting to put Peter Parker’s head on a stick. Only problem is he’s not THEIR Peter Parker. Before long Tom Holland is joined by Garfield and McGuire and it was what I’d always wanted the storytellers to say to us. Those other two Spideys weren’t erased from canon they were always there….just not where we could see them.

I love this conclusion to the other two franchises (I’m fully aware of the political reasons why there were so many reboots to begin with and the struggles between Sony and Marvel) and, as a fantasy author myself, bow to the scripwriters for having enough respect for the fans to finally give us the closure we wanted and needed to these films.

Garfield and Holland joking with McGuire about how his webs come out of his body while they have to wear contraptions on their wrists is a wonderful touch and I love this film so much for doing what no other franchise has done (the closest you usually get is a cameo by the original actor, a la Django Unchained, for us us geeks to snigger knowingly at) and the nearest recent comparison would be the “Great Idea, Shit Film” that was Terminator: Dark Fate.

Thank you for giving us both the respect we deserved and the closure we needed with this. The only downside is that this means there are at least three crap versions of the Fantastic Four in other universes.

** This was a long time ago. Like, pre Windows computers.