May 07, 2024
There's a realism to 80s superhero comics that I feel like was pushed to the fringes in the 90s and then more or less done away with in the 2000s into the 2010s and 2020s. Overt politics was very common and this story is a prime example where literally the entire thing is about the morality of the criminal justice system. And also, fun to point out, Spider-Man is wrong and bull-headed throughout the entire story. The parts of this story that are beating out the Zeb Wells ASM run, I think, are the parts that you won't find in a superhero comic today in general. At least not one as mainstream as Spider-Man. Spider-Man is rarely going to be put in a morally grey position where he is almost objectively wrong by the parameters set by the writer
and the story itself. He can be on the outs with the superhero community and do shady things, but the reader always has a great incentive to agree with him off the bat. Like with the Dead Language story arc. I think a lot of the reason why is that readers, as a whole, expect their heroes to be completely committed to moral good, and anything outside of that is hyperbolically seen as a betrayal of that character. The ability for a hero to make an ideological mistake is certainly going away, I think. It's only a mistake of not acting, or not acting fast enough, that is allowed. Nowadays, there's a lot of representation, which is good, but much less debate on the politics themselves. I think that's in part due to how much identity has become the politics themselves. They don't want to have a morally good character hate black people or something. But when that's becoming more and more the politics of one side, with less and less obfuscation, it's much harder to have a superhero be a Midwestern Conservative (That's a Wally reference).
Daredevil is completely right here. It's always been part of Peter's character that he's a bit hotheaded and tends to let his own biases rule until he inevitably is able to snap out of it. Whether it's a fight with Daredevil or punching out his wife, he eventually realizes he's in the wrong. Which is something writers often struggle to parse, mostly because of what I was getting at before. Readers are very quick to say an invocation of that character trait is out of character, because Spider-Man is a very relatable character and if he can screw up (In a way not integral to origins), then maybe we as readers are not always perfect either, and that's a terrifying thought. So writers either fall into the trap of making Peter too nice and almost Superman-like, which is boring (see: Taylor's Nightwing; different character, same issue), or making him too standoffish and a bit of an asshole (see: Dan Slott trying to create drama). This story does a great job with it though, because even if Peter is logically and morally in the wrong, he still has a justifiable, almost-heroic reasoning behind it that's kind of reminiscent of the most basic of superhero stories. But the keyword there is *almost*. more
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/110.jpg "Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #110")
