Not-so-friendly Neighborhood Spider-man

Spider-man Noir. Written by David Hine and Fabrice Sapolsky. Illustrated by Carmine Di Giandomenico.
Graphic Novel Review by Kerey McKenna.

As I discussed back in my Luke Cage Noir review, back in 2009-2010 Marvel Comics did a little experiment in genre by publishing short runs of comics re-contextualizing their superhero characters with noir aesthetics and sensibilities. They’re among my favorite kinds of superhero stories, the kind where a creative team takes a familiar hero and their supporting cast of friends and enemies and re-interprets them through different genre aesthetics and conventions. While many of the stories, such as Luke Cage, de-emphasized the fantastical elements of the characters, other stories kept the amazing aspects but ran things through a noir lens. One such tale was Spider-man Noir.

The reader is introduced to this new version of the web-slinger in media res as police bust down the door of 1930’s newspaper man J. Jonah Jameson, apparently gunned down by a figure clad all in black, his face behind a mask that betrays no emotion.

Escaping the scene by shooting webs and leaping out the window, this dark Spider-man may be a menace, or merely caught in a frame up.

Winding things back to before the murder, the story is narrated by Ben Urich, crime reporter for the Daily Bugle in the harsh winter of 1932-1933. Ben is jaded and cynical; he would tell you his odds of dying from either the mob or the bottle are 50/50.

The trope of the hardboiled reporter has its origins in the 1930s, so Ben fits right in. But working web-slinging vigilantes or monstrous creatures like the Green Goblin into the story is a tougher sell, no matter how many fedoras you stick characters under. Unless you strain genre conventions a bit and go into the realm of Dieselpunk.

Yes, this Noir November I did want to get in a mention of Dieselpunk, a genre that is a form of retro futurism like my beloved steampunk. Just as Steampunk is retro-futurist Sci-Fi Fantasy sub-genre that takes its cues from the steam-powered technology of the Victorian era, so Dieselpunk gets its cues from the 1920’s to early 1950’s. Its heroes are pulp adventurers and grizzled detectives; the villains are mad scientists, gangsters, fascists, and Lovecraftian horrors. It’s a natural fit for most superheroes and is a good way to return to the early pulp roots of the genre like the Shadow or the Phantom.

Through the magic of Dieselpunk, the Green Goblin can be transplanted to the Great Depression—in the form of a gangster, Norman “the Goblin” Osborn. Not only is Osborn protected from prosecution by keeping all the right palms greased, he has a team of freakish bodyguards recruited from circus acts. Those who get in his way, like social reformer Ben Parker, are rubbed out. With the murder unprosecuted, Parker’s nephew Peter wants to become a reporter who can expose mafia bosses like Goblin. In a rare moments of optimism, Urich takes the teenage Peter under his wing as an apprentice.

One fateful night, while tailing the Goblin’s crew trying to catch them smuggling stolen artifacts, he has an encounter with the totem of a terrifying spider trickster god. The deity bestows “The Curse of Power” upon the young man, granting him the familiar abilities of strength, agility, spider-sense and web spinning. Donning a less familiar all-black costume, a trench coat, and his Uncle’s old service revolver from the Great War, Peter embarks on a campaign of vengeance against the Goblin and his freakish cohorts.

Unlike the Spider-man we know and love, this dark Spider-man’s desires for vengeance against criminals is not tempered by a chance of fate making him partially responsible for his own uncle’s death. This is a Peter Parker and a Spider-man of a much bleaker world. In a game of mobsters and monsters where the enemy is playing for keeps, Peter will have to decide how far he is willing to go to get revenge.

This noir version of Spider-man has been the only character of the Marvel Noir project that has been revisited, not only in comics, but also in video games, TV, and coming next month, film. Nicholas Cage will voice Spider-man Noir in Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse. Multiple web slingers from multiple parallel dimensions will team up to solve an interdimensional emergency. I covered two of these Spider-people—Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy—in my Climbing the Walls: Other Web Slingers of Marvel last year, so it seemed only fitting to give a shout out to Spider-man Noir before the big screen debut. Despite possibly being the most grim and dour take on the usually friendly neighborhood Spider-man, in his short existence he’s brought joy to a lot of fans, myself included.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.