The Magnificent Six

Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse.
Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.

Regular readers of this blog already know that the Peter Parker we all know and love is not the only Spider-man. Through the years, many others have worn the mask. Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse, opening in theaters today, asks “What if a half dozen of these web-slingers joined forces?”

The pretext for this team up, in classic comic book fashion, is a lab experiment gone wrong. Wilson Fisk—the Kingpin—has lost his wife Vanessa and their son Richard in a car accident which he had some responsibility for. Desperate to see them one more time, the grieving Fisk builds a “supercollider” to open portals between dimensions in the hopes of finding their counterparts in parallel universes. But it’s a dangerous machine—every time he operates it, earthquakes shake New York; if he continues, the whole city is likely to collapse.

Determined to stop the Kingpin is the Spider-man from this universe, Miles Morales, a Banksy wanna-be whose 2011 comic book debut was controversial because of his Afro-Caribbean-American ancestry. As Nerds who Read Contributing Reviewer Kerey McKenna pointed out, much of the controversy came from culture warriors who never read a comic book. Miles just wants to fit in at his straitlaced new school—a magnet school for the gifted—develop his artistic talent, and not be embarrassed by his cop dad. He never asked to be bitten by a glowing spider—I think it was robotic—and bear the great power—and great responsibility—of a super-hero.

Miles is joined by five other Spider-men Spider-persons Spider-creatures who were sucked through the interdimensional portals:

An older Peter Parker, Peter B. Parker, sadder, but not yet wiser,

Gwen Stacy (Spider-Gwen), the new girl in school, the only one of Miles’s classmates to appreciate his humor,

from the 1930s, the hard-boiled Spider-man Noir (voiced by Nicolas Cage, BTW),

the anime cutie, Peni Parker,

and strangest of all, Peter Porker, aka Spider-ham, who first appeared in 1983’s Marvel Tails alongside Hulk Bunny, Goose Rider, and Captain Americat. Yes, there was a spider-pig decades before Homer Simpson got pig tracks on the ceiling.

Together they must defeat the Kingpin while completing the seemingly conflicting tasks of getting everyone back to their own corners of the multiverse and shutting down the supercollider for good.

The artistic team combined multiple animation styles appropriate to the various characters. Then they added the handmade, colorful graffiti style of Miles’s urban neighborhood to the mix. The combined effect is visually stunning.

The movie delivers plenty of the trademark humor and one-liners we’ve come to expect from Marvel Studios. As with last year’s Lego Batman Movie, all the characters’ past incarnations are “real,” even when they’re an embarrassment.

We don’t talk about this.

And channeling Deadpool 2, there’s an end credits scene worth waiting for in which Spider-man travels back in time to confront one of those earlier incarnations.

It isn’t all fun and games, however. When I saw it, a solemn hush fell over the theater during the Stan Lee cameo, the first since his death last month. Very sad.

Much as I like this movie, I have to concede it drags in places. The special effects of the supercollider are overdone and go on too long. Because it doubles as an origin story for Miles Morales, this Spider-man movie takes a while to start Spider-manning. And it faces the same problem as Suicide Squad in that it needs to introduce a large number of characters that most of the public (unlike fans of Nerds who Read) aren’t familiar with.

As is often the case with ensemble casts, some of the characters get short shrift. I would have liked to see more of Spider-man Noir, thanks to Kerey’s recent review of that character. Peni Parker, sadly, gets hardly any screen time at all. And Kingpin does little more than show up, look menacing, and sometimes beat people to death. The Vanessa/Richard back story is told in a very brief flashback. This is quite a contrast to Netflix’s Daredevil, where the complexity of his character, especially his seemingly out-of-character devotion to Vanessa, is the dramatic linchpin of the series. I would have liked to see that developed in Into the Spider-verse as well.

Still, it says something that my biggest complaint about a movie is I didn’t get enough of some things. Overall, Into the Spider-verse is immensely funny and hugely entertaining, in my opinion the best movie of the Christmas season (so far, at least). Go see it.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

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.