Atop the Fourth Wall2008

Linkara:
Allow me to share a revelation I've just had. For all of his bluster about "with great power comes great responsibility," Peter Parker is one of the most irresponsible superheroes ever. He never learns from his mistakes, never takes into consideration how his life as Spider-Man affects everybody else. Now some would say that's the core concept of the character, the constant struggle between the mask and the man. But he never actually gives any consideration to the man, preferring to make excuses about it. He disappoints people around him all the time because something more important was happening as Spider-Man. But instead of finding a way to balance his two lives properly, he will go out of his way to make excuses for it and be sad that being Spider-Man hurt his personal life. If he places more importance on being Spider-Man, then he should distance himself from relationships that would hurt that. If he places more emphasis on being Peter Parker, he needs to sacrifice his time as Spider-Man. Now that's not always going to be the case for everyone in the real world. But Peter never actually changes as a result of his actions. He just makes the same mistakes over and over. During a story line called "The Other" when Peter was dying from an untraceable condition, this was also written by JMS by the way, he admits that he doesn't even have life insurance. Peter has never made a plan about what would happen to his family if he were killed by a super-villain. He's never thought about the repurcussions of his life if he should be maimed or killed while wearing the costume, to his wife or to his constantly dying aunt. In a recent issue of "Avengers Academy," a group of teenage superheroes thought of several ways he could have capitalized on being Spider-Man without revealing his identity to anyone. Now admittedly, he was just a young, dumb teenager when he started out and didn't think of those things. But Peter is and has been an adult for decades now. Forget about whether you like Spidey being married or not, the character himself still seems to operate like he's in high school, never growing up, never seems to recognize adult relationships, and never actually taking responsibility for his life and the choices he's made. This is one of the reasons I decided to finally review One More Day. The deal with Mephisto is symptomatic of a bigger problem for the character and the people who write him. The unwillingness for the character to become an adult. He's supposed to be roughly 25 years old at the time of this story, maybe closer to 30. And yet he repeatedly approaches his problems like a 16-year-old would and is never actually prepared to act like a mature adult. I've made several jokes in the last 200 episodes about how Peter Parker's life is an endless spiral of shame and misery, what with his friends and loved ones dying all around him or becoming super-villains because of his life as Spider-Man and I mean it. The truth is that if Peter Parker actually cared about taking responsibility for his actions, he would have given up being Spider-Man a looong time ago. But hey, maybe that's just the reasoning of a jaded individual looking at this stupid-ass comic in hindsight. Of course I don't want Peter Parker to stop being Spider-Man. What I want is for him to be written like a goddamn adult already! But the writers and Marvel editorial seem to steadfastly refuse to let that happen. Spider-Man is just escapist fantasy to them. The reason why they don't think there's drama in marriage is because marriage is an aspect of real life and they don't want the escapism of Peter Parker swinging through the air and stopping bad guys being infected with the drama of things that people have to endure in the real world. And that's just hilarious since Spider-Man is supposed to be the character who does face the real-life challenges of the world. That was what made his character so appealing to begin with: His ability to relate to the reader. But the truth is that the reader has grown up. The reader got married, has kids, have relatives that die and they have to move on. The reader changed but Peter Parker has not. You know there was a rumor that Marvel was doing its own reboot to compete with the one DC did last year. They're not of course. They're just releasing a whole bunch of new number ones, but you know what? Maybe they should reboot Spider-Man. After all, if the creative teams are unwilling to let him get out of his high school life, then why the hell isn't he still there?