This demonstrates exactly why a comic book like Spider-Man is a Nazi Smasher. It is the exact opposite of copaganda. Cops are portrayed as bumbling fools who can’t effectively help anyone. Cops hate Spider-Man, and so does the media.
And Spider-Man does engage in vigilante activity, but he’s not doing it because he’s a law and order guy. He does it because he’s a New Yorker who happens to be physically powerful. He’s just doing what New Yorkers already do for each other. That is, we completely mind our own business unless someone is in obvious distress, in which case we drop everything we are doing in order to help them. Spider-Man almost always has to drop something very important to him, like his most important relationships, in order to save the lives of complete strangers.
Spider-Man doesn’t say “let me find a bad guy and beat the shit out of him.” He says “oh shit, those innocent people are in danger, let me protect them. Oh, this messed up person is responsible? I’ll tie them up with webs to stop the immediate danger and then let society take care of them.”
That New York attitude is what has people standing in front of neighbors homes to keep ICE agents at bay. 100% anti-fascist.
No shit, re read what I said, I asked because I wanna learn more about the particular 14 characteristics you cited so I asked for who came up with them.
I’m personally partial to Lawrence Britt’s definition because it’s a bit more modern and practical to Eco’s more philosophical lens. Now I wanna compare that one to both.
With great power comes great responsibility. Spider-Man has strength. He can stop the Rhino from smashing up 5th ave, so that’s what he does.
Spider-Man isn’t rich. Dude takes photos for a living and spends all his money on rent and web shooter fluid. He doesn’t have the power to help the homeless, so he doesn’t have the responsibility.
And the same can be said of all New Yorkers. Except the rich ones. No surprise, they can get eaten.
Heh, ya know what, uncle Ben’s advice bears a striking resemblance to rule .303. I think I may like comics spiderman more than I did before. If I wanna start reading comics spiderman where’s a good starting point?
I learned them in social studies in high school. Seems to be a mix of Umberto Eco’s thoughts with a bunch of other definitions. It was always 14, but there are a lot of different lists of “the 14.”
I imagine Eco’s 14 were just updated/shifted by a lot of people over the intervening years.
And literally one google returns a discussion on the evolution of “the 14.”
It’s clearly incomplete.
If I had to guess, a lot of people learn 14 key characteristics of fascism as ideology in high school, and that list is only broadly consistent and gets repeated and changed over time.
I would even go so far as to say that Wilson’s “14 points” paved the way for the number 14 in particular here for no good reason other than that “Wilson’s 14 points” is in every high school social studies program as a unit.
If you want to read some old Spider-Man you can go back to the Gwen Stacy stuff from 1963. Kraven’s Last Hunt in the '80s is highly critically acclaimed. More recently I would go for Dan Slott’s run that starts with Amazing Spider-Man #546 from 2008.
Basically look at who the writer is, and you know what kind of Spider-Man you’re going to get.
Specifically, check out Dan Slott’s Superior Spider-Man and Spider-Verse comics, although the Spider-verse collection is out of order and doesn’t make sense to read as published for some weird reason:
To be fair, this also effectively destroys the organization, and follows through on the “Spoils the whole bunch” part of the saying, which is better than nowt.
Eh fair enough. I don’t claim to be an expert on the MCU, I just for some reason love Bucky Barnes, and by extension all the Capetian America movies. I’ve seen all the big ones at least once though and from what I remember, post winter soldier/civil war, whatever standin’s for authority in the US aren’t treated as the bad guys.
Kinda holds true for the entire MCU, cops/military are either portrayed as neutral or good (like when the baddies kill em, it’s a way to raise the steaks, show how strong the baddies are and how bad they are that they’re willing to do that. Hell now I’m thinkin’ it didn’t fuckin bilbo baggins play a literal CIA guy in black panther? And IIRC got a section in the end where he’s a big damn hero, shot down a plane or something.
That isn’t quite true though. Spider-man isn’t just “minding his own business until something happens”. He actively patrols the city when he can on the lookout for problems.
It also only works “kind off” though. A central core of Spider-Man stories is that it rarely works out for him and the double-life is stressful and dangerous not just to him directly but also the people that surround him. Furthermore, Spider-man only works because he is provided this impeccable moral code and only goes after “bad guys” who are obviously doing something wrong. People like George Zimmerman or Kyle Rittenhouse also believed to be protecting their neighborhood and you can see what goes wrong there.
Spider-man is also not the only kind of vigilante being portrayed in comics. E.g. see the Punisher whose portrayal has slowly morphed from obviously horrible monster to anti-hero and as a result is being idolized by people that the character would hate.
Eh, in Civil War and subsequent related films like Black Widow the UN task force headed by General Ross is pretty definitively portrayed as “wrong” due to Cap’s mistrust in such institutions as a result of the events of Winter Soldier. The Central conflict of the film is Cap’s mistrust of such institutions as opposed to Iron Man’s belief in the necessity of oversight by an authority that is more accountable to the general public.
The Punisher is not good, and almost all Punisher comics are bad. There are however, a few takes on him that give a twist or different perspective, but they are the exception.
That’s kinda my point though. Ironman and those that agree with him aren’t shown as the bad guy, both sides are considered reasonable. Hell, to my mind Ironman and co are more right than rogers and them. Public oversight and accountability are good things and in the movie’s language that means siding with like shield or the UN, or the sikovia accords or whatever the plot has that being.
In a vacuum this is a case of reasonable people disagreeing. It’s only when you try and ascribe the moving parts as allegory for real world institutions that the movies ideology becomes apparent.
Actually though, the above was kind of just a snarky comment, but it is topical. I finally went and saw Spider-man: No Way Home. I already knew through osmosis that there would be some connection to the previous two Sony Spider-man series, but I didn’t know the extend. I did not expect that they would wrap three famous Spider-man storylines, namely “Sinister Six” (or in this case “five”), “Spiderverse” and “One More Day” into one neat package. But do I really need to see the Andrew Garfield ones now?
I did feel a bit annoyed in the scene where the arc-words of the Spider-man universe was spoken because I thought the series had actually a) skipped past this central pillar of the Spider-man property or rather b) explored it through Spider-man’s relationship with Tony Stark in the MCU. However, it made more narrative sense as the movie progressed.
Also can’t help but admit that I had a huge grin when I saw Matt Murdock appear on-screen.
Over christmas vacation I’ve actually been catching up with a lot of MCU stuff I’ve missed since for some reason it didn’t really grip me to get back in after the pandemic delays created a break that more or less coincided with the end of Phase 3 of the MCU. I got back into it after starting to play Marvel Champions again (see here).
Black Widow was fine, not great. The new character of Yelena was fun, as was the MCU version of Red Guardian. It somehow felt a bit “too little too late” for the character of Natasha Romanoff though, particularly when combined with the cerfuffle over Johanson’s contract.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was interesting but also felt a bit commercial to me, as the film was most certainly designed to appeal to the chinese market. I did like the callbacks to the Iron-Man movies which they are tied to. They did pretty well with adapting the source material while filtering out the rather orientalist leanings within it, or at least the very overt ones that even a pasty white guy from austria recognizes. Great fight scenes throughout.
The Hawkeye TV series was pretty good. It wasn’t quite what I hoped for as I am a big fan of the Matt Fraction Hawkeye run this borrows a lot from, but considering where the character of Clint Barton is in the MCU this paved over the gap pretty well. A prequel series with a young Clint Barton probably would not have worked with a 50-year-old Jeremy Renner, and wouldn’t have given us an heir apparent in Kate Bishop.
Venom is one of the dumbest action movies I have ever seen, but it is fun. Only watched it because I stumbled over it on Netflix, and didn’t expect to be now actually relevant to the MCU.
Overall, a lot of the MCU now feels like “rebuilding” which makes sense after the events of Infinity War/Endgame and the resulting death or retirement of the original Avengers line-up. I just hope it doesn’t fall apart.
This is a pretty fun video going into the Chinese cultural inspirations behind Shang-Chi. They are also an author and their book “Iron Widow” is incredible.
Agreed. Being a bit older, I always enjoyed Roger Stern’s run on Amazing Spider-Man. While most people will point to the creation of The Hobgoblin, for me it was Peter Parker maturing. He returned to college and worked towards getting his degree (or master’s, it’s been a few years). The funniest part of this being when he is trying to run down a dean to sign off on some papers, and after he signs them, the dean complains about not getting a moment’s peace. Next panel shows the dean trying to leave his office and the door has been webbed shut…
I actually let out a big “YESSSS!” in the theater when I saw Matt Murdock in the beginning of the movie. Seeing him was just as enjoyable as seeing the other surprise appearances.
One more thing: Something that really annoys me about the MCU is that the “Blip” as it is called in-universe is given way too little weight. I mean, during Endgame we see people being devastated by half the population of earth having disappeared, and we see abandoned buildings and cities, but almost by the next movie, that being Spider-man: Far from Home their reappearance is little more than “hey, isn’t it weird that my brother who was three years younger is now two years older than me?”
For example in Hawkeye we see one character’s backstory where they turn to dust and reassemble in the bathroom of someone they are visiting with those 5 years passing in between. The person they are visiting is surprised that they are back, but in the next scene which seems to be less than an hour later they are only discussing how this one blipped person can continue on with their life. No mention of the fact that suddenly 4 billion people, including others that this person knew, have suddenly reapeared. I mean, that person is a trained and conditioned assassin, but they shouldn’t they be at least somewhat perturbed by the staggering implications of this event to both their personal life and the palent in general?
I mean, an event like that should have caused major upheaval and probably a fucking global famine. Even with the major food waste we are committing, I don’t think 4 billion people will have food for another 4 billion just at hand.
I generally agree with you that the MCU doesn’t give enough weight to “the Blip,” but isn’t what you’re talking about the entire premise behind The Falcon and the Winter Soldier TV series? I forget the name of the terrorist organization, but their entire goal was to get back at the organization that was in charge of taking care of the people who returned after the “Blip.”
The faster the MCU moves on from the blip being a big part of their movies, the better. I’m just not interested. Let it be a soft reset and just get on with it. It’s dumb, and unrealistic, but I’m not watching MCU movies for either intelligence or realism!
