Nobody Knows Who You Are (Spider-Man: Life Story)

What follows is an article that wasn't published in PanelXPanel due to being too similar to other articles in the magazine. It was written on 7/9/19 over the course of a single day. Another article I wrote was featured in that PanelXPanel can be found here.

Hey, turns out I'm absolutely right about
absolutely everything!

Spider-Man: Life Story asks the question of what would happen if Spider-Man’s story was told in real time. If he grew older and older with each passing decade and had to deal with the countless political upheavals the United States went through. On the surface, it seems like a simple premise. Indeed, John Byrne did it with the relationship of Batman and Superman in his Generations trilogy. But the story Spider-Man: Life Story wishes to tell is of Spider-Man’s place in the world, one that hopes to understand what Spider-Man is about.

If one is to tell the story of Spider-Man as Spider-Man: Life Story purports to do, then one must first understand the nature of Spider-Man’s narrative. The thematic core that acts as a through line for that story and that story alone. For some superheroes, such things are obvious. To give an example, Batman is the story of how found families forged through trauma can help make a person better. And many have argued that Spider-Man is likewise an easy superhero to understand the story of: With Great Power, There Must Also Come… Great Responsibility. And there’s certainly an argument to be made on that front. There are loads of Spider-Man stories that explore the ways in which power and responsibility collide with one another.

There’s just one problem: every single superhero is about the implications of great power and how to use it responsibly. There’s that one famous Green Lantern story about how he will fight to free the green people, the purple people, the yellow people, but will he fight to free the black ones. Marvelman is literally about the sheer horror of giving people such great power and how their idea of acting responsibly with it is through creating a fascist utopia where criminals are rehabilitated through mind control. All Star Superman, by contrast, is about what one man does when faced with the end of his life, and how much responsibility he has to the world he leaves behind. Hell, “Must there be a Superman” is a rephrasing of the question “What is the responsibility of those with great power?”

That’s not to say all superhero stories fall into this axiom. I will admit that the All Star Superman comparison is a bit of a stretch. But much in the same way that not all detective stories are about problem solving, the ghost of the relationship between power and responsibility still lurks within the narrative shape of it all. So then, if Spider-Man isn’t just about power and responsibility, then what is it all about?

Consider how Spider-Man: Life Story uses the concepts of power and responsibility. For the most part, these stories consist of Spider-Man being presented with an issue wherein he has to choose between doing something for his friends/family/job or stopping the bad guy from hurting people. But at the same time, Peter is an active member of the world. He isn’t shunt off into some apolitical landscape where he doesn’t have opinions on things. He feels strongly about the cruelty being perpetrated by those with power whom he views as not using it responsibly.

Consider the opening scene of the fourth issue, focusing on the 1990’s era of Spider-Man. By that time period, Peter has become the CEO of his own corporation, one that is doing quite well for itself. Tony Stark offers to buy out Peter’s shares in the company (in his words “merging” the companies under the Stark Industries name) so that he can work move into the communications business (as it would be much easier to buy out a company that’s already in that business than start from scratch). Tony thinks that Peter would rather be in his lab doing experiments than the boring, day to day work of a CEO, he even says as such. So confident is he, that Tony came himself rather than call his lawyers or do the more traditional hostile takeover. All Tony wants to know is what it’ll take for the company to be in his hands instead of Peter’s.

Peter responds, quite bluntly, “Stop making weapons.” Tony, naturally, is pissed that Peter would dare suggest that an American hero such as him should just stop being that hero. He built the weapons that saved America from the Russian War and keep peace across the world while this punk kid makes cell phones. Tony Stark saved Mary Jane’s life, Peter’s kids’ lives, and countless other lives. Peter responds by insinuating, in the most unsubtle terms imaginable, that Tony has also been selling his weapons to various regimes across the world. A Real Hero, this Tony Stark fellow is. He has the smarts to create technology that could help people walk or see when they couldn’t before. And he decides to instead build weapons that make a lot of money.

Conversely, there’s Peter’s relationship with Reed Richards in the second issue (set in the 70’s). There, Peter is working as a fellow scientist at Reed’s Future Foundation, where they do work that helps the world. And yet, Peter feels they could be doing more. He confronts Reed on the matter, highlighting the way in which the clothing the Fantastic Four wear alone could revitalize the world. Reed’s response is something akin to an anthropologist not wishing to impact a culture that they’re not a part of. Peter responds that Reed is part of that culture, to which Reed makes the case that if any action is done, then that would lead to a slippery slope of superheroes taking over the world. And while such things are an issue, using the slippery slope fallacy as an argument not to do something has always been a rubbish argument.

You might have noticed something about the two relationships presented. Despite twenty years passing by, Reed remains a scientist working in his lab. And despite forty years going on, Tony is still a war profiteer. They remain in the stories they were created from. Peter, by contrast, has gone from a college student to an assistant to the head of a company. He’s lost friends and family to time and war.

There’s a concept within comics called the illusion of change that claims that the superhero never really changes. They’ll always go back to the same status quos that governed their lives. Iron Man will always be a billionaire playboy, Captain America a soldier out of time, Jessica Jones a detective. But Spider-Man can never have that luxury, because there is no Status Quo to go back to. For Spider-Man can never again be a high school student. The story of Spider-Man is a story about change.

Consider the longest run on Spider-Man, that by Dan Slott. His run begins with Peter Parker as a lay about failure whose genius is being wasted. He could have been the next Steve Jobs, but instead he’s taking pictures of Spider-Man. But over the course of that run, he becomes a mad scientist working to make the world a better place, Otto Ocatvius trying to be a better man, a CEO of a big tech company that could change the world, and finally a reporter at the Daily Bugle focusing on the scientific advancements going on in the world.

Hell, look at the Lee/Ditko era of Spider-Man. That whole story is about a young kid growing from being a selfish little jerk who only looks out for himself to fighting impossible odds just to save one life. DeMatteis’ two eras look at how the traumatic experiences Peter has gone through have changed who he is and how he functions in a way that no one had done before. Strazynski opted to make Spider-Man a more mystical figure while simultaneously putting him in his most mundane setting as a schoolteacher. The worst, least memorable eras of Spider-Man have always thought of themselves as being throwbacks to a previous era without doing anything new with the character. Spider-Man thrives on the new, the different.

Hell, even attempts at shunting Peter back into an older status quo ultimately force things to be radically altered. One More Day being the most famous example wherein the undoing of 20 years of development could only be done through something that’s so out of what most people consider the thematic interests of Spider-Man. Even putting aside the quality of that story, that return to status quo ultimately is so massive, it’s more of a shift in the status quo than a return to one.

Which is perhaps the core of what Spider-Man: Life Story is doing. Many a Spider-Man fan has joked (or made a serious case) that Peter Parker’s life is a never-ending cascade of misery and pain where everyone close to him ultimately suffers and dies because of him. They point to Gwen Stacy or Ned Leeds or the countless other Spider-Man supporting characters who have died (all three of them). They’ll talk about how Peter’s home life is being ruined by his need to be Spider-Man. And while there may be a grain of truth in that claim, it ultimately misses the larger issue at hand: Spider-Man is a story about change in a universe that runs on the illusion of it. And that’s terrifying. 

Spider-Man: Life Story, by contrast, removes that illusion. For all that Tony and Reed remain where they were when they started, there are consequences for them remaining in place. Sue leaves Reed because he just won’t leave the lab to have a conversation that isn’t about science. Tony grows more and more villainous by the day, outright declaring himself to be the baddie. Captain America finds himself disillusioned by the Vietnam War and worked to save as many people as he could from the bloodshed.

And what of Spider-Man? Well, at the time of this writing, his story remains unfinished. That is, after all, the nature of Spider-Man and indeed all serialized fiction of this type: to lack an ending. But Spider-Man: Life Story is one that needs an ending. It’s not ongoing and it purports to be his life story. And all lives end the same way. All things considered, Peter will probably die in the next issue and the final issue will focus on what he leaves behind. It will look at the world that has changed because of Spider-Man and in particular those he has inspired to be heroes (which is to say “Miles Morales”), to fight to change the world and make it better than it was before. For all the darkness, all the horror, all the cruelty, Spider-Man is ultimately a hopeful story about the growth of a single person into a better version of himself. And really, that’s all we can hope to do with our lives and our capacity to change: be better.

That is, after all, what his sad final statement on Norman Osborn amounts to: “You could have been so much more. Even after everything, you had a son who loved you. But what were you doing? Plotting revenge, locked in battle with me.” He could have been more than a sad, petty little man. He could have helped, even if it was just himself to be better. Because, in spite of everything, Peter believed that he could. It’s not easy changing who you are or how you act. But it’s possible to stop being a jerk.