We Got Every Last One of These Punks. (Spider-Man: Reign)

“Sometimes, it's necessary to fight back.”
-Andrew Cartmel, 1992

1/8: The revolution will not be televised.

When I was a boy, my aunt would get me Christmas presents. Some years it would be video games, others it would be Hot Wheels. Nowadays, it’s cash (which is increasingly the present I get from that side of the family. Then again, I don’t have the closeness to them that I do with the other side, mostly due to distance). But the last year I remember getting an actual present was when I was just exiting middle school. I got a phone call from my aunt and she asked what I wanted for Christmas. At the time, I had begun reading comics in earnest again, and so I asked for some.

Or rather, just one: Spider-Man The Other. While I was getting into comics, one of the trades I would always return to was “Back in Black,” which featured a story with a character from The Other. I was intrigued by the oddness of such a character in a Spider-Man comic and I wanted to learn more about them. So I asked my aunt for the comic and she sent it to me. The Other was a storyline from a few years back wherein Peter dies at the hands of a vampire and comes back from the dead through mystical means. Looking back, I don’t think either was as good as I remembered it being when I was 13.

But that wasn’t the only comic I got that Christmas. There were two others: Fallen Son (which looked at the Marvel Universe’s reaction to the Death of Captain America) and Spider-Man Reign: One of the greatest Spider-Man comic of the 21^st Century. There are many negative things one could say about Reign: The art is a bit crap at times (especially the backgrounds, which don’t seem to even try at points), some of the plot details are left to the side when they should have been somewhat explained (how did Jonah learn about Peter’s secret identity), the story probably needed another issue of space, and a couple of panels are counterintuitive to the themes and ideas the story is invested in (specifically, in the final issue, one of the minor characters inexplicably says, “I believe” and that works against the rest of the comic’s suspicion of the previous generation).

But when people talk about Spider-Man Reign in a negative light, what they focus on aren’t those aspects of the text but rather the text’s approach to sexuality and how it flagrantly nicks ideas from the Dark Knight Returns. In regards to sexuality, this comes from two moments. Firstly, in the initial printing of the story, Kaare Andrews drew a picture of Peter Parker completely naked. Which is to say we see his cock. On the one hand, this is a very embarrassing miss on the part of Marvel editorial. But at the same time, it’s not all that detailed in the panel it appears in (indeed, it’s even less so than Dr. Manhattan’s infamously tiny penis), so it’s understandable that Andrews was briefly able to get away with that.

The other piece of sexuality requires a bit more work. In the penultimate issue, it’s revealed that the cause of Mary Jane’s death was being in a relationship with Peter. (The fact that Mary Jane Watson died at all was something that was suggested by both the covers and the fact that her ghost literally haunts Peter, but not something that was explicitly stated until the second issue.) Now the decision to kill off Mary Jane as a means to get Peter to stop being a superhero is problematic to say the least, but the contention most critics of this story have with this isn’t that she was killed off but rather how she was killed off. Though not explicitly stated in the text, one can infer (both from the dialogue of “I am filled with radioactive blood. And not just blood. Every fluid. Touching me… Loving me… Loving me killed you!!” and the fact that Andrews decided to draw Spidey’s penis) that Mary Jane was killed by Peter’s Spider-Sperm.

If one is to make the argument that Spider-Man Reign is one of the greatest Spider-Man comics ever made, this is certainly a moment for redemptive reading. In many regards, this is a literalization of what Harry was talking about in Best of Enemies: “…We leave nothing but pain in our wake. We’re toxic, Peter-- anyone comes near us… and their lives become radioactive.” (For all that I’ll get into the influence of Frank Miller, perhaps the biggest influence on this story is that of JM DeMatteis from the invocation of Kraven’s Last Hunt [indeed, Reign was the story that introduced me to that one] to the investment in masks and performance to the contrast between toxic masculinity and healthy masculinity. Also, note the lack of appearance of Gwen Stacy and Harry Osborn. While most likely done to give the story the ability to somewhat stand on its own, it also has the implication that Peter was able to make peace with those deaths as he was with Ned Leeds and Charlamange, connecting the story with another theme of the DeMatteis era: the ability to cope with trauma.) In this regard, recall that I argued that comic could be read as being about the final stages of a collapsing polyamorous relationship. Given this, it could be read that the Spider-Sperm was less of a “super cancer” than it was a metaphor for having AIDS. Many an AIDS narrative focused on either the experience of slowly dying of the disease or, as Spider-Man Reign does, the guilt of the carrier for having caused the death of their lover through their love and how they cope with outliving them. (An alternative reading would be just to point out that there's no actual proof within the text that being in a relationship with Peter caused Mary Jane to die. Literally all we have is Peter Parker's word on the matter. It could very well be that Peter just blames himself for his wife getting cancer. Indeed, the text supports this theory given the ghost of Mary Jane [because comics] responds to Peter tearfully confessing that he gave his wife cancer with "Stop being silly.")

Of course, connecting this text with my own read of a 20 year old comic isn’t enough to actually argue that this is a queer text (nor is it enough to save said text from the banality of killing off a female lead solely to give the male lead some drama, but then few things can and Spider-Man Reign is interesting enough to survive without those factors). There has to be something within the text that alludes to queerness in some fashion. Fortunately, this comes in the form of the story’s main antagonist: Venom, the Black Suit made manifest. When confronting the bad guy in the final issue, the way Venom talks to Peter has an abusive ex-boyfriend vibe to it, in particular: “Well, well, well, look who’s come crawling back. It’s been a long time, lover. Heard you’re single again.” Add to that the way Venom gaslights Peter about the nature of their relationship (specifically in regards to his awareness about the Black Suit’s nature), and it’s abundant that Venom’s relationship with Peter (as with all his relationships really) is one founded upon abusing his partner.

(There is of course a sensible argument to be made in regards to implicitly queering the main antagonist of the text. However the narrative doesn’t do so in the typical way, opting to instead make the queerness an implication of dialogue rather than the typical methodology of using stereotypical queer signifiers [such as a focus on fashion and being extremely camp] to highlight the villainy. Indeed, the villainy of Venom is less in regards to his queerness than in regards to him being a fascist who plots to enslave and consume humanity because he was “abandoned” by the one person who he “loved.” Even if we are to assume a sympathetic motivation [which the text grants to some degree, but not enough to allow Peter to be unsympathetic], the final solution Venom comes up with dashes those arguments away for the bollocks that they are.)

Which leaves us with the Dark Knight Returns connection. In most regards, this is a superficial read of the text, focusing on the fact that it’s the story of old man Spidey coming out of retirement to do battle with a dystopian future. There are some other minor details that connect the two texts: there’s an army of young people who don masks to combat the horrors of the dystopia, a murder occurs that everyone (including the author) ignores, and the main character’s retirement is caused by the death of someone close to him.

However if one were to actually look at those moments closely, it becomes clear that Spider-Man Reign is talking about completely different things. For starters, Peter’s reasoning for retiring has less to do with Batman realizing that he’s pushed the game of caped crusader too far (again, he’s blatantly Adam West Batman) but rather the guilt caused by the death of someone he loves. (In fact, unlike Jason Todd, the death of Mary Jane is central to the text. Peter's arc within the story is making peace with her death. Batman doesn't give a shit about Jason once Carrie Kelly comes into the picture.) Indeed, when given the opportunity to return to being a costume superhero, Batman immediately jumps at the chance whereas Peter tries to run as far away as possible. As for the youths, where Dark Knight Returns demonized them until they were wielded by someone of great power and control, Spider-Man Reign views them in a more valorizing light. (This should come as no surprise given their more recent work: where Frank Miller went on to write a screed against Islam to such a degree as to plausibly mortify Ben Garrison, Andrews went on to write a comic that argues for the extrajudicial murder of the 1%.)

Furthermore, there’s the people who brought the youths together in the end. For the Dark Knight Returns, it’s Batman who whips these criminal youths into his own militia. His indomitable will pushes their criminality towards his own ends. Conversely, Spider-Man Reign initially has this role be played by J Jonah Jameson. Jameson has an interesting role within the narrative. He’s a sympathetic character, and yet he’s consistently viewed as being in the wrong about just everything. He’s wrong about Peter’s willingness to be the great superhero who will destroy the dystopia, he’s wrong about the people being inspired to fight once they see the superhero in action, and he was wrong about who Venom was possessing (he thought it was George W. Bush whereas it was really Dick Cheney). (This has an interesting impact on his final benediction where he thanks god for the return of the Superhero as opposed to the collapse of the fascist state. Indeed, it’s ambiguous as to whether Spider-Man is now a traditional superhero or if he’s become something else entirely.)

Midway through though, he’s arrested for starting a riot and the young people are scattered without a leader. And so the person who brings them together is not Spider-Man, but the text’s deturagonist (who remains nameless within the text, which doesn’t work at all). She proclaims to the crowd of fellow teenagers and kids “We can’t rely on them anymore. The old men. They can’t show us how to live. They took our city and made it a cage. They only hurt us. Stop running. Stop hiding. It’s time we became something more than what we are.“ This reads a lot differently in 2018 than it did 10 years ago, especially given the gun debate going on right now. (In many ways, this prescience is what makes Spider-Man Reign one of the best Spider-Man comics of the 21^st century.) (Another interesting note is that she’s reacting against, of all things, a Doctor Who reference. In the episode Survival, a joke is made about two men being chased by a tiger, and one of the men claims he’ll survive because he’s faster than the other. Spider-Man Reign tells the joke verbatim, save for changing the tiger to a bear.)

At the same time though, Andrews is aware enough of these small connections to the Dark Knight Returns to play with them in his narrative, which really hurts the story overall. While some, such as the televisions (and, subsequently, the journalist Miller Janson), add to the theme of watching the world as a method to bringing about social change (for one cannot change the world if one looks away from their child of Omelas), the decision to confine the story within four issues hurts the flow and impact of the narrative. In retrospect the story should have either had the issues extended as Dark Knight Returns were or had an additional issue added to expand on things. Also the decision to toy with some plot beats of the Dark Knight Returns (the superhero returns for a one off mission, which is successful so he goes after a bigger target, which proves to be too much for him and he’s saved by his girl sidekick [the subversion comes from that last part, where instead of a last minute rescue, the girl flees because “he’s just an old man. Weak. Like the rest of us”]) should have stopped in the first issue in favor of doing its own thing.

And yet, I can’t help but love this story. There are so many things that I haven’t brought up that are absolutely fantastic (the use of Deus Ex Machina, the Mary Jane scenes, the two instances of the nine panel grid, etc.). But more than that, this is one of the texts that actually got me invested in literary criticism. One of the first comics blogs I ever followed was 4thletter, which is sadly no longer active. One of the posts I read on that site was David Brothers’ take on Spider-Man Reign in a series on the influence of the Dark Knight Returns. It’s a spectacular piece that highlights why this comic is great to such a degree that if I was to make my argument, I’d just be ripping off his work entirely. Brothers, along with Gavok, Andrew Hickey and the rest of the Mindless Ones, and Dr. Anj, were among the earliest of my influences and guides to comics. Without them and so many others, this blog wouldn’t exist. Thank you.

            The End.

07/13/2017-03/21/2018

[Photo: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys #5 by Gerard Way, Shaun Simon, and Becky Cloonan]

Long ago in an American autumn.

He’s Not Dead! (Diane)

1/8: I believe in a thing called love!

The song opens with an acoustic guitar and a choir going “oooOOOooo” four times. It feels meditative, or rather akin to what one would listen to while meditating. And yet, there’s a twinge of melancholy to the guitar. Not in the Johnny Cash sense wherein you can feel the anger and depression in the song, but rather the melancholy of nostalgia for a somewhere (or, more accurately, someone) you haven’t seen in a long time.

Diane.

Diane,

How can I ever

Make you

Understand?

To be perfectly honest, this isn’t my kind of music. The lyrics are a bit too straightforward and simplistic, the instrumentals are too soft for my tastes, and I find John Marc De Matteis’ voice to be a bit too wobbly. But don’t confuse my aesthetic for a judgment of quality. Looking up the background of the song, De Matteis wrote the piece for his wife, Diane Epstein on their honeymoon, so it would make sense for him to write a piece that straightforwardly expressed how he feels towards her. Indeed, the wobbliness of De Matteis’ voice is best read as a bit of nervousness towards his new wife and the feelings she is causing him to have.

Words can’t

Explain

The way that your eyes have

Washed away

My pain.

In terms of the themes and ideas of the blog, this is one of the more interesting stanzas. Kraven’s Last Hunt, among being about other things, is about how one can cope with the way the world is. For some, like Kraven, coping is too difficult to bear and they sadly decide to commit suicide to get away from the madness and pain that forms their life. Others, like Vermin, cope by lashing out at the world, being as cruel to it as it was to them. But that path is also self-defeating as it leaves you alone and miserable. But for people like Peter, the way to cope is by finding other people who are also hurting, conversing with them, and helping each other through the darkness. There’s a line from Soul of the Hunter (the coda to Kraven’s Last Hunt released five years later, which this blog will sadly not be covering) that’s telling: “…But we can make a choice to listen hard for a song of hope; a song of belief in something bigger: that every heart can touch when it opens in love.”

Diane,

My wife,

You are a gift from God,

My light,

My life.

This bit straightforwardly expresses the relationship between singer and the object of his affection. Religion is an interesting subject within the work of De Matteis. As noted by Grant Morrison in his psychochronography “Supergods,” De Matteis is “a devotee of Indian mystic Meher Baba.” Baba’s influence within the work of De Matteis can perhaps be best seen within Seekers into the Mystery (another book this project won’t be covering), as he is clearly the inspiration for The Magician, a spiritual figure who brings enlightenment to the lead character as well as several others within the world.

But since Baba seems to be a rabbit hole that I am ill equipped to go into, and I want to cover something with a bit more of a personal connection, I’m instead going to talk about De Matteis’ elseworlds story: Supergirl Wings. Apart from possibly Dr. Strange Into Shamballa (which I can’t find a copy of) and maybe his Phantom Stranger run (which, while focusing on Judas Iscariot, is diluted by the positionality of his co-writer, Dan Didio), this is perhaps the most religious of his superhero works. It takes Peter David’s concept of an angelic Supergirl and pushes it even further, combining it with Grant Morrison’s Hawkman replacement, Zauriel, as well as a few reinterpretations of other superheroes to fit within this fantastical system such as Superman being an angel who decided to become human, Aquaman being the guide from non-existence to existence, and Batman being literal, actual Satan (though in this context, more akin to Satan’s original role within the Bible as being a tester rather than as a straightforwardly malevolent force). It’s a psychogeographic look at a mythological system in the vein of Alice in Wonderland that isn’t a one-to-one allegory for any known religion, but rather invokes several belief systems to create something unexpected yet fitting. Much like Kraven’s Last Hunt, it too deals with a depressed person on the verge of suicide, though her ending is more akin to Peter’s than the titular character.

(The personal connection comes from the fact that for a long period of time, I wasn’t actively reading comics. They were just something that existed that I didn’t need to explore further. But at that time, I had a small obsession with the character of Death brought about by my childhood love of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. As such, I surfed the web looking for appearances of the character. When I heard that Death was going to pop up in an issue of Action Comics on IGN, I went surfing to find out more. It was then that I came across this blog called Supergirl Comic Box Commentary. While going through the backlog, I discovered the work of Grant Morrison, John Marc De Matteis [whose work I was nostalgic for, but never had any reason to go back to before this blog], among countless others. Through those works, I exploded into the comics’ scene and haven’t looked back. I owe a debt to that blog, which I hope I’ll someday be able to pay back.)

To add to the sense of melancholy, a violin is added to the song. It is the only other noticeable instrument in the piece.

Another set of four “oooOOOooo”s comes after this stanza.

Dreams come true,

And miracles happen.

            As a chorus, these lines repeat four times. It’s a mantra for most writers, and indeed most people, meaning we can achieve whatever we want. At the same time, it subconsciously acknowledges that just because you work hard and try your best, it doesn’t mean your dreams will come true. Life tends to deal odd hands that could prevent your goals from coming into fruition, be it through an interviewer having a bad day, an interviewee saying the wrong thing without realizing it, or the fact that there’s just someone better than you for the position. That’s where miracles come in: those moments of grace that you don’t think are possible until they actually happen.

Diane,

Sweet bride,

You’ve walked into the door

Into the other side.

This most likely refers to the wedding that has just occurred. Doors are a form of passage, to represent the move from one stage of life to another. This is made more explicit within the next stanza, which is far more interesting than this one.

The past

Is dead.

And joy is the only road that lies ahead.

This isn’t completely true. In terms of being a thing that can be experienced, yes the past is dead. And yet, dead things can still have an impact on the world. We are living within the consequences of the 1980’s, be it the rise of Trump, the impact of Ronald Regan’s presidency, or even the culture we consume. The past haunts the present like a ghost whose business will never be completed, who keeps finding reasons to stick around even after it’s become abundantly clear that they’re only hurting those around them with their presence (insert Twin Peaks The Return joke here).

That also doesn’t mean that the only possible path forward is joy. Yes, this is clearly referring to the relationship between De Matteis and Diane, but everything has implications and meaning to it in the wider context of the world. (Even then, to assume that a relationship can’t fall apart is naïvely optimistic, though understandably so.) As 2017 has shown, there are many paths the future can take. But in the end, I tend to see that the path by which the future goes through ultimately as one of social improvement. A path of caring for others and wishing the best for everyone. Be it the recent surge in support of LGBT people, the push of Generation Z for gun laws, or even the countless people in the entertainment industry coming out in regards to being sexually abused by people in power and said people being torn down.

Dreams come true.

            The line repeats four times before transitioning into the chorus.

Diane.

Diane,

No need to explain

Because you understand:

Now dreams come true.

Dreams come true.

Dreams come true.

Dreams come true.

Miracles too.

At this point, I should probably talk about the twinge of melancholy that I’ve noted throughout the song. For all that De Matties clearly cares for and loves his wife, for all that he is astonished that he’s with such a wonderful person, this is nonetheless an ending. And endings by their very nature are sad. Because they’re the moment where nothing can follow from it. It’s a stop gate of the things that have come before, the culmination of all that you’ve been building towards.

And yet, like most ongoing fiction, we tend to not notice this because it doesn’t feel like an ending in the moment. It feels like another part of life. Life is being in perpetual middle. There’s no climax that everything build towards, no Aristotelian unity that connects every little detail in one perfectly created package. To claim otherwise would be to fall into the trap of conspiracy theories. I know I said that life is going in a specific direction, but that’s only right now. That’s only how it feels as I’m typing it. For all I know, the world could feel vastly different on June 26^th, 2018 when this uploads on my blog or on May 29^th, 2525 (if man is still alive).

The world is constantly changing, becoming something new in every instant. Because that’s the nature of life: change. We all change, when you get down to it. We fall in love, fall out of love, have kids, get jobs we hate, and yes, die. We begin projects that feel too big for use and, when they’re done, find that you could have done so much more. We become new people every single day of our lives.

Yes, someday humanity will become extinct. Maybe even all sentient life or even all life period. The universe itself will collapse into entropy and decay, only to birth itself anew. The story of life is perpetual “To Be Continued,” there is no one singular ending, but a vast multitude of endings for every single being, be it man, deer, or plant. Life has no coherent thesis, no true ending or culmination of themes. It just keeps going on and on forever.

What meanings we do find within life are ones we put in there ourselves. We create meaning through our experiences and the experiences of those close to us, be it physically or emotionally. And through our meanings and interpretations, we find reasons to keep moving forward, to see new things and old ones as well, until that day it all ends for us. And what happens next, I cannot say. But it has been said that miracles happen. Maybe, despite everything, there’s something after this. Something we haven’t considered yet is staring us right in the face. Maybe the story of our lives doesn’t have an ending either. After all, who can actually remember coming out of their parent’s womb? And without that beginning, to paraphrase my favorite book, there can be no ending to the story of our lives. It just stops.

The song closes with a cacophony of lyrics including the chorus, the word “Diane” repeated over and over again, and a few “oOOoOOO”s. The violins are the loudest here.

“Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs. And what’s wrong with that?”
-Paul and Linda McCartney, 1976

The End.

07/13/2017-03/20/2018

[Photo: Both the Immortals and Those Who Aren’t Sing the Praises of Life Equally Directed by Takahiro Omori Script by Noboru Takagi]

Long ago in an American autumn.

Aunt May? Mary Jane? (Die I)

1/8: You're gonna carry that weight.

Sadly, You Died.

“The Universe is Change; every Change is the effect of an Act of Love; all Acts of Love contain Pure Joy. Die Daily. Death is the apex of one curve of the snake Life: behold all opposites as necessary complements, and rejoice.”
-Aleister Crowley, 1944

The End.

07/13/2017-03/19/2018

[Photo: The Real Folk Blues Part 2 Directed by Yoshiyuki Takei Script by Keiko Nobumoto]

Long ago in an American autumn.

An Open Letter to Wes Anderson

Dear Wes Anderson,

I would like to open this letter with a bit of flattery. In the wake of the release of Isle of Dogs (which I needed to be pointed out was an obvious pun), I watched and rewatched a large selection of your filmography. By now, I have seen all of your films bar Rushmore and Bottle Rocket, and I have liked most of them (as many people pointed out, Darjeeling Limited was perhaps a bad move). Out of the ones I’ve seen, I’d probably say the Grand Budapest Hotel is my hotel (yes, I am a boring person), though I my second favorite, oddly enough, is Life Aquatic. Overall, I would say you’re one of the best working filmmakers of the 21^stcentury. That isn’t to say you’re without critique (which I won’t get into so as to avoid losing you before I get to the reason why I wrote this letter), but I think striking you from the “list of quality filmmakers” would be a terrible loss in the way losing John Ford or Peter Jackson wouldn’t.

Now that I’ve gotten the flattery out of the way, I need your help. Before I get to what I need you to do, I first need to set up some context. Said context being the fact that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is the greatest superhero movie ever made. Now there are some people out there (including Aleph Null, who commissioned this piece) who would wish this film to be stricken from the record of the Superhero Film Canon. However, this is impossible both because Canon is a bullshit concept that has stagnated many a story (Grant Morrison’s Batman post New 52) and limited what one can and can’t do with a character (Dr. Light: Rape Fetishist) and because of the fact that, within the first act of the film, Spider-Man is revealed to have access to hammerspace.

Now, in case you’re not aware (or, rather, the people reading this who aren’t you aren’t aware [I’m sure you’re aware of what hammerspace is, Mr. Anderson]), hammerspace is a concept derived from Looney Tunes cartoons wherein a character is capable of pulling objects of varying sizes from seemingly nowhere. (In Spider-Man’s case, a simple cell phone.) By doing this, the filmmakers not only connect Spidey to a legacy of trickster characters (see also the various homages to silent comedy and slapstick romances), but they also reveal what Spider-Man looks like from outside of his own head. From our perspective, we see Spidey as this down on his luck jerk who breaks down at the sign of pressure. But this is due to having access to his interior monologue. He doesn’t, contrary to the amazing work in Chip Zdarsky’s Howard the Duck, crawl into a ball to cry about Uncle Ben for two weeks. Instead, he keeps his feelings bottled up until they explode into giving up all together or deciding that it’s a good idea to murder Norman Osborn instead of helping Harry out as he’s going through a bad trip. Not the typical day-to-day superheroing, is what I’m saying.

But without that interior monologue, the average New York citizen sees Spidey as this witty chaotic trickster. A slim fool who outwits his opponents while making jokes about the situation they both find themselves in. One who frequently dons disguises to trick his opponents (typically an extremely easily to anger white guy) into falling into their own traps. In short, most people see Spider-Man as Bugs Bunny. By making this connection literal via the introduction of hammerspace into Spider-Man’s powers, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 not only justifies its own existence, but it also puts to shame every single other Spider-Man story after it that refuses to acknowledge this ability of Peter’

But this isn’t enough to make the film the greatest superhero movie ever made. Indeed, there’s a stronger case to be made that it’s one of the worst, though not the reasons most give for it. The main arguments from most of the critiques of the film that I’ve seen range from “This is a film that exists solely to keep Spider-Man from being in the MCU” (one could make a sensible argument that’s actually a virtue of the film, given who owns the MCU) to “They should have let Sam Rami make Spider-Man 4” (No, no they should not). The actual vices people bring up tend to be the decision to uncritically kill off Gwen Stacy (and indeed not give the character or any female characters within the film much to do on screen [they tend to spend most of their time in the margins of the film doing interesting things, which is a complaint that could be raised at every single Spider-Man film]), the plotline involving Peter’s Dad is a bit shit with its “proper” conclusion being left on the cutting room floor, and the fact that the film is structurally convoluted, juggling 4-7 different plotlines at a time and not always making them work.

(One point of ambiguity that I noted at the time was the decision to have Electro in a hoodie when he’s confronted by a cop who believes him to be a threat and is prepared to fire on him. In case you’ve forgotten about this film [and apologies about assuming you have memories of the Amazing Spider-Man 2], Electro is played by noted African American actor Jamie Foxx. The implications of this are not ones I am prepared to tackle. I can see the argument that this is a critique of the police, but it’s slim enough that I don’t feel comfortable making the argument, even if I wasn’t a white guy. I would be interested in someone else making an analysis of that scene, be it positive or otherwise. It’s an implication that no one was prepared for.)

At the same time though, the plotlines never collapse into incoherence and indeed feature some amazing character work. Off the top of my head there’s the scene where Peter tries to talk down Electro before he accidentally kills some people, the bit on the bridge that’s easily the most romantic comedy moment of the two films (indeed, for good and for ill, the films fit nicely within the romantic comedy genre), and the moment where Aunt May calls Peter out for obsessing over the “Peter’s Dad did some BAD THINGS” plotline. The action is a marked improvement over the previous film, with the lighting and cinematography making for some terrific shots. And there are some fascinating implications that are left unspoken (If one were inclined to make a redemptive read out of the film instead of an argument on why it’s the greatest superhero film ever made, one would note the first film’s thematic interests in the duality between love and horror and the metafictional critique of Nolan’s Batman [which made being the first superhero film to come out after The Avengers hurt it even more], the flagrantly obvious identity of Mr. Fears [and the subsequent implications], the way the film empathizes with the plight of Harry Osborn even when treating him as a figure of ambiguity, and how there is no good capitalist to balance out the realistically cartoonish villainy of Oscorp, and one can make the read that the Amazing Spider-Man films are part of a trilogy about how capitalism is a system that hurts everyone within it, even those who allegedly benefit from it. And it is the Amazing Spider-Man 2 that does the majority of the legwork. Of course, were the Amazing Spider-Man 3 to be made by some mad fanboy as part of a comic adaptation [since it’s reasonable to assume the Amazing Spider-Man 2’s production burnt a lot of bridges], it would end with the Marvel Cinematic Universe literally eating the universe as if it was Galactus, ending with the bleak note that capitalism ultimately consumes everything it touches).

So what we have is a mixed bag of a film elevated by the occasional clever brilliant bit. In short, it’s the perfect expression of the superhero genre. As a genre, there are some fleetingly great moments, but as a genre it is also defined by the majority of writer’s inability to write interesting stories about women and people of color outside of the margins, implications in regards to the plausibility of fascism as a read on what the superhero is, and several behind the scenes corporate stuff that makes it unethical to read any works within the genre. The genre has produced works by brilliant artists and writers like JH Williams III and Donny Cates, but it also spawned works by awful storytellers like Howard Chakyn and Chuck Dixon. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is the greatest superhero movie ever made because it is the only one capable of expressing the multitudes of the genre. It’s the greatest… because the superhero genre is shit.

Which, at long last, brings us to you, Mr. Anderson. What I want from you is simple: I don’t want the Amazing Spider-Man 2 to be the greatest superhero film ever made, PLEASE ADAPT FLEX MENTALLO: MAN OF MUSCLE MYSTERY TO THE BIG SCREEN!!!!

I should probably elaborate on that point. Flex Mentallo follows two separate plot lines. The first is a semi noir tale about a superhero, the titular Flex Mentallo, trapped in the real world discovering that one of his friends, The Fact, is working for a terrorist organization in the real world and must uncover the reason behind the plot. The second follows Flex’s creator, Wally Sage, as he talks to a suicide hotline about all those shitty amazing comics he read as a kid shortly after taking enough pills to be fatal. All the while, the apocalypse looms.

In many regards, even putting aside the quirky aesthetics of the comic, you are the perfect director to adapt the comic. As with many of your films, the light colors and oddly formal means of talking belie stories of depression, guilt, and striving to be better, which this comic likewise exemplifies. In many ways, despite coming out roughly the same time as Bottle Rocket, Flex Mentallo exemplifies the ethos and implications of your more recent career turn towards artifice as a means of expressing unspeakable honesty that you are the perfect director to adapt this comic.

And by having such a perfect director adapt a work about the comics medium, warts and all, I believe your Flex Mentallo is the only thing that can usurp the Amazing Spider-Man 2 as the greatest superhero film ever made. I mean, at this point it’s either you or Teen Titans Go! to the Movies.

Thank you for whatever time you have provided this rubbish letter,

Sean Dillon