Sharpening the Sword is a regular column by retailer John Riley of Grasshopper's Comics, a 1300 square foot comic and game store in
Spoiler Warning: If for some bizarre reason you haven't read Civil War #2 yet and don't want it ruined, don't read this article.
OK, I don't like writing about things that I have no control over but this one time I thought I'd just ruminate on comics for a while. As you know, Peter Parker outed himself this week, revealing his identity to the world. Naturally, it was a topic of great discussion in our store as fans debated whether this was a catastrophe in the making, whether it was appropriate for the character, and whether it was even real.
But the thing that I found most surprising was that the major point of concern was actually what this revelation meant to his marriage to Mary Jane. As soon as fans found out (some read the book in the store, and others actually went home, read it, and came back to discuss it) the subject of the conversation seemed to veer towards Joe Quesada and his outspoken dislike of Mary Jane. Apparently, Quesada really doesn't think Spider-Man should be married to MJ as he thinks that apparently this prevents readers from being able to relate to him.
Now before you go thinking that this is just some fanboy's rant regarding a favorite character, I do have a point here. The point is that for many readers, Peter's relationship to Mary Jane is in fact the defining element in what makes him a character they can relate to. But at this point we seem to have a character that is torn in two directions. Marvel, as publisher of a licensable property, doesn't want Spider-Man to really ever change. Yet his fans, many of them who grew up reading about his trials and tribulations, have grown up, married and have children of their own. Spider-Man was in essence 'everyman', a character that we could all identify with, but now he seems like the long lost friend that got left behind as we all matured. We check back in on him every so often to see if he's gone on with his life yet, only to find out that he's still stuck somewhere back in high school.
I myself am interested in watching Peter deal with his marriage, have a family, and deal with the many issues of balancing responsibilities that I face in my daily life. The reason I don't read too many stories about sixteen year olds, is that I'm not a sixteen year old anymore. And judging from the customers in my store, most comic readers aren't sixteen years old anymore either.
So why should we care as retailers? Well, I wonder who a book like Spider-Man is being written for.
I had a large number of customers tell me that if Spider-Man's marriage to MJ is destroyed that they're done reading the book. Seriously done as there's nothing left for them to relate to. Marvel seems hell-bent on preventing Peter from ever having a life, being forever stuck in that rut just out of high-school where you have trouble getting a job, have no money, and your relationships don't work. But most of the readers have moved beyond that point. Peter has become that friend from high school who never moved on, never got a life. You still care, you check up on him now and again hoping that he's grown up, but he never does and you just can't stand seeing him that way for too long.
Obviously, since Marvel won't let Peter get a life, they obviously must hope to use Spider-Man's universal appeal to get new young readers into comic books. But is a story where we find out that Spider-Man's virginal ex-girlfriend had sex with his arch enemy on his office desk really appropriate? Are we really to believe that's a story aimed at the 'tweens' audience?
So who are comics written for today? And if our characters can't age with us, and the stories often aren't appropriate for readers younger than us, what does that leave? It seems to me that both audiences are dissatisfied.
The aging of comic fans is something that we all know about but don't discuss much. At least in my store kids 'discover' comics in their late teens now, and most are discovering books far away from the mainstream. The linear narratives of books like Y: The Last Man and Walking Dead are capturing the imaginations of so many, while it looks like Spider-Man goes through another in his countless 'reboots' in a bit over a decade in a constant effort to get attention. Maybe I'm being an idealist, as I know that Spider-Man is basically just intellectual property to be licensed out to the highest bidder, but I know most readers my age would probably relate to him a bit more if Marvel would let him grow up a little.
And considering that we're talking about the 'everyman' character known as Spider-Man, I think that's just a bit too ironic.