DISCLAIMER: The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this story are pure fiction. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products are intended or should be inferred or meant in any way to slander or cause harm. True events and the science portrayed in this story are from a purely interpretive and speculative point of view and taken largely with a creative license from the author (please don't come after me for misinformation, I tried my best).
Issue #1 - It All Began With a Spider (Part 1)
I could pinpoint the exact moment when I found out my life was going to change forever. Whether it be for better or worse was still up for debate. It wasn't monumental like an earthshattering revelation of a terrorist attack on New York City or a divorce that would come only two years later. It was a just a kid sitting in front of a TV screen like any other Saturday morning.
Dad had just purchased the option to show a movie on DirectTV Pay-Per-View. For those not familiar with the concept, it was where you paid extra for a movie or TV show on satellite/cable TV, but instead of owning the purchase, the movie would play itself over and over on its own personal, closed-circuited TV channel for the next 24 hours. The TV would count down to the next showing of the movie, start, end, and then repeat all over again. It was the reason why we had multiple VCR tapes of movies like Doctor Doolittle II and Treasure Planet playing on repeat for over four hours, not always starting or stopping at the correct beginning or end of the movie. Nowadays, you can just rent it off of YouTube or VUDU for 48 hrs without any issue, but during the time, this was a mind-blowing experience to a child. To watch a movie or TV show you didn't own or touch with your physical hands and then record it . It was pure magic. Dad back then was pure magic. He was my hero, the man who could fix anything and everything with his innovative DIY and at the same time loved to torture me with sightings of daddy-longlegs he had found out by the woodpile when he was out cutting grass or hunting for moles. The same man who had built our house by himself and had torn it to shreds almost ten years later.
A girl just eight years old who had been obsessed with horses and only watched Disney movies growing up, not allowed to watch anything other than Nickelodeon, Playhouse Disney, and PBS Kids, watched him as he scrolled through the private channels. There was no room for any kind of boy themed media in this house. Boys were supposed like those boring shows that displayed gruff characters wearing non-feminine colors of red, blue, black, and on occasion, yellow, colors strongly associated with the major superheroes on the local access station of Saturday morning's cartoon block of DC's Justice League and Static Shock. They also tended to fall onto the labels of "much too violent" that seemed to be what only boys could appreciate. Girls were not supposed to enjoy things that involved violent fisticuffs and bawdy humor. We were queens, delicate, innocent flowers as pure as the snow-white lily. Boy things were forbidden, or at the very least, frowned upon. It was an easier method of keeping the innocence of childhood longer than boys typically did, who once they turned twelve became sex craved roid monsters the instant puberty hit.
Which was why it perplexed me to thoroughly enjoy a piece of cinema so much, a piece of media that all personal and social accounts of nineties gender-norms stated that I should not be enjoying. And yet, there I was, spell-bound by the first three notes of Spider-Man's "Main Theme" as they descended from their high octave, backed by a low tremolo as the opening image of Colombia Pictures' Statue of Liberty-eque model appeared on the screen in a way that made me a lifelong ride-or-die Danny Elfman fan.
Suddenly, it's a rush of images of actions of faces of heroes as the melt into the words Marvel as a light, wooden percussive instrument picks up a rabid sixteenth note 4/4 drumbeat as the screen is teased with close up glimmers of a spider's web running across the screen. The soundtrack score builds to something more intense and- oh! I can feel the anticipation, the building excitement! The strings are moving fast and more aggressive as the accents bite into the score as it builds towards something more, overtone motifs of heroism yet something sinister, as if crawling out of a dark corner into daylight. The words of actors and cast members break apart and reassemble onscreen as the camera quickly spins and pans to other names in the web it has trapped like victims in a spider's cocoon. Then it fades into the hero's monologue, calming down to our average everyday nerd, Peter Parker, trying to catch the bus as the adrenaline dies down.
It was one hell of an opening, especially when it was nothing but words and CGI threads woven together. The rest of my memories of my first impression of the whole movie were a bit muddled, but I could still recall the sheer terror of Willem Dafoe's performance of Norman Osborn as the Green Goblin. The sinister duality in nature of two personalities existing inside of one person. The horrifying idea that monsters could look just like men, a revelation that in a therapy session I had later connected to stemming from my fear of werewolves. As soon as I saw the gas-induced seizure transformation of Norman becoming the Green Goblin to the scary split-second cuts of flashbacks during a memory blackout that came after, I had wanted to run. I wanted to delve under the covers and hide in the dozens of quilts and soft, velvet blankets I had stacked on my bed forever as I tried to erase images of him vaporizing an entire board of directors to the point that you could see their shocking skeletons for a second before they fell into nothing but ash. Had Mom been in the room or witnessed any of the moments Dafoe's Green Goblin was onscreen, it would have been her cue to turn off the TV and lecture my dad for letting an eight- and six-year-old watch a PG-13 movie. If she had, maybe things would have been different.
But she wasn't there. I was with my father and little sister, who I tried to be brave for in the face of not having a son in the family because that was my role. It was my own dual internal struggle, a girl wanting to be a damsel in distress by letting someone else deal with the problem while also having to take up the role of a hero by remaining brave in the face of danger. Overall, I wanted to be saved. Saved from my life, saved from this nightmare man who spoke terror into my very soul, hanging over me like a knife poised to drop from the ceiling.
And then to my relief, there he was. Spider-Man had come to save the day! My hero. He had come when all had felt lost. I sat up in my seat, absorbing every "thwip!" to Dafoe's campy line of "Weeeee'll meet again, Spider-Maaaaaaan!" before Tobey Macguire's Spider-Man leapt off of a ledge in a daring feat to save his lady love, Mary Jane Watson. It was fine. Superhero movies were campy back then, but it didn't matter. I ate it up, nightmare fuel and all. I was a fat kid suddenly found starved for entertainment, gleaming for every last morsel of meat on a chicken leg until it was nothing but bone.
I was a child who barely understood what the concept of love was beyond fairytales and gross displays of affection shared between parents… and then I saw the kiss. That upside down Spider-Man kiss in the rain that became an icon of cinema pop culture. To me however it was something more, a way of saving that did not require violence or medicine or magic or some other way to be physically or even religiously saved. It was a moment of peace and redemption that lightened the heart and enriched the soul. Of course, my eight-year-old brain only saw it as the hero kissing his princess and thought it was a bit gross.
It was only a few years later in the late stages of puberty that I realized what that feeling really was: I had fallen in love with Peter Parker. My first love and it had been a comic-book character. I could not tell you what exactly it was that I loved about him There was just something about him that connected with me, something inherently good and pure about him as a person that registered even in my past self's horse crazy addled brain. That a man can have so much bad happen to him and still do good anyways. To this day, that fact has always remained true. Despite all the people and stories that come into my life, Spider-Man has and always will be my one true love, my inspiration, my muse. In every person, character, and piece of media I had ever loved, I had been unknowingly searching for him, trying to replicate that feeling I had felt that Saturday morning. It was only now decades later that I realized that by searching for him, he had found me instead and that that may have not been a good thing.