My Brief History with Spider-Man / Michael French

My Brief History with Spider-Man

Michael French

The recent news of Peter Parker’s demise, and the surrounding controversy of the cancellation of The Amazing Spider-Man at issue #700, has put the wall-crawler in my mind of late. Right now, I should be doing a myriad of other things. I have a car to repair and a video to edit, but these thoughts are pushing their way to the front of the line.

I can’t claim like a few I know to have been born in a time before Spider-Man, to know what the impact of his creation felt like for the youth of the 20th century. I was born more than 15 years after he arrived on the scene. I don’t have stories of meeting Steve Ditko or remembering buying that first issue where Spider-Man took on the Fantastic Four.

However, that doesn’t diminish Spider-Man’s place in my personal history. Don’t get me wrong. I will never claim to have a “personal history” with every pop culture character or franchise out there. I’m not so presumptuous or melodramatic as some who inhabit cyberspace. (One day I might write or make a video about Captain America or The Flash, as examples, but they won’t be from an emotional or nostalgic point of view.)

Spider-Man marks one of my first recollections of a memorable interest beyond Fisher-Price Little People. Frankly, I have a hard time knowing if I discovered Superman or Spider-Man first, but it must have been a neck-and-neck race. Superman was a notable Halloween costume of mine and I also had a blanket covered in Garcia-Lopez artwork. But Spider-Man on the other hand occupies a more notable space—the first cartoon I watched religiously and the first action figure I ever owned.

As I type this, I’m listening to the sounds of the 1967 classic Spider-Man cartoon. This was the show I watched in my preschool years every afternoon on Channel 17 in Nashville. My first animated superhero memory. Even after 25 years without seeing it, I could still sing every lyric of the famous intro song, and the visuals in the show were 50 percent of what defines Spider-Man for me. The other 50 percent is the prolific John Romita artwork of Spider-Man that permeated Spider-Man merchandising in the 1980s. Sometimes it all feels like a lifetime ago. I guess it was….

Around that time, a Mego gift set of Marvel Pocket Super Heroes became my first action figures. I had Spider-Man, Hulk and Green Goblin, along with the Amazing Spider-Car. I think I had these well before any Dukes of Hazzard toys, and certainly long before my first Star Wars toys (which would usurp all other interests by the end of 1982). I also had a very brief run-in with a single rerun of the live-action Spider-Man series, and it captivated me, but I never saw another episode—much to my frustration.

Saturdays were also a Spidey-fest in the early 1980s, with Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends on the air. I was always excited to see that show, and alongside Blackstar and Super Friends, the series is my first Saturday Morning cartoon recollection. Although the show is sometimes derided, I still think it is a lot of fun, and it introduced me to the wider Marvel Universe, with characters like Captain America, Daredevil, the X-Men and all the villains making appearances. I confess the show confused a kid too young for comics when the Mattel Secret Wars toys arrived, because I didn’t see action figures for Iceman or Firestar. Maybe that’s why I never got the Spider-Man figure in that series—I couldn’t collect them all, in my mind anyway….

Star Wars and Secret Wars marked the start of a long hiatus in my relationship with Spider-Man. I moved through the other fads of the day—G.I. Joe, Voltron, M.A.S.K.—and Spider-Man simultaneously disappeared from toy aisles for a very long time. Batman moved in right at the end of the 1980s and took the comic superhero limelight. A year later, my family moved to England.

In 1991, we were still over there living in Surrey. I would often walk to a small town called Walton on weekends and hit up a newsagent there for American comics. Most often, they had Green Lantern, The Flash and Savage Sword of Conan. I would buy the latter. But one day, I went in there and the store had a copy of something I’d never seen before called The Complete Spider-Man. I started flipping through it and found it was a compilation of all four U.S. Spider-Man titles in one digest.

It was the era of Mark Bagley and Erik Larsen. Larsen’s work really reflected the look of Romita, and Bagley’s art was just fun. I’d been pleasantly reintroduced to Spider-Man after the better part of a decade. From there on, I was a Spider-Man reader. I even went to a local toy shop and bought the newest Toy Biz figure of Spider-Man, despite the stupid suction cup hands. Soon afterward, more and more Spider-Man figures were hitting store shelves. The wall crawler was back in a big way!

I remember in 1992 reading the swirling rumors of a James Cameron-directed Spider-Man movie, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, fresh off T2, to be cast as Doctor Octopus. That never materialized. My family was back in the states in 1993 and comics were peaking. I was buying back issues, trading cards, and looking forward to the upcoming new Spider-Man animated series.

All of that came to a screeching halt with the Ben Reilly clone debacle. Spider-Man had made me a comic book collector, and only a few years later, Spider-Man drove me away from them with the worst storyline to hit comics to date.

By the time the Sam Raimi film was released, Spider-Man and I had come to an understanding. We’d outgrown one another. I was now an adult fresh out of college trying to climb the ladder of success by my fingernails. Spider-Man was crawling up the side of the skyscraper of fame like a bottle rocket. Our priorities had changed.

When I see him on the street today, he’s a very different guy than the friend I met in the early 1980s and reunited with in the early 1990s. I always acknowledge him politely with a nod when we cross paths, and he’s always inviting me to hang out, but I’m not into his new friends and his new look. If you’re reading this, I appreciate the effort, Spidey, but your new neighborhood isn’t one I’m interested in moving into. Thanks for the memories, man.

Top (l to r): my childhood Mego Spider-Man (repainted) with a recently acquired Spider-Car; The 1967 Spider-Man DVD Collection (now out of print); my bootleg DVD set of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends

Bottom (l to r): my collection of Complete Spider-Man—I cherish these books; the Toy Biz era begins; if we had only known what the contents of Amazing #149 would mean for Spider-Man in the 1990s...