1: It used to be said that the three most famous fictional characters in the English speaking world were Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan and Superman.
I propose an experiment. Go out of your front door, and walk to the Post Office or to your local Burger King. And do a headcount. How many children do you see with Sherlock Holmes backpacks, lunch-boxes or sneakers? How many adults do you see wearing Tarzan of the Apes t-shirts? How many shops or cars or houses do you pass with Superman figurines and mascots in the windows?
Times change: there is a pretty good chance that you will see a Harry Potter hoodie; a Mickey Mouse romper suit or just possibly a James Bond t-shirt. But I don’t think you’ll get to the end of your walk without seeing some version of the Spider-Man motif.
Dearly as I love them, Winnie-the-Pooh is not reducible to the twenty perfect short stories A.A Milne wrote about him and his friends. Winnie-the-Pooh is also Disney cartoons and Hallmark greetings cards and dreadful Facebook fan fic about helping your friends through difficult patches.
What is Spider-Man? Is he simply a red and blue costume with white slanty eyes? Is he the idea of swinging through New York on web ropes; of putting two fingers on your palms and saying “fwtp, fwtp”? Kids don’t necessarily know about Jack Sparrow or Long John Silver, and they certainly don't know about Anne Bonnet or Captain Kidd or Elcid Barrat; but they sure as heck know that pirates say “Arrrr!”.
Spider-Man is quite possibly the most famous fictional character in the world — which, incidentally, makes Stan Lee the most influential writer of all time. Even if he is now more a meme than a story or a character, these are the comics from which that meme emerged. They are worthy of our scrutiny.
2: Discourse about comic books, like every thing else in the post Twitter world, is toxic and polarised. If you cleave to the old story that Stan Lee was, in the traditional sense, a writer, then you are likely to believe that Ditko and Romita were no more than hired illustrators --and over-rated ones at that — and that anyone who thinks differently is being iconoclastic for bad motives. But many people who agree with me that Steve Ditko was the primary creative force are inclined to call Stan Lee a swindler and a bullshit-artist and a nepo-baby; and to say that his text should as far as possible be ignored when looking at the comics. And they’ll say that the people who think that Stan was the creator are buying into a corporate myth for bad motives.
Stan and Steve and John and Jack are no longer alive: but the comics they created are freely available in many formats. Comics, just as much as poems and plays and songs are complex, multi-faceted things; they affect readers in complicated ways.
Perhaps if we get away from acrimonious arguments about who said what to whom nearly seventy years ago, and look closely at the words and the pictures they left us, we may get a better understanding of their creative talents involved in their creation.
3: I loved these comics; it is a love which has never left me.
There are very many very much better books in the world: but I never loved Estragon or Paul Atriedes or Parsifal in the way that I once loved Spider-Man.
I am no longer eight years old and I cannot read these comics as if I was eight years old, although in some cases I think I can remember what it was like to read them at that age.
Rarely, I think, can I actually remember the first reading of the stories, but I can remember the black and white television, the ringing landline, the neopolitan ice-cream, the first Kentucky Fried Chicken, Hector’s House and the Magic Roundabout, Ed “Stewpot” Stewart and grown-ups talking in hushed voices about a war in a place called Watergate.
I have never wanted to preserve a first reading or a first viewing of anything in aspic. In fact I am far from sure that I know what aspic even is. I want to keep these stories alive; to read them as I would read them if I had not read them before. It was C.S Lewis who said that a very small child might draw no distinction in his mind between chocolate easter eggs and the resurrection of Jesus; but that if his understanding of Christian theology doesn’t become more sophisticated as he grows up then the eggs will stop seeming special.
Of course I can’t enter uncritically and imaginatively into the world of these comics any more; and of course I can see their many faults. But studying them them critically and intellectually is a way of re-engaging with them. Of keeping them, in a way, alive.
4: I have heard that there are Rabbis — I was about to type ‘Jewish Rabbis’ as if there was another kind — who will deliberately make absurd and pedantic arguments about the Torah, in order to demonstrate their knowledge of it, and as a scholarly game.
But I think that they think that the game is a pious one: that proving from scripture that there is no afterlife and then proving equally convincingly from the same scripture that there is an afterlife demonstrates a kind of wholehearted devotion to the Law. John Sutherland’s questions about Daniel Deronda’s foreskin and what part of the pig Arabella throws at Jude are part of a similar game. Sometimes it is fun to ask a silly question and come up with a silly answer; but sometimes you uncover something that’s really present in the book which you wouldn’t have noticed if you weren’t deliberately overthinking it.
I am quite sure that Stan Lee did not have a time line in mind when he wrote these stories; but I still think that it is worth looking at all those “Meanwhile…” and “The Next Morning…” captions, and pondering how it is that Norman Osborn gets from New York to the coast and back in a single morning, and how it manages to be simultaneously night in one part of New York and day in another. Because it makes us pay attention to things that perhaps no-one else in seventy years has paid any attention to. And because it is a way of describing, to ourselves and to others, what reading these comics actually feels like.
5: John Betjeman kept, even as an old man, his childhood teddy bear Archibald on a shelf in his home, and occasionally went to check on him for comfort. This seems perfectly healthy: provided, of course, you also care about adult things like gels and old churches and silk slippers. I am aware of people who put all their childhood interests in a box when they turn sixteen and never think about them again. Christopher Milne, who also had a bear he was particularly fond of, maintained he had no interest as an adult of returning to his childhood loves (or even of visiting his parents). Critically engaging with old comic books is like patting a beloved bear on the ear. It is a way of maintaining the connection.
6: I am not, in fact, writing about Spider-Man. I am in fact screaming into the void about my awful terrible English childhood and in particular my awful terrible English primary school. I should have thought that was perfectly obvious.
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