Comments on: The Anatomy of a Spider

By: chaitanya

chaitanya — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 10:18:18 +0000

so much said about this thing, did you guys read it? i read the comic(indian spiderman) its total nonesense! as an indian living in india,i found it to be totally revolting. but what else can you expect. mary jane is maya something and i forget what pseudo name they gave peter parker. and guesswhat, he gets his powers from some old sage/rishi-muni fellow. and osborne becomes a green rakshasa that looks like some character they ripped off from a hentai film. can’t believe people actually create rubbish like that.

By: Sluggo

Sluggo — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 21:15:44 +0000

What Ennis said, is why I liked Spiderman, and also it was the revolutionary aspect of it that changed comic books in the early 1960s. It was a humanistic take on comic book heros/villians that produced others like the Fantastict Four, The hulk, etc. Up to that point they are usually two dimensioanl cookie cutter type characters.

You can somewhat correlate this with the dynamics of the flawed heros in Greek tragedies, except for the horrific nature of those tragedies and the usually horrific endings to those tales.

By: Ennis

Ennis — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 15:49:55 +0000

But Spiderman, unlike Superman, is the little guy. He's a nobody, he has no social status without his mask on. Even with his mask on, he's a smaller, weaker, superhero than most. He can't fly, he's not as strong as many, he has to swing for building to building leaving residue along the way. He's named after a common household pest.

However, he's clever. He has a spider sense. He uses his strength as a lever, just like he uses his wisecracks.

Unlike other heros, he often loses. He loses his uncle. He loses his first girl friend. He almost loses his aunt. He often loses girl and job for his responsibility, yet is seen as a slacker.

Still, he keeps fighting.

Spiderman is the common man's hero. Minor powers + street smart + heart = few extrinsic rewards + alot of abuse + a hero who keeps on plugging.

What makes this work is his choice, and his constrant struggle, over whether to continue with his thankless task. If you inject too much fate and duty, I think the character becomes alot less interesting.

By: Blank

Blank — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 21:32:32 +0000

People are putting tooo much thought into this.

Its a freaking COMIC book. As a kid, none of the above questions or issues were raised. For me it was simply,"Whoa dude, Spiderman put the whomp on him" and on those lines.

Seriously, freaking comic books. All the debate is interesting in its own right, but one has to step back and take a look at what is being analyzed here [enter stereotypical pragmatic guju thought].

By: vinod

vinod — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 19:33:50 +0000

It's amazing how in our highly polarized political climate, even a friggin' comic book can generate fierce left vs. right commentary (David Adesnik is a well known right-of-center blogger)

But I suppose it's also somewhat inevitable as well - so much of the underlying philosophical divide is based on things like

how banal is evil? (is it the product of the decidedly human construct of Power or does it stem more from nature, serendipity, and universal seeds found in all humanity?)
the role of the individual vs. society? (are there hero's or simply individuals who happened to be in very specific circumstances?)

and so on.... Comic's are ultimately a vessel used to transmit questions like this to our youth and thus probably impossible to make entirely apolitical.

Luckily, I don't think a comic strip constructed along Rohit Gupta's philosophical lines (no heros... the strong guy is always wrong... etc.) will exactly light up the bookstand...