It was in high school that my obsession with Peter Pan began. I was Captain Hook in our high school play, and Peter Pan—a part traditionally played by a woman—was played by long legs, blue eyes, and a dynamite smile. So, as to win her affections, I delved deep into the only thing I knew 100% that we had in common: Pan. I greedily absorbed every film version (yes, even Hook) listened to the entire original novel, and read through the script of the original play as well as saw the musical performed live on stage. A severely understated fact about Mr. Pan? He’s a creep. In the original book more than anywhere, we have this emotionally unstable kid masquerading as the hero, abducting children, and doing nothing truly noble. To put it another way, the truer to the original source material you get, the more you realize that beneath all the pixie dust, there is something severely wrong with someone who can’t grow up.

Not Peter Pan, by Mark Bagley

This essay is not about Peter Pan, however. Not really, anyway. It is about another fictional Peter I had an obsession with in my high school days: Peter Parker, aka the Amazing Spider-Man. What makes Spider-Man arguably the greatest superhero of all time is his relatability, as any fan will tell you. Spidey is the everyman: a guy just like you, and in those high school days, he was just like me too. Growing into young adulthood, I had in Spider-Man a sort of model: when I was struggled with homework, so did Spidey. When I fell in love, so did Spider-Man. When I got my first job, so did Spider-Man. When I got married, so did Spider-Man. Up or down, win or lose, in every milestone young adult life could supply, I had a superhero to look up to who went through the same thing.

Still only 399 cents, which is more than DC can say I guess.

That is, of course, before One More Day. There was a fear at Marvel Editorial that Spidey had lost that relatable charm that was his hallmark. At the time of One More Day’s publication, Peter had a steady gig as the science teacher at his local high school, his marriage to Mary Jane was solid, and—with the exception of some magical mumbo jumbo that had invaded his life—Spidey almost had his life together. Which, of course, was not ok for a Spider-Man title. Tactfully, the editor-in-chief decided to force Peter to sell his marriage to the devil and undo all continuity that led up to that point—exactly the way I think anybody would handle that move given the circumstances.

Credit where credit is due, this might be the last truly iconic Spidey cover.

Dripping sarcasm aside, it is safe to say that I’m not alone in my disdain for One More Day. The world hates One More Day. However, there is a large portion of Spider-Man fans that say its evil was a necessary one. Old Webhead had gotten too far from his roots, they argue, and wasn’t as relatable as he was in the good old days. Harkening back to those good old days, the Brand New Day initiative began, bringing in talent from the worlds of comic and film, complete with it’s own ‘manifesto’ of all their philosophies on how Spider-Man could never get so far from his roots ever again.

 

Here’s a shot of my Spider-Man manifesto reprinted in the back of the TPB for Brand New Day. It goes on for pages, this is just an idea of what it looks like.

This was my reentry to the title, and when I first read this manifesto, I loved it. New villains? Keeping to Spider-Man’s roots? An official statement from the Marvel bullpen that Spider-Man 2 is the greatest Spider-Man movie? What more could a guy ask for? Under the shepherding of Dan Slott, breakout star of Brand New Day, Spidey found himself fighting evil of all shapes and sizes, just like the good old days, for the next decade. Even as I describe it to you, it doesn’t sound like such a bad idea in concept.

But then something happened. Me and that aforementioned blue-eyed wonder? Wedded bliss. Exams? I took my last one this year. There is a real sense that young adulthood is behind me now, and I look to the future with more hopes and dreams than even the luckiest man could hope will all come true. Those high school good old days are behind me, and that’s alright. That’s how growing up works. But when I open up the latest issue of ASM, Peter Parker is still bumming around with his same room mates, still single, and still bumming from job to job just like he was when I opened my first issue of ASM as a boy. There is a real sense that I’ve outgrown my childhood hero. Which is alright. Not every story needs to appeal to every person. I still love Spidey, and still ravenously leap for ASM whenever I get the pocket change to do so (which means I’m about thirty issues behind, but I digress.) However, the reason I do feel inclined to protest in such an article as this one is that as whispers circulate that Spidey’s Brand New Day is coming to a close, the movement’s defenders argue that the initiative really was a success, and that it really did make Spider-Man more relatable. This just isn’t true.

The milestones in Spidey’s life were the same as the milestones in his reader’s lives.

There is a real sense in which Peter Parker has been robbed of his right as a person—fictional or otherwise—to grow up. By keeping Spidey in a world where he is not allowed according to your own manifesto to change too much, you have turned Peter Parker into a sort of Peter Pan who will never grow up. This is done in the name of keeping the web slinger relatable, but what Marvel can’t seem to recognize is that while Spider-Man can play Peter Pan in his eternal Brand New Day for as long as he wants, aping his good old days ad nauseum, literally every one of his readers is still growing up. Every one of us is still changing, growing, and aging. But Spider-Man, trying to keep lightning in the bottle, is not. To put it another way, Spider-Man is in a fundamentally unnatural state that none of his readers can participate in and thus cannot find relatable. Spider-Man is no longer a guy just like me. He is a guy just like he used to be back in the good old days of the early sixties.

As mentioned, there seems to be a buzz around the new ASM title that things might go back to the way that they were before One More Day, and as much as I’ve enjoyed the stories that have come since that fateful event, I can’t help but say that it’s definitely needed. If Marvel wants Spider-Man to be the everyman that we all can relate to, he needs to be subject to one of the only things that is true for each and every member of his audience: change. This is what drew readers to the character in the first place: to see someone like us with powers beyond our wildest imagination ride the roller coaster that we call life with us. Rather than locking Spidey in a state of eternal youth, constantly reflecting on the good old days of the title, the main title needs to be willing to let Spider-Man experience life as his audience does. Failure to do so doesn’t make him more relatable, but rather locks him away as a Peter Pan in some Neverland none of us can get to. And, as I said earlier, even Pan recognizes that there is something wrong with someone who cannot grow up.

Ending on a Bagley. Cuz I like Bagley.