Peter Parker and Why Relatable ≠ Average

All too often I see people argue that the reason Spider-Man means so much to so many people is because the story of Peter Parker is relatable. Even Stan Lee himself attributed the character’s popularity to the fact that his face is fully covered, allowing readers to place themselves under the mask.

I can’t argue with that, although I must admit what always drew me to the character was the cool costume and his acrobatic abilities. Maybe I’m just superficial.

However, I’ve been noticing a trend in most modern interpretations of ol’ Web-Head and that is a conflation of being relatable with being average.

I never really thought of Peter Parker as an everyman. He has an above-average IQ, below-average social standing, and let’s be real, he’s a bit of a creep.

Peter Parker should be King of the Freaks, a social pariah. Yet from Andrew Garfield to Spider-Man PS4, recent adaptations insist on turning him into the most unremarkable, milquetoast, boring-looking dudebro imaginable.

Before I go any further, I want to stress that these are just my opinions and tastes based on my own personal experiences with the character. I grew up reading, watching and playing Spider-Man comics, cartoons and games at a very particular time, and it has evidently influenced the lens through which I view the character.

I’m not really up to date on modern Spider-Man comics. In fact, I haven’t been reading Amazing Spider-Man regularly since the mid-2000s. Every now and then, I will dip into an issue or two to see where the Web-Head is at but it invariably leaves me cold. Dan Slott’s an undeniably great writer who crafted an intricate web of overarching storylines across his 10 year run but I often found his self-referential ‘it’s funny because it’s not’ brand of humour got in the way of the melodrama I so desperately craved. When Nick Spencer took over, I jumped back on to see where he’d take the character but what I found was, depressingly, the same. I’m just not that interested in the pursuits of a frat boy Peter, shoving pizza into his gob and wearing odd socks. Neither do I care much for the MCU version whose voice wavers and cracks with trepidation every time he opens his mouth.

Again, I want to reiterate that this is just my opinion based on nothing but my own arbitrary likes and dislikes. But growing up, ASM was never really a funny book. In fact, when I first started reading about the exploits of our Friendly Neighborhood Wallcrawler, the character was still reeling from the events of the Clone Saga and the unexpected return of his long-dead parents (who were subsequently revealed to be robots programmed by the Chameleon because comics, I guess?) Spidey’s stories in the late 90s were, like most comic books in the 90s, dark and gloomy.

As a kid reading comics at the time, I didn’t so much relate to Peter Parker, I was more intrigued by what a weirdo he was. The character was melancholic and morose, trapped in a perpetual cycle of trauma.

A few years later, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man compounded 40 years of tragedy into 121 minutes with what is admittedly a fairly bleak story about loss and responsibility — Remember, the film ends with Peter having lost a third father figure and he doesn’t even get the girl.

The 1994 Spider-Man TV show to which I owe my love of the character wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs either. Its focus on villains like Morbius the Living Vampire, Venom, the Lizard, as well as Spider-Man’s own bizarre mutating physiology gave the series an oppressive and foreboding atmosphere.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Peter Parker wasn’t relatable back then. In fact, as a freelancer living paycheck to paycheck, never knowing if I’m going to make the next month’s rent, I probably relate to the character more now than I ever did in my youth. But there is nothing average or happy-go-lucky about Spider-Man. He was a kid super genius and social leper who gained downright disturbing abilities. He dates supermodels and keeps secrets from everybody he loves, all while never holding down a stable job. Under the pen of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Parker displayed sociopathic tendencies at times, viewing the world around him with contempt.

To that end, I always preferred the way Ditko drew him as a kind of stretched-out, bespectacled dork than when Romita turned him into a barrel-chested hunk. And that’s kind of the point I’m making, the whole appeal of Spidey was that he WASN’T a traditional superhero. Steve Rogers is the everyman, Clark Kent is an Average Joe.

Peter Parker, on the other hand, is a total creep and I love him for it.

— JS