Watching Captain America: Civil War I honestly broke down during the scene where Peter Parker tries to explain why he uses his powers to help people. I haven’t cracked like that since, well, since the end of The Peanuts Movie. And I tried to process why the scene was hitting me so hard.
Basically, I have loved Spider-Man since I was a little kid and when I actually started reading the comics I realized the reason I loved Spider-Man was that he was Peter Parker and, except for the super powers/secret life thing, Peter Parker was exactly like me, which is the reason millions of others readers grew so attached to Spidey.
I stopped reading the Spider-Man comic books with the “One More Day” fiasco. Marvel honcho Joe Queseda was so desperate to end Peter’s marriage to Mary Jane Watson that he engineered a story where Spidey makes a deal with the devil to erase his marriage from history. You read that correctly: a deal with the devil. It was obvious Marvel didn’t value old-time fans like me any more. I hear good things about the current Spider-Man writer, Dan Slott, but I just can’t go back. To me, the comic-book Spidey was broken in a way that can never be fixed.
At least I still had the movies, right? After the glories of Spider-Man 2, they couldn’t possibly screw up the movies, no sirree. I hadn’t counted on the wrecking ball in a suit known as Avi “More Villains!” Arad. The misfire of Spider-Man 3 was compounded by the godawful twin monstrosity of the the Marc Webb/Andrew Garfield reboot that I hate to the very core of my soul. Even the news that Marvel had scored the movie rights to Spider-Man didn’t cheer me much because I figured that the cinematic Spider-Man had also been broken in a way that can never be fixed and another reboot would just compound the damage.
And out of nowhere, in the middle of someone else’s movie, this new kid Tom Holland starts saying exactly the sort of things Peter Parker should be saying (even if he sounds waaaaaaaay too much like Marty McFly), and I just started blubbering.
I thought Spider-Man was lost to me. I got Spider-Man back.
