Reality bites unemployed Spider-Man
Time to dust off that resume, Spider-Man. You're fired!
Don't fret, the web-slinger will still be keeping New York City safe from Venom and Carnage and any number of other dastardly villains he's tangled with over the years. But beginning tomorrow, he's going to have to do it between trips to the unemployment line.
That's the day Peter Parker, Spider-Man's nice guy alter-ego, hears the words, "You're fired" from his cranky, long-suffering boss, Mayor J. Jonah Jameson. Worse still, Jameson not only sacks Parker, who makes his living as a photojournalist, he blacklists him with every news organisation in town.
This of course raises all kinds of interesting questions:
- How will Parker maintain his Spider-Man costumes? Dry-cleaning bills alone must run to several hundred dollars a year.
- How will he keep buying the stuff he uses to spin those industrial-strength webs needed to hop from building to building? Surely he doesn't pick that up at the 99 Cents Store.
- Where is his next meal coming from? Would he be reduced to spinning webs outside supermarkets and trapping shopping carts in them?
"Because we still want to sell comic books, I can't answer those questions," laughs Joe Quesada, editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, which reveals the web spinner's latest crisis in Issue No. 623.
But while hard times may lie ahead, Spider-Man has gotten through hard times before. Just two years ago his marriage to beautiful Mary Jane came to an end when the villain Mephisto erased everyone's memory of it.
He landed on the unemployment line this time not because of the recession or even a downsizing news industry. You probably guessed it already, it was because of an evil villain.
Spider-Man got wind of a plot to frame Jameson and exposed it by digitally manipulating photos he'd taken as Peter Parker. Of course to do that he had to violate journalism ethics by misrepresenting the images. Jameson, longtime publisher of the Daily Bugle, could never tolerate that.
And just why would Peter Parker/aka Spider-Man do such a thing anyway?
"Just because he has super powers doesn't mean he's perfect," says Quesada.
Related information:
Spider-Man is a fictional Marvel Comics superhero. The character was created by writer-editor Stan Lee and writer-artist Steve Ditko. He first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15 (Aug. 1962). Lee and Ditko conceived of the character as an orphan being raised by his Aunt May and Uncle Ben as an ordinary teenager, having to deal with the normal struggles of youth in addition to those of a costumed crime fighter. Spider-Man's creators gave him super strength and agility, the ability to cling to most surfaces, shoot spider-webs using devices of his own invention which he called "web-shooters," and react to danger quickly with his "spider-sense", enabling him to combat his foes.
When Spider-Man first appeared in the early 1960s, teenagers in superhero comic books were usually relegated to the role of sidekick to the protagonist. The Spider-Man series broke ground by featuring Peter Parker, a teenage high school student to whose "self-obsessions with rejection, inadequacy, and loneliness" young readers could easily relate.[1]:210 Unlike previous teen heroes such as James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes and Robin, Spider-Man did not benefit from being the protege of any adult mentors like Captain America and Batman, and thus he had to learn for himself that "with great power comes great responsibility" — a line included in a text box in the final panel of the first Spider-Man story, but later retroactively attributed to his guardian, the late Uncle Ben.
Marvel has featured Spider-Man in several comic book series, the first and longest-lasting of which is titled The Amazing Spider-Man. Over the years, the Peter Parker character has developed from shy high school student to troubled but outgoing college student to married high school teacher to, in the late 2000s, a single freelance photographer, his most typical adult role. He is now a member of an unofficial splinter group of the Avengers, one of Marvel's flagship superhero teams. In the comics, Spider-Man is often referred to as "Spidey," "web-slinger," "wall-crawler," or "web-head."
Spider-Man is one of the most popular and commercially successful superheroes. As Marvel's flagship character and company mascot, he has appeared in many forms of media, including several animated and live-action television shows, syndicated newspaper comic strips and a successful series of films starring actor Tobey Maguire as the "friendly neighborhood" hero. Spider-Man was named Empire magazine's fifth-greatest comic-book character.
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