A Chilling Admission from Your L.A. Mood Comic Correspondent

by L.A. Mood Comics and Games

The views expressed in this column are those of the writer alone and should not be attributed to L. A. Mood or its employees.

 

By Dan Brown

I’ve got a horrible confession to make.
 

You’re going to think less of me.

But I can’t go on as L.A. Mood’s comic columnist without coming clean.
 

If you’ve read any of my previous columns this year, you’ll know that I’m a fan of Marvel Comics from way back.

(I always found D.C. heroes to be emotionally constipated, which made them seem less real and compelling to my younger self, a topic for a future column.)
 

However, here’s the thing: As much as I’ve loved Marvel since the 1970s, I don’t feel much for the brand’s marquee character.

That’s right.
 

I don’t like Spider-Man.

I can hear you gasping.
 

I have to be honest with you, my fellow comic fans: I feel little for everyone’s favourite web-slinger, even though he’s been Marvel’s mainstay attraction for decades.

It’s not that I actively dislike Peter Parker’s alter ego, it’s just that I’ve never gone out of my way to seek out the many books that feature him.
 

How many different Spider-Man titles are there these days? About 5,000? That’s 5,000 I don’t have on my monthly pull list.

I realize this is like a DC fan admitting they never liked Superman. Startling, but true.
 

I guess I just never formed a bond with Spidey the way I did with characters like the Thing or Wolverine or the members of Alpha Flight.

I started making mine Marvel in the mid-1970s. 
 

As the years went on, I fell in love with the Fantastic Four, Iron Fist, the new team of X-Men, Captain America, Iron Man, and others.

Sure, I was aware of Spider-Man. 
 

Heck, one of his girlfriends had been killed by a baddie. Back then, characters died and stayed dead, so that was remarkable. And I knew a bit about supporting characters like the Punisher, who shot rubber bullets at his foes. That was cool.

But in my childhood home in Poplar Hill, I wasn’t the one reading Spider-Man’s adventures. It was my four-years-older brother who brought Marvel Team-Up home off the spinner rack. Every month, the webhead partnered with a different character, usually one Marvel was hoping to promote to head up their own title.
 

And I will admit, in the hands of artist John Byrne, Spidey could do some thrilling stuff. In one of those Team-Ups, Spidey runs upside-down through a hallway on the ceiling – it was such a brilliant use of a comic panel to show what the character is capable of.

Yet it still wasn’t enough to fire my imagination.
 

I drew a few pictures of Spider-Man in my school notebooks, but he was not the focus of my attention the way others were. I was a sucker for such anti-heroes as Deathlok, the warrior cyborg from the future. How could the wall-crawler compete?

Somewhere along the way I even picked up a mini-digest of the first six or seven appearances of Spider-Man from the 1960s. Even though I loved that otherworldly Steve Ditko art and dug the crazy villains, it didn’t make me a regular reader.
 

Were the modern movies any different? Nope.

I went to see the three Tobey Maguire films, out of a sense of duty more than anything else. Maguire’s Spidey seemed just as . . . vanilla . . . as the one I remember from the comic books, so I gave up on him as a motion-picture character.
 

Nor am I going to rain on anybody else’s parade. Don’t worry.

If you’re a fan of Spider-Man, good for you. I’m just glad people are still reading comics and geeking out over superheroes in the year 2023.
 

And hey, I’m a weird guy who likes weird things, so likely I’m the odd man out here. The fault is probably mine for not making a bigger spot in my heart for Aunt May’s favourite nephew.

Are there any popular characters you never developed an affection for, even though they were bestsellers? I’d love to hear all about it in the comment box below.
 

I promise I won’t think any differently of you!

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.

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