WHEREVER THERE'S A HANG UP [548]

Art by Steve Ditko from "The Amazing Spider-Man" #5 (1963)

I will freely admit ignorance to anything that isn’t important so, to that end, I didn’t know what “Spidey Sense” was, despite having been a reader of comic books for over twenty years.

This apparent revelation came about due to the release of the new film “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”, the fourth film in the franchise with Tom Holland in the title role, the ninth made by Sony under Columbia Pictures and officially the thirty-eighth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

I have read the Spider-Man stories I want to read, and the same would go for Marvel Comics as a whole. I am more a fan of DC Comics, but I haven’t really watched their films either for the same reason. Comics are already their own form of visual storytelling, and don’t have to become storyboards for another medium, even if you are trying to increase exposure to the characters and their stories.

Despite all this, it appears I hadn’t been reading the Spider-Man stories closely enough. I have mostly read the 1960s and 70s run of “The Amazing Spider-Man”, mostly written or co-plotted by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, and Marv Wolfman among others, plus some of the 2000s run from J Michael Straczynski. However, they are Marvel comics, led by action, and Spider-Man is a character that demands to be drawn dynamically, as demonstrated by co-creator Steve Ditko to John Romita, both senior and junior, to Ross Andru and Sal Buscema’s run on the companion book “The Spectacular Spider-Man” in the 1980s. All the posing, the composition of frames, the economy of the storytelling as average page counts for the main story declined across the industry during the 1970s, but I should have been paying more attention to some wavy lines.

The story apparently goes that, when reviewing the pencilled artwork for the first issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man” Stan Lee, in his other capacity as editor, had asked Steve Ditko how Spider-Man knew the story’s villain, the Chameleon, was in the same room as them. Ditko drew lines around the hero’s head, explaining that Spider-Man had “spider senses”, much like a bat can use echolocation. Similar lines were drawn around the character, both as Spider-Man and as Peter Parker, in earlier scenes to add credence to the device.

Now, what I had apparently done was think of these lines as acting like a visual approximation of being startled, like you had just been woken up to the presence of something. You don’t see speed lines or the energy of a “Kirby Krackle” in real life either, so I thought this was just the way the story depicted being startled. Upon realising my omission, the next thing is whether “Spidey Sense” – I am too self-effacing to call Spider-Man “Spidey” – is a “sixth sense” or some sort of precognition, and depending on its use in a particular story, the answer is yes, it is.

If it hadn’t been for two other people being in the same room as me when I said I didn’t know what “Spidey Sense” really was, I would have been given no more reason to think about it. Yes, superheroes lead our current folk tales, or at least those from the United States, but no, not everyone knows these characters inside out. I am still more of a reader of Daredevil, the only Marvel Comics character whose book I pick up each month, and to be honest, his powers are easier to remember: the toxic incident this time around made him blind, but heightened his other senses, so anything about strength is down to training. As far as I know, that’s it.