Dapper Dan Gvozden on kids named “Ben”
I wanted to tell the story of how important J. Totino Tedesco and Brad Meltzer’s Marvel Comics #1000 page is to me.
For years, I had been struggling with the choice of whether or not to have a child. My parents used to say, “You’re never ready," whenever I suggested the timing wasn't right. This always felt disingenuous, surely there are better and worse times to have a kid. That all changed when I saw Lord and Rothman’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I loved how their script reframed Miles and Peter’s life-choices into “It’s a leap of faith." For Miles, that was brilliantly portrayed by his leap off the building.
The brilliant, and often ignored, element of this story is that the glass behind Miles breaks when he jumps. The reason isn’t because of his momentum, but because his fear-activated Spider-stickiness is activated. He’s jumping despite his fear.
Miles repeats Peter’s line back to him in the film's final moments. “It’s a leap of faith.” Here the context changes and it is exactly what Peter needs to hear to regain confidence in himself, heal his fractured marriage, and try to have a child. I wrote about this in a piece for The Hollywood Reporter where I argued that allowing Peter to grow up and for Miles to take his place as the young Spider-Man was a bold move that the comics should consider. Responsibility only increases the older you get.
This one movie completely changed how I felt about fatherhood. No longer was I looking at parenthood as “You’re never ready”, as if I was about to get hit by a bus. But as, “It’s a leap of faith.” I could do this! And... a couple years later I did. Meet Ben.
Now back to the comic page from Marvel Comics #1000, entitled “We’re Calling Him Ben”. I’m sure you can guess my son’s name has something to do with this comic. You’d be right. Let me explain.
My read on the comic is as follows: Peter saves a pregnant woman who responds by wanting to name her son after him. He gives the name “Ben” to honor his late uncle. We see the impact of Spider-Man doing this many times, saving people and sparking a rash of kids named “Ben”. My favorite detail is almost hidden in the bottom corner, after all the other images. A lone word balloon reading “Ben”. I read this as the infinite baby. The idea of the endless number of good deeds that Spider-Man will do, especially as his comic continues infinitely.
I remembered this when it came time to name my son. I love the idea that our good deeds can echo into the next generation and serve as a moral guide. I can only hope that I can pass on my morality to my son, who can do the same, and on and on.
But it also speaks to me of the power of fiction in our lives. That I was inspired to have a child by a movie’s fictionalized version of a man wrestling with the concept of fatherhood. That so much of my life is built around principles I’ve learned from fiction.
I make, analyze, and study fiction because I believe in the power that it has to pass along empathy, entertainment, and values. This single-page comic story addresses all of those things and represents all I want to pass on to my son. A print of this page hangs in my son's bedroom. We look at it every morning and it is his absolute favorite image in his room. I hope one day I can explain its importance. Excelsior!
TJ Collins on Miles’ choice
The montage sequence in Spider-verse is amazing but let me offer up why this scene is the most important scene in the movie.A theme throughout the movie was that Miles didn’t have a choice but to do what others wanted of him. Whether by peer pressure or pressure he put on himself, Miles felt like he had no choice but to do what others thought was right for him. What was responsible. What was expected.
What does doing it all for everyone else lead to? He almost died, his uncle was killed, and his dad thinks he did it. His world is imploding. The only place of refuge is the school he tried failing out of. No sooner than unmasking and he's reminded of those Great Expectations.
The spider peeps take the goober and he is left alone. In a way, he gets what he wants. He’s been relieved of the great responsibility that comes with his great power. But he's still literally and figuratively trapped.
So, now we come back to the single most important line in the movie. Not with how it starts but how it ends.
“I love you.
You don’t have to say it back though.”
This dad, who earlier in the movie forced his son to say "I love you" back to him, was now giving his son the choice to respond. The burden of expectation was finally lifted from Miles allowing him to choose for himself what he wanted to say or what he wanted to do.
I love how the movie gave this sequence time and space. Realistically, the situation hadn’t changed. He was still alone in his room stuck to a chair. But now he’d been given the chance to choose for himself. What does he want to do? What kind of person does he want to be?
Naturally he chooses to be Spider-man. That choice giving him control of his powers. Literally and figuratively freeing.
I could go on and on about this movie forever but I'll stop there. The montage was great because it was a satisfying payoff to a sweet, sweet set-up.
Miles & Peter
I said that thread perfectly exemplifies how Spider-Verse understands the essence of a Spider-Man story, including the subtle but important difference between a Miles story and a Peter story, and a friend asked me to expand on the point.
Spider-Man is about adolescence: growing into your talents, taking pleasure in them, but also feeling the need to step into adult responsibility but not quite having it together yet, getting tripped up by conflicting priorities and honest mistakes.
Peter Parker is also about dorkiness, not fitting in, feeling isolated. Peter eventually marries one of those hot women who has figured out that nerds make good sweethearts, but that isn’t him overcoming his dorkiness; his circle of friends and family as Peter stays small.
Miles Morales has a stronger matrix of friends, family, and community than Peter Parker. He is as nerdy as Peter and not cool, but is not an outcast dork.
Peter also originates as Jewish in 1963, right at the point when Ashkenazim have arrived at being white. It is part of why he is alienated … but not in the unmistakable way that Miles has to navigate being a Teen Nerd Of Color.
So Peter and Miles experience subtly different pressures in Getting Their Lives Together.
I am uneasy with Movie Miles having a father who is a cop, but it plays in underlining how Miles as a PoC is under different pressures than Peter in growing into responsible adulthood.
Tom Holland
It is awkward that the kid from Queens is played by a Brit affecting an American accent, and he is too handsome for the role. But. Rumours say that when shooting Avengers: Infinity War, they asked Holland to ad lib some stuff for Peter’s last scene in the movie to get a last line for him, and he was so damm good that they could not bear to cut any of it out. I believe it. Going out saying “I’m sorry”? Holland understands Peter.
Peter, MJ, and Black Cat
When an interent friend objected to the supervillainess the Felicia “The Black Cat” Hardy flirting with Peter “Spider-Man” Parker (then married to Mary Jane) —
Like, it says everything how good a person MJ is. If I knew that my husband was consistently being flirted with by a fellow superhero, I would take a lamp and bash the shit out of her. She’s not a girl’s girl. As a dude you probably don’t see that.— I found myself naming something I have long thought about Mary Jane in her comics manifestation, who is much more interesting than any movie adaptation of her has been.
Black Cat is a villain. A not-very-villainous villain — she does not kill people, she just steals stuff that doesn't belong to her — and occasionally plays the hero when when very-villainous villains show up, but a villain nonetheless. She resembles, of course, the better character she is a lazy copy of.
She is not a good person. Her behavior is not OK. In real life flirting with a married man does not warrant violence but flirting hard as Black Cat does is bad behavior … and in the context of superhero melodrama I see Mary Jane as within her rights to hit Felicia over the noggin with a lamp, yes.
But it is appropriate that MJ does not try to give Felicia the shellacking she has earned because MJ is a good person who knows that Peter is a stand-up guy. He drops the ball sometimes but always picks it right back up and feels bad about every honest mistake. He’s Peter.
Maybe it is dude-ly of me in a bad way but well-written (which all too often I concur it is not) I do think this can be fun. Part of the melodrama of it is that Peter feels like he can flirt with Felicia because he knows he is never going to succumb to any real shenanigans with her — because he is ga-ga over MJ and even if he did not have MJ he knows that Felicia is a trainwreck. He flies a bit too close to the Sun flirting with Felicia because he does not feel to him like it is any real threat to his marriage. Poor form on his part — he should know that even though MJ rightly trusts him, knowing that he flirts with a femme fatale is still hurtful to her.
Peter is more together than he once was — not least because of his relationship with MJ, and he knows it — but he still carries his adolescent sense of his own dorkiness. He doesn’t feel that a gal like Felicia actually following through with him is a real possibility.
MJ had the savvy to register the reasons why Peter is in fact an attractive fella at an earlier age than most attractive women do.
She knows — in a way that Peter will never catch on to — how there are now plenty of hot women who want what MJ has with him. So MJ, living in the world which attractive women inhabit, sees how a woman like Felicia very well might draw Peter into a romance and then inevitably fuck up both of their lives and hearts. None of which occurs to him. Every time Peter lets Felicia get under his skin he thinks “golly, that was embarrassing, letting a pretty girl play me for a chump”. He does not see the real relationship threats Felicia represents. It is one of his good qualities.
Gunner Dobbins on what we learn from Peter
Hope Summers, the destined messiah of mutant kind, possibly the most important mutant ever born, destined to be a force of change, and her destined teacher to guide her to her destiny is…this loser from Queens?
Someone meeting Peter and starting a convo at “what the fuck can this moron teach me” and ending at “oh my god tell me how to do all of this” is so perfect and I’m mildly annoyed I’d never seen this before. He is the best of us and I love everything that reinforces that.
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