Is Spider-man "Uniquely Sixties"?

One thing I loved about the comic book collections on DVD-ROM Marvel put out a few years ago is that it allowed you to see the whole comic including Ads and (most importantly to me), the letters columns. This lets you see exactly how the fans of the era viewed the comics you're reading. Some of them were written by people who would be famous and others are insightful.

Consider this one from Bernadette L. Bosky of Green Castle, Indiana in Amazing Spider-man #143 (1975) where the big debate is whether Peter Parker should graduate after 9 years as a college student. She makes the case that like Doc Savage and the Shadow are "uniquely thirties" that Spider-man is "uniquely sixties" based on the many experiences he had. That Spider-man shouldn't be considered to be the product of every generation based on all the experiences he went through in the 1960s which were so formative.

Of course, Marvel has tried to make him youthful for every generation with new television series and comics including, "Ultimate Spider-man," the TV show. While I'm not sure I'd agree with Bernadette that he's uniquely Sixties, I do wonder if the basic core idea of Spider-man
fits with our twenty-first Century world.

Spider-man's principal core idea is that, "with great power comes great responsibility." However, this wasn't a simple situation for Spidey in the 1960s because responsibility wasn't easy. He didn't just have responsibilities as Spider-man, but as Peter Parker. He was a nephew, a student, and an employee as well and he had to balance all these responsibilities with that of being Spider-man. And it was these efforts that would land him in trouble. It was the conflict not between selfishness and responsibility but between responsibility and responsibility. One key responsibility was his need to provide for his Aunt May which meant taking photos for the Daily Bugle, which meant that Peter Parker assisted in the vilification of Spider-man in order to be Spider-man and provide for his Aunt. Because he seems to be so flighty, he's derided by Jameson as an irresponsible teenager when in fact, Parker is a character who embodies responsibility.

It feels like in more modern adaptations of Spider-man we've lost that idea. In both the Amazing Spider-man movie and the Ultimate Spider-man cartoon show, having a job is not a worry for Peter Parker and perhaps most importantly, taking care of his aunt isn't either. Both productions made Aunt May quite a bit younger and not the feeble woman with a weak heart in the comics. In Amazing Spider-man, she was able to return to work. In Ultimate Spider-man, she's a full power career woman who is almost completely absent from her nephew's life and adventures.

These changes to Aunt May are meant to reflect more modern sensibilities about women. "Women are powerful, capable, strong, don't need a man to take care of them." Aunt May is woman, hear her Roar!

However, this is not a reasonable approach. The Sam Rami Spider-man films or the previous animated programs didn't treat Aunt May as a character that represented every woman, but as a specific woman who was elderly and frail, who'd built her alive around her family and was concerned about her nephew, even while she faced problems in her own body. Every woman isn't like Aunt May, but there are plenty of women who are like her. However, their existence is not politically correct, so it's been decreed that Aunt May needs to comform to this idea of a modern woman who takes care of herself and even (in Amazing Spider-man) is prepared to take care of her nephew's education.

The problem is that in doing this, they've fundamentally made things easier, too easy for Peter. They've undermined the conflicts that underpin the character and eliminated the need for him to really be mature and deal with a host of conflicting responsibilities. In other words, they've made him a less interesting character with whom we have less reason to sympathize with.

I don't think Spider-man is "Uniquely Sixties." I've read some solid Spider-man tales from the 1970s and 80s as well. And I can think of material from the 1990s and even 2000s that was fairly good. However, I do think as expectations of young men decline and new reboots of Spider-man follow suit in bows to political correctness, the core of what made Spider-man so great is slowly eroding.