Drunken Comics Rage

Is anybody ELSE watching the (now not so) new The Spectacular Spiderman animated series?

I added it to Tivo (ALL HAIL TIVO!!) a couple weeks into the series.  I figured, what the hell, it’s a comic book cartoon.  I LOVED the DC ‘toons, though I found the Marvel ones to generally be a waste of time.  Accordingly, my expectations were low; Fantastic Four actually made my eyes bleed (what a terrible fucking cartoon), and I’m not a Spidey fan, but I figured I’d watch a few and if it wasn’t painfully bad keep a few around for when I wanna sit down, relax and grab a bite to eat for 20 minutes before whatever sport (and then drinking) I have on tap that night.

I missed the first one due to being late to the Spectacular party.  I caught a few in a row, and found them pretty darn enjoyable!  Then I ran into cable box problems…the cable box power would go out (that infuriates me), and when I switched boxes I had some trouble with the Tivo changing channels on the new HD cable box.  These are the little things that make me go all fucking HULK SMASH!! on shit.  So I missed a few, but thanks to the glorious torrent I was able to fill in the gaps.

And it turns out that this is a pretty good and fun cartoon!  The animation is clean and fun and “good enough”…one issue I had with the Craptastic Four was crummy animation.  The scripts and voice acting are solid and the episodes build on each other without forcing you to see them all to enjoy a given episode.  It does a nice job of paying homage to Spiderman canon without retelling the same old stories.

(Yeah, if this was Daredevil I'd be going off the deep end for daring to change things.  Fine, I’m inconsistent bordering on hypocritical, and I’m good with that.)

(Just so you all know…right as Ghost gets to that last non-parenthetical point up there in the previous paragraph, he’s gonna say “HAH!  Finally!  I caught Monkey misspelling something!  It’s spelled ‘canNon’!  AND, Spiderman doesn’t even have a cannon!  Gawd Monkey is dumb.”  Trust me, it is going to play out just like that.  I love that guy.  Good times.)

The show takes the classic elements and maybe even some of the movie elements and mixes them all up, giving a new shine on some nostalgic old bits.  Peter Parker is in high school, and living with Aunt May.  He’s struggling with being the biggest nerd in school, and she’s struggling to pay the bills.  Pete is trying to figure out how to be Spiderman and yet not be out after his 10PM curfew; dealing with the football team and the popular kids; trying to keep his friendships with Gwen Stacy and Harry Osborne (and now, a new cute girl named Mary Jane…) intact while seemingly disappearing at every moment of crisis…unbeknownst to them, to don his Spiderman outfit.  He’s even got his job at the Bugle (and JJ Jameson is exactly as you’d expect, although his interactions with his astronaut son show him to not be one dimensional), webbing up his camera before beating down some bad guys.

And the bad guys, and their presentation here, have been great.  Again, I ain’t a Spidey guy, but who doesn’t know some of his classic villains?  They’ve done a great job of slowly introducing a fellow they call The Big Man (who may or may not be exactly who you think), through his minion Hammerhead (awesome that they dusted him off).  The Big Man has caught notice of Spidey’s rise and is beginning to take action before Spidey goes from inadvertently interfering with his crime organization to purposefully doing so.  And it is this background that leads to new origins for Sandman, Rhino, and Doctor Octopus, just to name a few.  As a matter of fact, they are rolling out SO many of the classic Spidey arch-villains that I begin to wonder if the creators assumed they’d never see a second season, so they just went for broke.

In any event, the story is much better than I expected, and as it has unfolded I have grown increasingly impressed.  I like how they are expressing Peter’s struggles to balance his real-life and his Spider-life; those struggles get him down, but he meets them with a youthful enthusiasm that feels genuine and keeps the show from becoming “woe is me” in tone.  He tries to keep in Aunt May’s good graces and help her out and genuinely regrets how poorly his friends at times think of him based on their perception of his actions and priorities.  He loves being Spiderman, but desperately wants to also just be a teenager who can go to the prom or dress up for Halloween without being Spiderman getting in the way. 

All in all…go watch it, and give it a few episodes.  It’s worth it.

Filed under: Comic Movies & TV, Marvel Comics, Monkey Rage