The Megalomaniacal Spider-Man #1

[cyberghostface]

"What's really annoying about Peter Parker, however, is the relentless POUTING he indulges in. Except for when he's in costume, he rarely gloats or even expresses a single moment of joy over his superheroic exploits. Instead all he can do is dwell on the downside of his chosen profession. He's a real glass-half-empty kind of a guy, totally in need of a serious bitch-slapping. He was at his worst whenever he was around one of his beautiful girlfriends, at which point his pout-o-meter would go through the roof... All these endless 'misunderstandings' that went way beyond his never-ending I-can't-tell-her-I'm-Spider-Man dilemma. I remember this one story where a college-aged Peter Parker stood up a girl, and when she confronted him about it he said nothing—he just stared at the ground the whole time with this wounded puppy dog expression until she stormed away. Only rather than being out all night fighting crime, it turns out he was up all night cramming for a big exam! 'But why tell her that,' pouted ol' Pouty Petey. 'She wouldn't understand.' She wouldn't? What's not to understand?!? But God forbid he should miss a single opportunity to feel sorry for himself, even if that opportunity is totally self-created.

At this point you're probably wondering how a self-described Spidey-hater like me would know so much about the Spider-Man 'canon.' The reason is that I was hired by Marvel several years ago to do a one-shot Spider-Man comic, in my own style and with my own 'take' on the character. I know, I couldn't believe it either, but this was back when Marvel was struggling financially and were willing to take a shot at anything (a situation that quickly resolved itself for them, ironically, by the enormous success of the first Spider-Man movie that came out shortly afterwards). My 'take' was to use Spider-Man as an allegory for the whole Stan Lee vs. Steve Ditko back-story, which involved actually reading all the issues they did together. I also threw a whole lot of ME into the story, and what I was going through at the time, which was rather self-indulgent on my part, but who cares. My editor told me that the readers of the regular Spider-Man series hated its very existence, since it messed with the fragile suspension-of-disbelief thingie that their pathetic existence so relies on, so to this day I have no idea who DID buy it!" -- Peter Bagge