Good Fun

     Marvel has spun, well, webs with all the permutations of their "Spider-Man" character.  The core character was popular with my male peers in Junior High and High School: here was this wisecracking kid like them, except he usually knew the right thing to say and he had superpowers!  I thought he was fun, if implausible.  Given similar powers, the zit-faced boys I knew were unlikely to rise to his level of heroism -- or verbal cleverness.

     I admit it: I was never a huge fan of comic books, not even when they started to call themselves graphic novels.  The horror/SF comics were screamingly derivative, often "borrowing" SF plots or entire stories without so much as a nod to the original and I found that offputting.  For pure mindless fun, "Doc Savage" reprints were a better value for my money.

     But Spidey was his own thing, not a sanctimonious stuffed shirt.  Not a millionaire, or invulnerable, or a rebooted Norse god, just Some Guy who stumbled into superpowers, and that was kind of cool.  The thing is, he kind of wasn't entirely original; he had a pulp precursor, much darker: The Spider was the alias of the entirely human (if slightly gadgety) crimefighter Richard Wentworth, maybe the number three hero pulp after The Shadow and Doc Savage.  The Spider ran to greater moral ambiguity (and bloodthirstiness) than the other two and gave rise to a movie-serial version of the protagonist with a much more spidery look, and between the pulp and the films, helped inspire the later comic-book hero.  The teen angst was all from Stan Lee, though, and that's really the emotional driver of the graphic novel character.

     All this is to set up writing about the entirely entertaining Amazon Video streaming series, Spider-Noir.  It's spun from the "Spiderverse" notions Marvel's been shoveling through a kaledeoscope in recent years, but what's come out this time* is a back-crossing between the modern-day four-color hero and his pulp ancestor that's half film noir and half graphic novel (and about ten percent Republic-type serial).  Seedy PI Ben Reilly struggles to make a living, having put away his past as a costumed superhero after personal tragedy, and then....  Then, of course, plot happens.  It's not any more plausible than any other superhero tale, or most film noir for that matter, but it's as engaging as any of them, with a reasonably good take on the 1930s setting and nice acting, cinematography, effects and editing.  It's good fun.  They've managed to explain or at least lampshade most of the incongruities, too.  It's unlikely to alter your worldview, but it's at least as good a value for money as an old pulp magazine or a modern graphic novel.
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* They'd already done a similar thing, "Spider-Man Noir," in print and animation, the latter with the same actor (Nicholas Cage) as the TV series.