Me and Spiderman

I saw Spiderman yesterday. Obviously, I didn't see him, y'know walking down Guildford High Street, I mean I watched the latest movie. It was good fun, serious when it needed to be, but some good comedy moments too. But this post isn't about the movie, go see it if you want to or wait for Netflix.

No this is more about our relationship, me and Spidey. We go back to the early seventies when I was seven or eight and just getting into comics. What I found myself thinking about yesterday is how getting older might have changed the way I relate to a fictional character that I've known for a long time.

In this movie Peter Parker is 15. He's in High School. To me at seven, he was practically an adult. He was like some people's big brothers. He wasn't like me, but I knew that I could grow into someone like him. That the life he was leading was somewhere in my future. At that stage I enjoyed physical activity, I loved running and rolling about and I loved being Spiderman in my head. I also fell in love with the street identity of New York City. It seemed so exciting and dangerous. Of course, in the early seventies it really was pretty grim, but it was a fantasy land to me, safe to imagine without actually going there.

When I really was 15 myself, of course I'd put all that kids stuff away - though some of the comics would end up in this box which still sits in one of my wardrobes. I'd actually become the Peter Parker nerd type that he is before he gets bitten by a spider and becomes physically mature and confident. I didn't do science, I was in love with language and expression and music.

And when I finally made it to New York a few years ago and I looked out of the window at one of those water tanks on top of a building, I was back there, waiting for the Vulture or Doc Ock to smash it to pieces and see Spidey swinging by.

But now I realise he's younger than my kids and the person I most physically identify with in the movie is the villain - we're there in the same place, trying to do the best for ourselves and our family and some nerdy kid keeps getting in the way. I really got how annoying Spiderman is, the adolescent humour made sense, I saw it from a new perspective, I saw him for the kid that he is. Of course he's a hero, but he's not someone you'd want to be except in the way that he sets out to be useful despite everything being stacked against him.

I don't know. It didn't make me feel old, but it did feel like something shifted.