Peter Parker haunts the panels of the "The Real Thing" like an excessively polite and self-effacing ghost, the absolute opposite of a poltergeist, too shy to even rattle the cutlery or hide the front door keys. Occasionally we catch sight of him on the periphery of the lives of the folks who dominate the events of the book, of Mary Jane and Liz Allen, Harry Osbourne and Flash Thompson, the in-crowd, the beautiful people, the apparently lovable and the presumably well-loved ones. And when we do catch a glimpse of Peter, he's mostly little more than a bit player in other people's apparently more substantial lives. He's a walk-on, one-line character, who shuffles rather embarrassingly and ineffectively across the stage before disappearing without being missed at all.
It's such an odd way of telling a tale about Spider-Man, but then, this doesn't begin as a tale about Peter or his alter ego at all, and Mary Jane will always be the point of view character in this title. In truth, "Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane" is a tale of how a touchingly confused teenage girl unconsciously tries to displace her emotional difficulties by developing a crush upon a faceless superhero she thinks she knows nothing about. At first, Peter is irrelevant to the whole process, despite the fact that it's him wearing the costumed adventurer's longjohns, because she barely knows Peter at all, just as, by the end of "The Real Thing", she's only met Spider-Man the once. And that, of course, is the whole point of the book, and it's a brilliant idea; Mary Jane tumbles for
Spider-Man because he isn't a person to her, because he apparently doesn't have an individual's character or quirks or problems or needs. Spider-Man is a blank slate, he's tabula rasa, he's a symbol of a perfect boyfriend without any of the confusing and upsetting problems that real young men like Harry and Flash - and Peter - might bring to their relationships with her. That Spider-Man might end up being a person with his own quirks and limitations, and that he might be that nerdy little guy who's sweet in helping her boy-friend Harry with his assignments, could never possibly have occurred to Mary Jane. It's literally beyond anyone's ability to anticipate. Yet the business of falling in love, for whatever confused and confusing reasons, always brings with it costs and consequences, and it's in playing out such complications that "Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane" consistently shines.
The inspired and counter-intuitive choice to push Peter Parker's role in "The Real Thing" out to the margins of the narrative cleverly shows us aspects of his experience of high school life that have rarely been so illuminated before. In showing how tangential a figure Peter is in everyone's life except for his own and, to a limited degree, that of Harry Osbourne, the fact of his social isolation is emphasised in a way that scenes of his being deliberately mocked and bullied can't. When Peter inexplicably stops to say hello to a Mary-Jane who barely knows how to acknowledge his presence, so distant is her acquaintance with him when he's not in costume, his social unimportance is highlighted by his anonymity in her eyes. This isn't the Peter of the Lee/Ditko years, being scorned with disdain by another take on Liz Allen after he's asked her for a date. Rather, this is a Peter who no-one, beyond the occasional aggression of Flash Thompson, cares enough about to even hold in contempt. He's not even notable enough in his difference to provoke a general measure of loathing.
When he's mocked by a Flash Thompson who can barely raise the ill-will to abuse him to any effective degree, and when he's defended out of his earshot by Liz Allen not because she's fond of Peter, but because she's embarrassed by her boyfriend's casual, ill-mannered cruelties, we can feel Peter's social status dwindling from zero down into the minus count column. And whenever and wherever he appears, that's all that he is, one of the social underclass, of the outcasts, of the students who're invisible except for those moments when one of the members of the elite need a target for their tongue or their fists. And most of all, invisible is what Peter Parker is. A social life, an interesting life, the life of the pretty and the affluent and the athletic and the relatively wealthy rolls on in all its soap-operatic complexity wherever Peter isn't, while his life, being the existence of the lonely and almost-friendless only child, is transparent and tragic in its simplicity. He starts the day alone, except for the company of his Aunt, and he finishes it in the same way, and in between the morning and the evening he fails to make friends even if he does anonymously save the city, and even the world, at times.
It's a notably effective conceit which helps the reader fully grasp just how peripheral a figure Peter Parker undoubtedly was to the folks he shared high school with. For though we all know that Peter was exceptionally unhappy during these long years, regardless of whichever continuity we find him in, the impression that we're often given is that bullying him, and at the very least excluding him, was a matter of some vital importance to his schoolmates. Seeing that world of high school as we have through the young Spider-Man's eyes for the past fifty years, Flash Thompson's existence in Forest Hills , for example, has often seemed to be one substantially consumed by his hatred for Peter. But then, that's how it would appear to May Parker's boy. All he could know of the admittedly often vile Thompson would be the brief moments when the two of them collided and some thorough nastiness erupted as a consequence. But whereas Peter would have spent his school-days constantly dreading such meetings and steeling himself for their trials, Thompson's head would have been full of football and sex and status and self-pity masking as egoism. An awareness of "Puny" Parker would mostly only flare briefly into existence for Thompson when he could see him his victim before him, or when he'd feel that a victim ought to be delivered up to him as an entertaining sacrifice. Beyond that, Peter would have been of no more importance in Flash's life than any other insubstantial and unthreatening ghost of a student to be mocked when the day was boring, or Thompson's mood was bad.
In short, Peter Parker didn't matter all that much to anybody but himself, and so, although he certainly didn't over-exaggerate to himself how lonely and wretched a life he had to endure day after day, he did perhaps fail to understand that the suffering and alienation which consumed him was barely if at all visible or important to anyone else around him. In that, Peter's life was ruined not so much because Thompson and his cronies and his less objectionable friends had it in for him so much as because no-one beyond Harry Osbourn could even keep the fact of Peter's existence fixed in their mind when he left the room before they did, or after he disappeared down a stairwell buried in a mass of other shuffling bodies.
Indeed, for the vast majority of the time, no-one probably even noticed that Peter was sharing a room with them, anymore than they were conscious that they were sharing floorspace with the school's desks and chairs, cupboards and bins.
Sadly, and like most folks who are bullied, the evidence in "The Real Thing " is that Peter obviously struggled to grasp why he was so ill-treated and yet so markedly irrelevant too. As a consequence, he behaves here in ways which appear almost calculated to embarrass himself. He stops in front of Liz Allen and Mary Jane as they banter over coffee in order to awkwardly say "Hey .." to MJ, and it'd be a decision which would be beyond understanding, given how impossibly high her status was, if it wasn't for the fact that this Peter was so obviously impossibly naive. For he seems to find it hard to grasp that being pleasant, and kind, and helpful, in or out of costume, won't in itself make him popular with at least some of the folks who seem to be at the top of the tree. Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth, and especially not in high school, where guileless good nature is regrettably neither in rare supply nor valued for its common and uncomplicated virtues.
Still, there is an unanswered question which hangs over this book, and the series which followed, and which then echoes backwards and forwards through the history of stories about Spider-Man in High School, namely, why didn't Peter simply make friends among the outsiders such as himself? If Peter couldn't be liked and admired by Flash and Liz and MJ, surely he could have found folks to be friends with elsewhere in that school?
Why is it that Peter has so often seemed to aspire to hang out with the cooler kids? Couldn't he recognise the virtues of those further down the social pecking order, or did they reject him too?
The reasons why we often-unknowingly choose the friends and lovers we do, and exclude without thinking others, is one of the threads which weaves the various chapters of "Spider-Man Loves Mary-Jane" together. When Mary Jane is later shown shocked to grasp that Flash Thompson is a repeatedly violent bully towards Peter, it shows how little attention she'd paid to the behaviour of her friend, as well as to how carefully Thompson had presumably obscured his bullying from the attention of the young women he'd so wanted to impress. Well, why would Mary Jane note the detail of how awfully Flash treats Peter, when she's only just learning to conceive of Peter as a distinct and individual human being, let alone a leading member of the cast of her life. Peter is at first to her what he is to everyone, the shadow of a wallflower which passes occasionally over her desk as she dreams of Spider-Man and a future life as an actress.
In telling us so much about Peter's life by apparently showing us so little of it, Mr McKeever and Mr Miyazawa's work establishes for us what a wonderful technique this is for illuminating the personality and situation of long-established characters. It's certainly an approach which we might agree is too little used in superhero comics, where the relentless focus on the business of being a superhero from the superhero's point of view often means that all the reader can perceive is the next battle, the next love, the next disappointment, the next crisis, the next victory. And the insistence on a state of permanent crisis and a process of radical change and an existence lived largely in the company of other superheroes often makes it hard today to place an alter-ego in an everyday context, and to care more about them for that very reason. Yet in "Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane", we see Peter Parker all the more clearly because we hardly see him at all. After all, isn't that how we're perceived by most of the people we live amongst, as that person at work, that acquaintance in the supermarket queue, that friend of a friend of a workmate? Aren't most people nothing much at all in the eyes of the world they flit through?
The restraint with which Peter is used also means that when he does appear, whether in or out of costume, the reader's attention is untypically focused upon him. By turning the camera away from him, as it were, he becomes all the more important. We can't help following him as he disappears rather sadly off-panel, or shuffles away to sit alone at a table uncared for by his peers, and each brief sign of modesty and kindness on his part counts all the more because we know the unhappiness he's attempting to disguise just as we can see that the social world he inhabits cares not to a whit to look close enough to note or empathise with his misery.
It's never been so clear that Charlie Brown grew up to be Peter Parker as it is in "Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane" # 1.
Two particularly subtle and affecting moments stand out for this blogger through the use of this storytelling technique in "The Real Thing". In the first, we're shown Harry Osbourne going out of his way to reassure Peter that Flash "doesn't mean what he says", after Peter has been casually insulted in public for no good reason at all by Thompson. It's an act of compromised kindness that convinces in a way that little else ever has that Harry really is a kind of friend to Peter, just as it proves that Harry isn't that good a friend at all. After all, Harry shouldn't be wandering over to reassure Peter when Flash's cruelty is over, when there's no-one else around, or so he thinks, to notice his betrayal of the party line. In truth, Harry should have stood up to Flash and defended his Peter when and where it really counted, but, regrettably, he didn't. Peter's only friend isn't anything like the comfort that he ought to be, and that too accentuates the young Spider-Man's isolation.
But then, that's what makes Sean McKeever's work so quietly remarkable. For he doesn't present us with barely two-dimensional cut-outs, but rather with recognisably compromised human beings. Harry, you see, is a nice enough fellow, but he's no ethical paragon. He's just Harry, a human being with a human being's faults. And Peter, too, for all that's he's undoubtedly treated harshly by the world he struggles through, is shown to contribute to his own suffering. For example, common sense and a respect for his friend ought to have caused him to think twice about speaking to Harry when Flash Thompson was sitting at the same table, though bravery and perhaps an inability to catch Osbourne at any other time might have driven Peter to speak out then. But Peter steps in where he perhaps might have chosen not to, and bad things happen as a result.
But then, there are few simple choices in anyone's life, even when it comes down to who to talk to and where, and that's certainly true here.
And the second moment? It's a beautifully observed sequence where Peter as Spider-Man rescues MJ from Electro and delivers her home directly to the sidewalk outside her parent's front lawn;
Mary Jane: "Hey. How'd you know where I live?"
Spider-Man: "Um ... It -- It's one of my special powers."
But we know how he knows, and the superhuman capabilities lent to him by the bite of radioactive spider have got nothing to do with it at all.
Folks may rarely notice the ghosts in their lives, but their ghosts notice them. Mary Jane might never have considered that Peter Parker might know where she lives, letalone Spider-Man, but to Peter, it's a fact that, once learned, would never slip from his memory. Being a ghost is, after all, an unavoidable and central truth of all of our existences. I've ex-students whose careers I follow at a silent and respectful distance, old friends whose lives have parted from mine but whose achievements still bring me the satisfaction of knowing that good people are earning appropriately fine rewards. When the knowledge of their fates criss-cross over my own, I'm as pleased for them as I could be, despite the fact
that, quite rightly, I doubt any thought of me passes across their minds for even a single moment every decade. And there will no doubt have been neighbours or family or acquaintances that you hardly noticed, but who quietly cared for you and took an interest in your progress. And you yourself will of course have been a ghost in the background of the life of most everyone you've ever known, just as I am, just as everyone is. Without being conscious of the fact for much of the time, we all know how unimportant we are, even to many of those people who matter to us the most. And as a consequence of noting this and referencing it, as a result of showing in "The Real Thing" what Peter Parker isn't to other people, we see with so much more clarity how Peter Parker's own view of his adolescent experiences was as unavoidably partial and egocentric as his life was still undoubtedly and protractedly tragic. Through his absence from so much of the everyday life depicted in "Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane", Peter Parker becomes all the more real, because, just like ourselves, just like everyone, he was so often a ghostly, insubstantial presence to just about all of those around him, and that tells us, strangely enough, how very real he was, and how very real his unhappiness must have been for him.
After all, it could be said that we're defined every bit as much by who doesn't know us as who does, and by where we never walk as much as by the world that we're familiar with, and to.
I was wrong to recently write here that my favourite Spider-Man after that of Stan'n'Steve was the Conway/Andru take on the character. For though my regard for that latter run is undiminished, I realise that I'd struggle to place the splendid McKeever/Miyazawa version above or below it. Wonderful script, wonderful art, and a wonderful team. Ah, what riches, and what Spider-Man creative teams has my rusty old brain yet forgotten? My splendid best wishes to all, and, as always, a wish for you to benefit from the appropriate measure of "Sticking together!". Next off, we may well be dropping in on Dr Mid-Night, though, as always, who can say? Only The Shadow, of course, knows.
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