The Amazing Spider-Man

If you care a bit more than you should about these things, you've almost certainly seen the trailer for Captain America: Civil War in which Spider-Man shows up at the very end. (An aside: perhaps the actual movie will be about the Captain and his close personal allies, but the trailers make it look much more like the next Avengers installment. I go to a Captain America movie to see Captain America. And maybe the Falcon.) This has Thing 1 giddy with excitement, but me not so much.

Back when I was an avid comics reader, my favorite Spider-Man period was when Jim Owsley was editing those titles for Marvel during the 1980s. Thereafter, it seemed to me that Marvel was exploiting the character's popularity for cash value, putting him through countless wrenching changes and cross-overs for little reason other than boosting sales. That said, I thought the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies were fun, but by the third installment began suffering the same bloat which afflicted the first run of Batman movies after Tim Burton and Michael Keaton left the series. 

And then came The Amazing Spider-Man.

If you know any comic book history at all, you know the stories about how the Stan Lee-, Jack Kirby- and Steve Ditko-led Marvel Comics of the 1960s up-ended the industry. Spider-Man, we read, was revolutionary for having a secret identity which was not only as well-developed as his costumed role, but which was a nebbishy high-school student. We read about the excitement he generated among readers, offering a hero whom they could not only idolize, but to whom they could intimately relate (because you see, children, back in our day all comic book readers were irredeemable doofuses). I read about that Spider-Man, but I didn't experience him other than in the occasional anthology. The Spider-Man of my youth had aged, was in his late twenties, and even married Mary-Jane Watson. All of which was fine, but didn't exactly carry on the legendary magic of Stan Lee's 1960s Spider-Man.

I got that, finally, when Andrew Garfield took on the character in 2012. His portrayal, and the way the two films set his universe, finally landed me in the sheer joy of an adolescent climbing walls and the pathos of a teenager losing the man who had raised him while finding his first serious girlfriend. The Amazing Spider-Man movies gave me the opportunity to experience Stan Lee's original vision. Unlike any number of other recent superhero movies (looking at you, Man of Steel and the X-Men franchise), those films had an emotional heft which has stuck with me.

As much I've enjoyed the Marvel cinematic universe thus far, and the Avengers in particular, I'm not interested in seeing Spider-Man join it. To me, he's always been at his best when he is alone, struggling (and often failing) to figure out his place in the world . At the same time, I don't really object to him snatching away Captain America's shield, either. It's just too bad that moment had to come at the expense of ending Andrew Garfield's take on Spider-Man, the only one in which I've been interested for years.