Spider-Man: Reign

Many think of giving up as a choice. Life gets hard and people make this decision that enough is enough. And then somehow they keep deciding that they’re done. It’s the same line of reasoning you see with Luke in The Last Jedi. Something happened and he made a decision to just screw over everyone.

That’s totally idiotic.

Giving up is a disease of the soul. It HAPPENS to you. No, you don’t get a choice to be done or not. You get so overwhelmed that there’s really nothing else you can do. And whether or not you’ve fought this sorta thing off before is totally irrelevant: everyone will have a threshold that, if crossed, they will automatically give up, until the day they die.

Everyone.

Yes, you, Last Jedi hater.

After One More Day I threw away all my comics in a fit of grief I couldn’t communicate to you if I tried. Along with the comics went my hopes of being a comic artist and writer. All this happened at the same time I came down with Lyme’s Disease (which became so bad that I would have cars literally pop into existence before my eyes), my best friend completely went off thr deep end, and home troubles amped up a few notches. No, giving up really wasn’t a choice. It was too much. Later on I had to grieve throwing my comics out.  

There was one comic I made sure to buy again from that old collection. Just one.

Spider-Man: Reign.

I will not pretend to be objective about this comic book to you. It is so a part of my soul that it’s the spiritual equivalent of an arm or a leg. Or a heart. The beating heart.

Spider-Man: Reign is about a Peter Parker who has been so thoroughly poisoned against himself that giving up is no longer an option. It just is. Mary-Jane is long dead, in a manner that totally hollowed Peter out. While he was possessed by this illness a utopian government took over New York. One day J. Jonah Jameson appears on Peter’s door to ask him to become Spider-Man once more.

It goes about as well as you’d expect.

I am not going to tell you this is the best comic ever made. It’s not. The art is well-done but not exceptional. The story is a deliberate pastiche of The Dark Knight Returns. The third chapter is strange and outright gross and I love it for those qualities. You may not. And that’s fine.

But this is my Spider-Man story. It is the story of my soul, dressed up in dystopias that aren’t speculative anymore, costumes, and aliens. Whenever I read it I see my remarkably damaged and sick soul staring back. It’s stronger than when I was nineteen. A lot of the gaping wounds are now healing into scars. It’s ugly.

But it’s still alive. 

Someday I will be able to do what I always wanted. Slowly but surely I am becoming who I always wanted to be.

And yeah, that gives me hope. That’s what stories are for.