When I was in high school, I was the comic book guy in our class of around 300. Yes, kids read comics in grade school and junior high, but nobody but me collected them in high school. I was the oddball who did.

I had been inhaling comic books from age five on, with a propensity toward Dick Tracy, Joe Palooka and Li’l Abner, all of which were reprints of newspaper comic strips, though I initially wasn’t aware of that. I read Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, and Mad, among many others. An antiques shop within easy walking distance had stacks of comics and I would trade two-for-one.

But when I was six, the Comics Code Authority came in and censorship chased a lot of comic books out of business, in particular horror and crime, which I’d already been gobbling up. Also, DC Comics managed to sue the original Captain Marvel off the stands, claiming it was a plagiarism of Superman. Captain Marvel (and Captain Marvel Jr. and The Marvel Family) were outselling DC, which somehow had the muscle to get rid of their competition (much as they had gotten rid of Siegel and Shuster, who created Superman).

Mad became a magazine, and lots of comic books flat out disappeared. Tracy survived a while, as did Palooka; but before long just about all that was left of adventure comics was Superman (and its spin-offs) and Batman, which after some wonderful years (mostly drawn by Dick Sprang) got silly; but I hung in there. Batman still had a newspaper-comics look that endeared it to me. I was still buying it in high school.

DC’s Showcase introduced a new version of the Flash in 1956, and in the late ‘50s brought back Green Lantern, too, as well as the proto-Fantastic Four by way of Challengers of the Unknown in 1957. When the latter got its own comic book, I subscribed. I had good instincts at age nine: it was Jack Kirby’s work.

Then came Marvel.

Because of Kirby, I had followed that artist to Marvel where he drew monsters like Fin Fang Foom for Strange Tales and other similar titles. This would have been the late 1950s and early ‘60s. But what really caught my attention was Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962.

That title introduced Spider-man (aka Peter Parker) and his cast of supporting players. Artist Steve Ditko was a unique talent and the stories by longtime Atlas/Marvel editor Stan Lee essentially updated Superman to what was then modern-day, specifically making his super-hero an angst-ridden teenager. In March 1963 Spidey got his own book.

The Fantastic Four came along late in 1961 with Lee bringing a tongue-in-cheek touch to his four super-powered leads, with Jack Kirby co-creating. Kirby did around 100 issues, but when he left, so did I.

Ditko left Spider-man in 1966, the year I graduated from high school. He was replaced by John Romita, also a fine cartoonist, and I hung in there as long as Romita drew the book (1971), at which point I bailed.

As Marvel expanded, though, I’d come along for the ride – The Avengers in 1963, The X-Men that same year, both co-created by Kirby and Lee. Additionally Iron Man and Dr. Strange came along, too, in 1963.

My enthusiasm for Marvel petered out in my college years, during which I sold many of my now incredibly valuable comic books. But I needed the money, so what the hell.

Still, I have history with Spider-man and the rest of the Marvel universe. And I have gone to every movie about those characters, up through Thunderbolts, which I skipped – it just looked dreadful.

And I do believe I am done.

I realize a lot of people like Spider-Man: Brand-New Day. Tom Holland is fine in the lead. The personal story works well enough. It all adds up to a fine 90-minute Spider-man movie. Unfortunately Brand-New Day runs 145 minutes.

This is really not a movie at all. It is an overstuffed promotional piece for upcoming Marvel movies in general, and an attempt to elevate characters in the Marvel Universe who are lesser than Spider-man.

The central story has to do with Jean Grey, one of the X-Men. It includes the character Black Widow, previously played by Scarlett Johansson, now played by Florence Pugh (as the dead Widow’s sister) since the film Thunderbolts, which was a flop (and yet we’re all supposed to know who she is). Her scenes are ridiculous, even for a super-hero movie (her “office” is a bathhouse swimming pool and she’s naked…my 11 year-old grandson said, “Hello!”).

Another minor Marvel character, the Punisher (a direct rip-off of Don Pendleton’s The Executioner), is given a criminal amount of screen time and is uncomfortably overplayed by Jon Bernthal. Bruce Banner is back, which is to say the Hulk as portrayed by a picking-up-a-paycheck Mark Ruffalo; he too gets an inordinate amount of (mostly unconvincing CGI) screen time.

The Jean Grey character is a ridiculous sinister villain until a vision including the unlikely glamorous version of Aunt May (Spidey’s late aunt) turns Jean “nice.” Sorry about the old guy she made to get hit by a taxi cab!

Does Holland hold it all together? Sort of. He seems to be guest-starring in his own movie, though. This is the Happy Meal version of a film and I am done. A comics fan since age five, and I am done. Never again!

Well…maybe Batman 2….

The great J. Kingston Pierce has given Nate Heller some attention in his Rap Sheet column, specifically a behind-the-scenes look at the first two covers done for the series at TOR Books back in the day.

M.A.C.

Tags: Movie Reviews, Nate Heller, Nathan Heller