Comic Book Review – Spider-Man Epic Collection: Man-Wolf at Midnight

Spider-Man Epic Collection: Man-Wolf at Midnight (2022)
Reprints Amazing Spider-Man #124-142 and Giant-Size Super-Heroes #1
Written by Gerry Conway
Art by Ross Andru, Gil Kane, John Romita, and Paul Reinman

Something terrible happened to Peter Parker, and no one will let him process it and move on. The iconic man behind the spider lives in stasis between two poles: Uncle Ben’s death and Gwen Stacy’s death. There is this brief period between the two where he could be Spider-Man. Yet even in that, Captain Stacy’s death was a way of reigniting the angst of Peter’s guilt. This is who Spider-Man effectively is in popular culture: a perpetually grieving man who can never be absolved of his guilt. At least Batman is allowed to be grim, while Spidey has to joke about everything while psychologically unable to express the weight of his pain. Reading this collection caused me to completely rethink how I feel about this character.

The book opens immediately after Gwen and Norman Obsorn’s deaths. Not only is Peter forced to grieve his lover’s life, but he must also shoulder the burden of his enemy’s death in order not to rock the faith of his best friend, Harry Osborn. I began to notice how much of this book is thought bubbles, Peter with his thoughts even while in a crowd. There is always a barrier between him and his supposed friends. Reading through these stories, I have never understood why these people see Peter as a close friend because he is perpetually distant, stuck in his mind, and sinking into guilt. While these stories are difficult to read, they feel more connected to the reality of human experience than Ditko’s extremely objectivist take on humanity in the early days.

I’ve never seen Peter Parker as angry as I see him in these issues. As he battles J. Jonah Jameson’s son transformed into a werewolf, Peter too has a savagery in him driven by grief & guilt. Mary Jane plays the friend role, trying to cheer everyone up. Her boyfriend, Harry, is becoming more distant in the wake of his father’s death, so she loses that connection. She sees Peter suffering and reaches out to him, which he finds hard because he has to allow another person into that pain. For most of this book, Peter has always suffered alone. Mary Jane will eventually come to mean his release from this purgatory, someone with whom he can rest.

One of the most jarring things in these books is the introduction of Ross Andru as penciller. He’s a bit cruder than the clean, thick Silver Age lines of John Romita or the scope & scale of Gil Kane, making the comic feel darker and grimier. While Gerry Conway attempts to keep the silly Spider-Man villains flowing (see The Kangaroo, The Gibbon), it’s the more mundane evils like Jonas Harrow or Jameson who begin to emerge as far scarier threats. They look like people and wield power that none of us will ever have through institutions. I could conceivably get octopus arms and go toe to toe with Doc Ock, but I’ll never own a media outlet. In the background, waiting to make his grand reveal, is Dr. Miles Warren, saying he’s concerned about Peter missing class, but this will not be what it appears in time. The Jackal gleefully cackles in the background, a poor replacement for The Green Goblin, a reminder that Peter is now trapped in this infinite loop.

Into this nightmare of New York City circa 1971 is The Punisher, probably one of the darkest additions to Spidey’s rogues gallery. Earlier on, Conway provides Frank Castle with anti-hero status when Spidey convinces him not to follow the egging on of The Jackal. But Castle’s very nature is intertwined with the white reactionary ideology of figures like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry or Charles Bronson in Death Wish. I have never found anything heroic about The Punisher. As a concept, I suppose he can be used to point out the vigilante’s hypocrisy, how some Marvel Universe heroes see themselves as different but behave in a way that supersedes a standardized justice system. The Punisher, being a man who most of us would say is “white,” is allowed his violence because the systems put in place aren’t adequate enough for him. Make Punisher BIPOC, and I think he would have been written quite differently at the time.

We go off on a tangent at one point where Doc Ock is about to marry Aunt May, which concludes with Spidey flying off with May in a jet plane from a remote island where a thermonuclear bomb has been detonated. That’s followed by a convoluted and ultimately forgettable story that retcons Molten Man into being Liz Allen’s stepbrother. That ends with Spidey’s villain becoming inflamed, his existence as a human completely warped & twisted by atomic science. It paralleled the nuclear bomb explosion at the end of the other arc. Through Conway’s writing, we are getting a stark look into one young man’s view of New York City and the state of decay society was falling into.

The introduction of The Tarantula muddies the waters once we peek into his origins. This story is told by The Punisher, who is returning for a team-up with Spider-Man. We learn this new villain was a South American revolutionary army soldier. He fights against a dictator whom even Frank Castle describes as “mad,” yet in true Marvel fashion, we see that people seeking liberation are wrong if they use violence in the form of self-defense. What is most telling is how, eventually, the revolutionary army rejects Tarantula, and he is subsequently recruited by the dictator’s army, now killing his former comrades. This idea could be delivered more sophisticatedly, but Conway was in his early 20s and, while clearly literary, was also the product of the infantile American education system, which refuses to teach the actual concepts of liberation. Freedom is something that came long ago, and the neoliberal order needs us to believe liberation is no longer needed.

The most devastating arc for me was the Harry Osborn one. We learn that Harry has discovered Peter is Spider-Man and believes what Jameson has been printing: Spider-Man killed Norman Osborn. Harry also lies to himself by revealing he is the mysterious figure who stepped in and removed Norman’s costume. Now Harry is the Green Goblin, believing he’s avenging his father’s death, unable to see he has experienced a complete mental breakdown. The story reaches ludicrous & bleak levels when Harry reveals his grand trap: Aunt May, Mary Jane, and Flash Thompson are strapped to chairs in separate locations, with one of them having a small nuclear device over their head. 

I want you to fully take in this scene: Spider-Man’s best friend has dressed up in his dead dad’s goblin costume and is now threatening to nuke one of three people from their mutual friends. Harry has met May, and he has spent time with her. Despite Harry’s madness, Peter tries to hold fast to protect his friend, but eventually, that wears thin. He finally fights back, but with the idea of minimizing harm. The final moment with Harry shows him strapped to a gurney being rolled into an ambulance as he rants about Peter Parker being Spider-Man. To the people around him, they see an insane man, but Harry isn’t lying. He’s a human stuck in such horrible grief he wants to hurt everyone around him. 

In the same way that Peter Parker has been made to live in a virtual Hell, so has Harry Osborn. You can guarantee that when Harry shows up again and is given significant attention, it always leads to the return of the Green Goblin. It might be Harry or someone else cosplaying as his father, not realizing the horror they put Harry through. This man is not allowed to be anything but the shadow of his horrible father’s death, and the Goblin story has been regurgitated again and again, with nothing new really ever being added. Just walking the stations of the cross forever.

In the wake of Harry’s departure, Peter moves in briefly with Flash in Far Rockaway. Upon his arrival, Parker discovers Mindworm. This psychically altered human is born as a result of toxic waste pollution and is immediately seen by his father as a monster. Mindworm possess powers he doesn’t understand as a baby and kills people without realizing it. By the time Peter moves in, the boy is a man who has built his body into something that matches his mind. It ends with Spider-Man punching the villain, but there’s no satisfaction. Mindworm screams that now that he isn’t psychically leeching off the tenement dwellers, he is alone, in a vacuum, and collapses.

It becomes very odd for Spider-Man to go up against an old foe like Mysterio or a new one like The Grizzly while driving the dune buggy-inspired Spider-Mobile around while contemplating the existential horror of what the world is shown as in these stories. I don’t feel the joy of being Spider-Man; it doesn’t make us want to be like him. All they do is make me pity Peter Parker and wish he could kill himself. When does this end for him?

When someone wants to communicate the idea of Superman to us, they will trot out iconic characters: Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Lex Luthor, etc. When a writer wants to communicate the idea of Spider-Man, there are also familiar faces, but there is also Peter Parker’s never-ending grief. You will always see the loss of someone Spider-Man loves at the center of his stories now. I don’t feel great about that. It sends a woefully nihilistic message couched in a candy-colored story. If you’re a young person reading Spider-Man, do you end up ceasing to believe that we can be forgiven? Is every act of forgiveness just a temporary & fleeting thing? All we have in the end is our pain? The refusal to grapple with the misery of Parker’s existence unsettles me, as is how the readers are expected to see this purgatory as “just life.”