I like Spider-Man, just about all of them. I like Peter Parker, I like Miguel O'Harra, I really like Miles Morales and I miss Kaine. Spider-Man is awesome. But today we're here to talk about Peter Parker. See, Peter Parker is frequently out of his fucking league. Honestly, other superheroes need to stop encouraging him to do reckless shit. Sooner or Later Peter Parker is going to die again if we keep letting him do things out of his league.
Spider-Man is a street level hero and there's no shame in that. We need street level heroes. Every hero can't just hang around and wait for the next cosmic threat. Yet, somehow as a street level hero he keeps getting called into situations he clearly can not handle. I first realized this while reading Original Sin. Investigating a murder mystery, yeah Spider-Man can do that. But, why would you invite him to a space fight? He can't use his webbing. He can't stick to anything. Then the next thing you know Spider-Man is floating away into space screaming for someone to come to his rescue.
Spider-Man isn't just out of his league on things like that. Have you seen him globetrotting in Amazing Spider-Man lately? Zodiac beat the shit out of him recently. Like, I'm sure he shit his pants after this beating and Zodiac didn't break a sweat. In the end he didn't beat Zodiac in a fight. He didn't even out smart him. He ran away and got lucky that the door locked itself. Zodiac got everything he wanted and Spider-Man just crawled away injured hoping to live and fight another day. He's lucky the tomb just closed itself. Zodiac doesn't have a cosmic cube or anything like that and yet Spider-Man is still outmatched.
Yeah Spider-Man can handle guys like Rhino, Shocker and The Vulture. But, when it comes time for large scale threats he needs to take a back seat and work on rescuing people. If anything his spot on the team should be for moral support when major conflict arises. He din't make a difference in the fight during Civil War. He wasn't doing anything nobody else could. But he was a good moral thermometer and that's it.
He's a great scientist, but people over hype how smart he is. Have you ever noticed that when these think tanks get together he's not invited? T'Challa, Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Amadeus Cho all get together to solve a galactic problem and Spider-Man is not invited because he's just not that smart. He's smart, but not that smart. Look at his company Parker Industries, most of their tech is built off of Doc Oct's plans he hadn't finished when he gave Peter the body back. Then he just hired a bunch of smarter people to work under him. Peter is out of his league, he's not even the smartest guy in his own company.
I get it, Spider-Man is fucking cool. The problem is we can't act like he's top of the line hero. Booster Gold is popular too but we're not calling him in to handle Doomsday if Superman isn't around. We're calling Martian Manhunter. Why would we call Spider-Man because we can't get into contact with The Fantastic 4 and X-Men? You know people who are really about that cross dimensional travel, multiple timelines and space travel life. That isn't Spider-Man. The guy is almost always out of his damn league and he pays the price for it too. But we won't just tell him to stay home. He's just embarrassing himself at this point.
You can hear Darrell on the CP Time and Powerbomb Jutsu podcasts. He also plays classic arcade games on The Cabinet. You can also check out his playthrough of Sleeping Dogs.
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