Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #6: We Can Do This Together

This review hits very close to home for me. As we embark on the journey of Spider-Man and Spider-Bite, a sidekick manifesting out of nowhere, something feels not quite right from the beginning. Who is this mystery child? What’s in the box? How often do the bad guys escape on public transportation?

The return of Juann Cabal’s dynamic art almost masks that feeling as Spidey and Spider-Bite bounce about swapping wise-cracks and inspiring each other to be the best they can be against nearly insurmountable odds. But that feeling never quite dissipates. It lingers. It almost insists upon itself.

And then comes the moment of truth. The veil lifted, we meet Nathan, a young boy living in a cancer ward, play-acting a perfect day as a superhero with his favorite hero. A prayer for the dying.

With the handling of May’s diagnosis in the previous issue, I suppose we should have seen something similar to this coming, yet I didn’t. This issue caught me off-balance. It was at all times both joyous and sorrowful, respectful yet almost invasive in its devastation. You see, one of the beauties of the comics medium is the ability to read ourselves onto the pages– that sense of reader identification so eloquently discussed by Scott McCloud. We can inhabit these worlds of science fiction and fantasy, wonder and excitement. But sometimes, every so often, a writer like Taylor comes along and makes the characters inhabit our world. Instead of escapism, a mirror. That mirror is often cracked, deformed, and occasionally broken beyond recognition. Sometimes, it is flawless. I am not Stilt-Man. Stilt-Man is me.