Book Review: With Great Power: How Spider-Man Conquered Hollywood During the Golden Age of Comic Book Blockbusters.

 

Reviewed by Viola Burlew

Sean O’Connell. With Great Power: How Spider-Man Conquered Hollywood During the Golden Age of Comic Book Blockbusters. Essex, Connecticut: Applause Theater and Cinema Books, 2022. http://applausebooks.com/books/9781493066193

            There is perhaps no more iconic character in the Marvel universe than Spider-Man. Over the course of sixty years, various creative teams have depicted the web-slinger as an “everyday” superhero, from the first of his kind to his present-day status as a figurehead of the type. To examine the impact the character has had on superhero culture requires examining the intricacies of multiple versions of the character in print and digital media alike.

            Sean O’Connell’s With Great Power… achieves this feat and more. O’Connell’s work follows the growth of Spider-Man from a comic book fill-in feature to the big screen’s friendly neighborhood, billion-dollar-generating hero.

Decade by decade, he analyzes how different adaptations of Spider-Man have shaped both the character and the superhero film industry itself. He works his way from the 1960s to the 1990s in the book’s earliest chapters, demonstrating how repeated production failures adapting Spider-Man indicated a general apathy towards the comic book film genre. These early attempts to create an on-screen hero lacked a recognizable comic book feel, an element O’Connell argues is necessary to have a successful, and faithful, adaptation, in part due to technological limitations. Financial and licensing issues played their own part in delaying Spider-Man's appearance on the big screen, as O'Connell further details in his discussion of James Cameron's unproduced Spider-Man film of the 1990s. As a result, it is not until the 2000s that a Spider-Man appears with any kind of memorability on the big screen. 

It is from this moment forward, with the development of Sam Rami’s Spider-Man films, that O’Connell can truly delve into the complexities surrounding the on-screen character and subsequent adaptations. O’Connell’s close analyses of Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland’s depictions of the character, coupled with detailed accounts of Sony and Marvel’s bargaining over Spider-Man’s rights and marketability, reveal just how crucial Spider-Man was to the creation of the now-popular superhero universes. Strikingly, O’Connell does not pit these films against one another in his analysis. Instead, he traces their progression up to the present day, arguing that each Spider-Man product is a worthy successor to that which came before it. Though he clearly outlines certain missteps, his arc of Spider-Man media points to a consistent rise in quality, with each new film meaning something different to its creators and, crucially, its audience.

While the book is a chronological approach to Spider-Man’s development, O’Connell also offers readers a brief history of the superhero film market itself. He argues that Spider-Man has long been at the center of the genre’s development, with production companies seeing Spider-Man as the character that would launch a great wave of superhero films and sequels. In building these stories around a single character, O’Connell demonstrates that Spider-Man not only “conquered” the blockbuster golden age, but that the genre grew out of and around him.

With Great Power clearly demonstrates O’Connell’s passion for Spider-Man’s character and history. One of the text’s great strengths is O’Connell’s ability to tell these stories with a touch of personal flair—not a bias that privileges one adaptation over the other, but a fondness that seems to stem from genuine care for the character’s legacy. His interest in Spider-Man as a fan could be expanded upon; an occasional weakness of the text is the cursory nature of fan community responses, which undercuts O’Connell’s discussion of Spider-Man reboots and recasting. But this absence is largely secondary in examining the overall depth of O’Connell’s work and his apparent affection for Spider-Man.

This affection is precisely what makes for the most powerful portions of the text. O’Connell shares not only his own personal identification with Spider-Man, but others’ identification as well. He references Rami’s personal connections to Spider-Man, Garfield’s great love of the character, and Holland’s attachment to the role. These moments, in which creative teams find themselves reflecting on their personal relationship with the character, provide the evidence for O’Connell’s richest claim: that “Spider-Man belongs to everyone, and he belongs to no one.” (129) As much as Spider-Man legitimately belongs to the corporations who have battled over him, O’Connell emphasizes that Spider-Man also “belongs” to those that see themselves as embodying some element of his character. Their attachment to him gives them stake in his narratives, in the pieces of themselves they see reflected into him. When these are the individuals creating Spider-Man narratives, this fondness of him is what O’Connell sees as part of each adaptation’s success. While corporations create the need for constant creation and remakes, Spider-Man is at his best when he, even for a moment, “belongs” to someone who cares about his history and his legacy. 

This guiding ideology shapes With Great Power into a character study predominantly about the power of connection and personal truth in adaptation. These emotional moments of recognition, shared among Spider-Man’s many makers, are what make the character truly great. O’Connell reflects on this in his final discussions of the most recent Spider-Man adaptations, Into the Spider-Verse and No Way Home. These final films emphasize the hero’s place among a vast multiverse, where many Spider-people, and Spider-creators, can find themselves reflected in the character’s story. O’Connell concludes his analysis here, with two overarching takeaways: Spider-Man’s history is fascinating, and his legacy is powerful.

Overall, O’Connell weaves an intricate web through the superhero movie genre with Spider-Man constantly at its center. With Great Power deftly demonstrates not just the power of the superhero film, or the power of a classic character, but the potential for greatness still to come from a character that wields as much power in our universe as he does in his own.

Book review - The Wakanda Files. A Technological Exploration of the Avengers and Beyond.

 

Benjamin, Troy. The Wakanda Files. A Technological Exploration of the Avengers and Beyond. Epic Ink, 2020. 160 pages. ISBN: 978-0-7603-6544-1. $60.00.

 reviewed by Aaron Ricker

Troy Benjamin is the author of the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Declassified book series, and a contributor to the Official Guidebook to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. His new book The Wakanda Files is, like these other titles, an illustrated look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) aimed at fans in a hardcover book with plastic slipcase.* The book’s creative conceit presents The Wakanda Files as a collection of top-secret intelligence assembled by the royal scientists of Wakanda (a fictional African kingdom featured in the MCU, led by the Black Panther). The high-tech information thus collected by Wakandan spies and scientists is arranged into five sections: “Human Enhancement” (pages 4-69), “Weapons” (70-105), “Vehicles” (106-129), “AI and Mind Control” (130-143), and “Energies and Elements” (144-162). Chapter 1 therefore presents data on how Steve Rogers was transformed into Captain America, for example, and Chapter 2 talks about the development of his shield. Chapter 3 includes a discussion of the ups and downs of Howard Stark’s flying cars, and Chapter 4 highlights the AI breakthroughs (lucky and otherwise) achieved by Tony Stark. Chapter 6 presents some of the most fantastical science of all, including wonders like the fictionalized powers of palladium and the “Infinity Stones” whose blatantly magical character does not even get a perfunctory scientific fig leaf.

 

As this list of representative items suggests, the focus of The Wakanda Files is squarely on the MCU and the Avengers. The book’s subtitle touts it as “a technological exploration of the Avengers and beyond,” but the scope of its attention never extends far beyond the marvels of the Avengers-related movies. Even the illustrations are often just screenshots from the films, run through various Photoshop filters. If Wakanda has been patiently collecting data on exotic science related to human enhancement for years, one might ask, why do these files include no mention of achievements like Dr. Doom’s ultra-high-tech armour? The answer seems to be that the narrative focus of The Wakanda Files is restricted by the marketing needs of the real world outside the MCU: the Fantastic Four movies were (by MCU standards) commercial flops, and done by a rival studio which controlled the intellectual property. Hot Marvel properties that are fresh in people’s minds from the Avengers blockbusters are more likely to sell books.

 

The presentation of The Wakanda Files is not only limited by the MCU’s Avengers high-tech context in terms of the fictional technologies deemed worthy of attention. As intimated above with reference to the Infinity Stones, the book is also noticeably shaped by the way the Avengers movies tend to casually “retcon” the magic found in their source material as exotic science. On the very first page, chief scientist Shuri-Kimoyo specifies that the goal of the project is to “bring our planet the forefront of technology and innovation” (Wakanda Files, p. 3). The first file presented, though, is about the magic herb that allows the Black Panther to “access the ancestral plane” (Wakanda Files, pp. 6-7).

 

As a result of this artistic, or commercial, decision to accept the MCU’s preference for non-explanations, The Wakanda Files squanders some of its potential. A book about science (and) fiction can help scratch the hobbyist’s itch for collection and escapism. Such a book can also serve at times, though, to inform and inspire. It can give readers a pleasant chance to marvel at how elegantly the fantasy has been made to dance with the hard science. The lazy approach that The Wakanda Files picks up from the MCU shrugs off this opportunity. In Chapter 3, for example, Howard Stark explains that Captain America’s shield is bulletproof because it’s “[c]ompletely vibration absorbent” (p. 72). What do readers interested in scientific information gain from the suggestion that bullets are dangerous due to vibrations as opposed to their weight and speed?

 

At times, the loss in terms of potential infotainment value is exacerbated by losses in narrative coherence. According to The Wakanda Files, for example, the Bifrost bridge from Asgard to Earth controlled by the thunder god Thor is an Einstein-Rosen wormhole – an idea floated as theory in the movies and repeated here as fact. As such, the Bifrost is said to permit travel through space and time (pp. 80, 149). In narrative terms, though, this picture just doesn’t work. If Thor had the ability to open portals for time travel, the Avengers wouldn’t have needed to spend so much time and energy building a time machine (the very device discussed on pages 59-61 of The Wakanda Files). Now and then, this unfortunate streak of intellectual laziness drags the book down to the level of absurdity. In Chapter 3, for example, the reader is presented with Dr. Hank Pym’s plans to become smaller than an atom, which for some reason include worrying about how breathable the air might be. “Oxygen levels within the Quantum Realm are undetermined,” Pym notes (p. 129). This is a truly bizarre concern to attribute to a brilliant scientist. How many oxygen molecules per billion is he hoping to inhale, once he’s smaller than an oxygen molecule? The services of a good scientific advisor/editor would have come in handy at such points.

 

On a less serious, but nevertheless distracting and disappointing note, The Wakanda Files also suffers from a lack of basic editing. In Chapter 1, the head of the German super-soldier program is found writing, “I need resources. I need men” (p. 12). Two pages later, the head of the American super-soldier program writes, “We need resources. We need men” (p. 14). In Chapter 2, SHIELD agent Phil Coulson recommends copying Asgardian tech because “we’ll want to fight fire with fire” (p. 95). Two pages later, he also recommends copying Asgardian tech because “we’ll want to fight fire with fire” (p. 97). Proofreading mistakes appear in every section. Benjamin writes “burying the lead” as opposed to “the lede” (p. 142), for instance, and invents the new English expression “of which I’m familiar” (pp. 123, 146). In short, the timing of The Wakanda Files seems wise from a sales point of view - hot on the heels of the movies and ready for holiday sales - but a less derivative and more precise approach could have provided fans and students of comics culture with a more enjoyable read while enriching the backstory of the MCU.

 

*editor’s note – Ricker’s review was written from an advance copy pdf. His comments with page citations have been checked and confirmed against the final text. The finished book also comes with a small ultraviolet light designed as Wakandan technology with which the reader can find concealed messages. The plastic slipcase is necessary to hold the light together with the book. A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 22:2.