Despite my inner geek, I haven’t looked at a new comic book in years.
I was such a Spider-man dork that I read the first hundred issues in the Deering Library at Northwestern – yeah, I definitely knew how to party. Well, we all know that TV shows get absurd after about 6 seasons, imagine how crazy The Amazing Spider-man is now that they are up to issue number 545! Apparently, they got tired of Peter Parker being married because in the latest issue some evil spirit makes him erase his marriage to save dear old Aunt May for like the 875th time, essentially making like the last 15 years of the magazine a dream like they did on Dallas when they too ran out of ideas.
Fuck Aunt May. That old bitch has been ruining her poor nephew’s fun for like 50 years now and she’s been an inch away from death the whole damn time. Spider-man has defeated like 600 super powered miscreants, Aunt May is like 800 by now, and she just won’t die. At some point, in the new issue Mary Jane even points this out to Peter, who seems to agree, but by the end they make the ultimate sacrifice once again, because with great power comes apparently a whole hell of a lot of guilt.
The best part of the issue for me was actually the history of Aunt May, which did nothing but point out the absurdity of over thirty years of this nonsense. Apparently, Aunt May discovered that Peter was Spider-man at some point and she may have even defeated the Green Goblin a couple of times despite suffering 40 coronary attacks, 37 bouts of serious Cancer, 35 lethal gunshot wounds, and a near engagement to Doctor Octopus.
Most absurd of all the Aunt May history ended with one of those comic book power graphs, which they sort of ripped off of Dungeons and Dragons – Dexterity, Strength, Stamina, Speed, the whole ball of wax. Long story short – Aunt May’s rankings were not very impressive.
What is impressive is the fact that a comic book character whose main descriptive attribute has always been frail is still around and spoiling the fun of having super powers for her poor adopted nephew. Face it, I loved Aunt May for well at least 5 years, but it’s time for a very special issue where our favorite dignified widow gets hit by a school bus.
