Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Dir: Peter Ramsey, Bob Persichetti, Rodney Rothman

2018

****

I think it is safe to say Marvel and the MCU may have won the live-action battle over DC. I have no real loyalty to either (I was always a 2000AD man myself) but MCU have produced both quality and quantity. However, when it comes to animated films I think DC have the edge. Not all of the DC animations are great, indeed many seem rushed, but they do try new things like exploring the many versions of characters and DC’s Elseworld catalogue. In this sense Marvel were way behind, until now. All credit to Sony. They did the decent thing and worked with the MCU and let Spider-Man play with the Avengers after they couldn’t quite manage to get into the swing of things on their own but now I think they’ve found the perfect solution. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse doesn’t tread tentatively, it just goes for it. We know Spider-Man’s origin story, and Sony have decided to move on at last. What casual superhero viewers (rather than readers) might not know is that there are quite a number of different versions of Spider-Man in the comics, as there are with most comic characters. Some are so out there that I would never imagine seeing them on film, animated or live-action, and I’m sure many of the hardcore fans wouldn’t either, so that’s why Sony deserve a round of applause for having the guts to include them. The film is loosely adapted from the Spider-Verse series from 2014 but is far less complicated (the characters; Spider-Man 2099, Spider-UK, Spider-Girl of Earth-982, Silk, Scarlet Spider, Old Man Spider-Man, Spider-Man of Earth-70105, Superior Spider-Man, Assassin Spider-Man and Spider-Punk are all omitted). However, Spider-Ham/Peter Porker makes the cut, a character that would have been ordinarily swept under the carpet and filed under ‘Failed ideas from the early 80s’ and yet here he is in all his glory as he should be. The basics of the story are that Spider-Man’s arch villains have all got together to make a portal into other dimension, each for their own personal agendas but mainly for Wilson Fisk, AKA Kingpin, to replace his deceased family with that of another version of them that are alive in another version of reality. Super-Colliders and parallel universes have long existed in the world of comics but never have they been explored in such a wonderful manner. In Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s multiverse (the ‘Spider-verse’) the original Spider-Man lives in the same universe as young Miles Morales. Now Morales has been a fan favourite for a long time, with many suggesting that he should have been the version of Spider-Man that was adopted by the Avengers in the MCU. The concept of Morales, the first black Spider-Man, was first discussed a few months before the 2008 election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. Marvel Comics’ then-editor-in-chief Axel Alonso said at the time “We realized that we were standing at the brink of America electing its first African-American President and we acknowledged that maybe it was time to take a good look at one of our icons." Morales would replace Parker as Spider-Man only in Ultimate Marvel, an imprint whose storyline is set in a universe separate from the mainstream Marvel universe, in which Marvel's characters were re-imagined for a 21st-century audience. Essentially, when Marvel's editorial staff decided that the Ultimate universe's Peter Parker would be killed in the 2011 storyline "Death of Spider-Man", the character Miles Morales was created. People who have never read the comic will tell you that it was just a publicity stunt to appear ‘right on’ and to appeal to ethnic minorities but that’s nonsense, not only because the character and his comics aren’t brilliant in their own right, but because black people are not an ethnic minority – this very white term is utterly insulting and redundant. I have a big problem at the false outrage that non-comic reading people have with things that happen (or they think that happen) in comics, but I digress. I found Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse to be a real celebration of how diverse and creative comics have been. One of the worst comics I have ever read just so happens to be one of the best selling comics of all time: The Death of Superman. It’s utter garbage and the comics that followed were melodramatic crap mixed with unimaginative sci-fi. When a comic house is in trouble the best way to make money and gain attention is to kill off a beloved character, again, those that don’t actually read the comics become outraged and suddenly buy them. The characters always come back, either re-imagined or as they were but animated in a different style. Into the Spider-Verse starts with the death of Spider-Man but doesn’t make it into a huge melodrama. Morales discovers his powers just as Spider-Man dies and meets the alternative version of him soon after. Spider-Ham first appeared in 1983 in the humuorous one-shot Marvel Tails, which I think was intended to mimic Duck Tails and Looney Toons. It also featured Captain AmeriCat (a cat version of Captain America), Hulk-Bunny (a rabbit version of Hulk) and Goose Rider (a goose version of Ghost Rider). The fact that none of these characters has appeared in the MCU is a crime. Also featured is Spider-Man Noir, a black and white Philip Marlowe/Rorschach character highly influenced by Raymond Chandler, Humphrey Bogart and many of the Batman elseworld novels to be fair. I was thrilled when Gwen Stacy (aka Spider-Woman) appeared, as her series of comics that see Gwen bitten by the Spider rather than Peter Parker, has been churning out brilliant additions since 2014. I was equally thrilled when she wasn’t romantically linked to any of the other Spider-Men, thus standing strong as her own character. The big surprises, as if Spider-Ham wasn’t enough, was Kimiko Glenn, AKA Peni Parker, a young Japanese-American girl from an alternative anime-like universe who co-pilots a biomechanical suit with a radioactive spider that she shares a telepathic link with. This is the comics at their most creative and peculiar but it works perfectly. Lord and Miller, who made the brilliant Lego Movie, wanted the film to feel like "you walked inside a comic book" and they totally succeeded. The production team adapted 70-year-old comic art techniques for the film's visual language and it took around a year for two animators to create 10 seconds of footage that reflected the producers's vision and the animation work developed from there. During initial development, the directors worked with a single animator to establish the film's look before hiring 60 animators for production. It became clear that this would not be enough to complete the film on time, so the crew was expanded further. The number had reached 142 animators by August 2018 and at one point to 177 animators. The CGI animation for the film was combined with line work and painting to make it look like it was created by hand, which was described as a living painting. This was achieved by artists taking rendered frames from the CGI animators and working on top of them in 2D, with the goal of making every frame of the film look like a comic panel. It’s pretty revolutionary and a world away from the relatively simple animations that both DC and Marvel have been making of decades. Add to that the right level of humour, a consistently exciting script and voice work by people like Mahershala Ali, Lily Tomlin, Nicolas Cage, Liev Schreiber and Chris Pine, you’ve got the perfect animated comic book/superhero movie. I’m really hoping that it’ll lead the way and raise the standard. It contains a wonderful Stan Lee cameo (several in fact) and loads of quirky Easter eggs that Spider fans will love, including a slight dig at the original Sam Raimi films and the 60 cartoon that has adorned many a meme in recent years. It’s near perfect and is better than many of the live-action superhero/comic book movies of the last few years.