I was never really a Spider-Man fan so I don’t know that much about Mary Jane. She has, however, always struck me as your basic pretty girl character — she only has a personality when it suits the comic. And as you know, she’s been ditched in favor of Gwen Stacy as the love interest in the upcoming reboot of the Spider-Man film franchise.

But that brings me to Mary Jane: Homecoming and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane: Sophomore Jinx. These, if Wikipedia is to be believed, are more or less part of the same series although they don’t feel all that connected to me, honestly (granted, though, these two parts aren’t directly continuous, so I have missed some things in between the two).

Mary Jane: Homecoming Buy on Amazon.com

In Mary Jane: Homecoming, Mary Jane is dealing with her relationship with Harry Osbourn as well as Flash’s crush on her and troubles with her friend Liz. It’s all pretty typical high school stuff — Harry is aimlessly angry and he and Mary Jane just seem to be together because they are. Liz and MJ have a conflicted friendship — they like each other, sure, mostly because they’ve been friends forever, but they’re competitive with each other, too. Oh, and Spider-Man shows up and fights some bad guys a couple of times, but that’s pretty inconsequential (except MJ does feel a growing connection to him — and to Peter Parker).

In writer Sean McKeever‘s hands, the story’s twists have the right amount of drama without ever becoming over-the-top. These kids are just trying to figure themselves out as well as each other. The shifting alliances and confusing relationships feel natural. He has a wonderful grasp of how teenagers behave without being condescending. Takeshi Miyazawa‘s art is cute and soft and is just manga-like enough to make it distinctive from a superhero title. I love the eye for detail he has, from MJ and Liz’s updos for the homecoming dance to the emotional glances characters give each other.

Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane: Sophomore Jinx Buy on Amazon.com

Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane: Sophomore Jinx feels a bit different. It has another creative team of Terry Moore and Craig Rousseau and everything feels a bit bigger — more drama, more action, more conflict. Here, MJ is just starting her sophomore year of high school (hence the title) and struggles to find her place after someone starts some cruel rumors about her.

I don’t think anyone would accuse Moore of not being able to write women well. Even when Strangers in Paradise began getting more and more convoluted, it was always clear his female characters were fully realized. He does less well with teenage girls, though. This isn’t particularly bad, but he doesn’t seem to quite grasp the intricacies of teenage relationships (and maybe I’m wrong, but I’m almost sure no teenager was appending “not” to the end of a sentence to make it a negative in 2008). Rousseau’s art is stylized and has an exaggerated, animated feel to it, but also comes across as a bit more generic. I don’t think he gets to shine here.

Neither of these books are bad. I liked Homecoming more than Sophomore Jinx, but I liked both. But I was left with one major question: Who was this title for?

Now, I ended up with them because I am interested in this sort of thing (you know, comics aimed at girls). Homecoming was a dollar at a comic con and a friend gave me Sophomore Jinx because he ended up with it and figured it had a better home with me.

But other than me, who was this intended for? I can’t really picture the audience for this title.

Mary Jane is presented as likeable, sweet and smart, but she’s also one of the popular kids. She has some problems at home, sure, but a lot of that just feels thrown in to keep her from seeming too perfect.

I can only use myself as an example, but as a teen — even as a preteen — I wouldn’t have been interested in Mary Jane. I was a misfit and I didn’t hang out with cheerleaders or football players. I wasn’t interested in reading about them. And I’d guess that a lot of teen girls that are into comics wouldn’t really either.

(I did see some girls excited by Archie comics, so maybe I’m wrong.)

While I was critical of a lot the Minx titles for feeling too young for their intended audience, they were mostly about girls I would’ve wanted to read about at that age. I could see a 12-year-old enjoying Homecoming that her loving father (or even older brother) bought for her, but I do think Sophomore Jinx, while still pretty innocent, is probably too old for her. I don’t think any older teen girls who like comics would’ve sought this out on their own. It’s possible I’m wrong there, though.

I think Marvel has done some interesting things aimed at women (even before last year’s push, and even when they’ve put stupid covers on them) but I’m not sure why they felt like Mary Jane needed to be its go-to teen girl character, other than the company thought she was (or would be) “popular” following the Spider-Man movies.

Which I guess means we can look forward to some comics starring Gwen Stacy.

Now that I’ve seen it, I’ve been trying to figure out something to say about Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. I’ve been going back and forth since I saw it Thursday night and I couldn’t really come up with something.

And then around lunch time on Friday, I had an exchange with Eden about the infamous shoe song. For those who don’t know, there is a song in the second act about shoes. Eden was having a hard time getting her head around the notion that the show, about a superhero, has a song about shoes. She was wondering what the context was. The song comes in the second act when Arachne, the character from Greek Myth and the villain, of sorts, becomes angry that the Daily Bugle doesn’t cover her robbery of 40 (or is it 50?) shoe stores. This prompts Arachne and her spider cohorts (think multilegged babes wearing helmets that are similar to those worn by the Jack Kirby’s New Gods) to sing about the joys of shoes. The idea that anyone would have thought this song belonged in a play such as this kind of explains how wrong things can go when people who don’t understand comics try to use the characters and archetypes to make a buck when they don’t understand what they are dealing with.

The play proper begins, after a riff on the death of Gwen Stacy, when four kids (the Geek Chorus) decide to rethink Spider-Man to make him more like today. During the discussion the myth of Arachne is brought up. She was a beautiful woman who offended the gods by being the best weaver ever, She beat one of the gods in a weaving duel but ended up committing suicide before being turned into a spider.

The myth allows for the most beautiful sequence in the play, but at the same time it’s staged in such away that it seems to be imported from another show (like from anything else Julie Taymor has directed).

The inclusion of the myth itself is the first thing wrong with the show. Taymor, who I’m sure brought it into the play, is relying way too much on the notion that comics are the modern-day myths. Yes the Marvel comic universe is full of mythic characters (Thor, Hercules), but at the same time they just weren’t brought in randomly and there was ground work laid for it. The people who did it — Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and others — knew that we wouldn’t accept it just because they said so. Taymor doesn’t understand that. Instead, she simply throws Arachne in to the mix and then pushes her aside for most of the first half of the play.

After the Arachne bit, we get Peter Parker and his relationship with Mary Jane.

There is a duet where both Peter and MJ go home (run-down houses in Queens) and sing of their troubles. MJ fights with her dad and Peter fights with Aunt May and Uncle Ben. This is the first real indication that the creative team doesn’t know their source material.

They changed the characters. Peter and the relationship with his aunt and uncle is strained, but ridiculously so. There is no sense of love between them.The play marginalizes them so Ben has almost no presence other than to die and Aunt May becomes a witty sarcastic cypher. I was watching that early scene and I had no sense of them. How could Peter have turned out as well as he did if they all behaved like that? Worse when Uncle Ben dies (killed not by gun shot by a crook Peter should have stopped, but by a car thief stealing a friend;s car) you can’t understand why it affects him so.

We then meet Norman Osborne and his wife who are doing genetic manipulation for the military. When Peter and his class arrive at the lab he’s bitten. The next day he beats up his tormentors for the hell of it and then goes into a wrestling ring to get enough money to buy a car to impress MJ. What?

Eventually he becomes Spider-Man, and it’s at this point the really cool flying happens over the audience.

Norman Osborne becomes the Green Goblin and suddenly (and I do mean suddenly) he has kidnapped Spidey, stolen a piano and taken them to the top of the Chrysler Building (There is a huge plot hole here that is explained away by a few howlingly awful lines of dialogue). There he asks Peter to join him in taking over the world. Of course Peter refuses and they fight over and in the audience (it’s really cool). However the Goblin has a failsafe and he pushes MJ — whom he also has kidnapped — off the Chrysler Building while tied to the piano. But Peter tells the Goblin he’s really tied to the piano and it pulls the Goblin to his doom, while Peter saves MJ.

That’s the end of Act 1, so you’re probably wondering what’s left for Act 2.

In Act 2, they threw out everything but the Greek myth and in the process, burn down the main character that has survived and thrived for half a century. In a play called Spider-Man, they pretty much don’t have him appear.

The plot of the second act has Spidey giving up his superhero life for MJ (somehow he loses his powers, though why or how that happens is never explained). Arachne and her minions banish the Geek Chorus and they bring a reign of chaos led by the Sinister Six — Kraven, Electro, Swiss Miss (a new character created for the show that looks like Grace Jones in shiny armor), The Swarm, Carnage and the Lizard. They also resurrect the Goblin, who appears on TV screens even though there is a citywide blackout.

Arachne wants Peter to love her. But since he loves MJ, he refuses to leave her and doesn’t become Spider-Man for almost all of Act 2. This means lots of meaningless chatter and songs as Peter proves he’s as emo as they come. It all comes to a head when the Sinister Seven kidnaps Mary Jane and takes her to the Brooklyn Bridge. She falls seeming her to her death and Peter overcome with grief leaps to his death.

He doesn’t die since Arachne saves him from death, but doesn’t anyone have a problem with Peter Parker killing himself for a girl?
At what point in the 50-year history of the character would he have done this?

Taymor and her cohorts obviously don’t understand the way comics function. As much as they are touted as myth, they don’t behave like them. They behave according to their own rules which are not the same. For example the end of the play — where Arachne gives Peter back MJ and his life because he offers to stay with her comes off as extremely silly.

What were they thinking? This angsty nonsense is not Spider-Man.

This being a comics blog, I’m not going to go into all of the technical problems with the show. You don’t need to know that the music by Bono and The Edge has only one song that works in context, that the dancing is among the worst I’ve seen and that the performances, with one exception, range from wasted to awful (Reeve Carney as Peter Parker has no business being on the stage)

It’s spectacular during the flying sequences and if they rewrote the first act and cut off the second act they might have something. But I doubt that is going to happen.

Ultimately, it’s a waste of time and money.

It’s probably the worst comic adaptation ever. Not because its bad (the first act could work and I have seen much worse) but rather because it’s asking the public to pony up and pay as much as $145 a seat (not including premium seats) to watch a bunch of way-too-clever intellectuals over-think a simple iconic story to such a degree that it no longer resembles what they started with. This play is an affront to comic lovers everywhere.

Do yourself a favor and forget it ever existed.

I’m currently on a documentary kick and Netflix does have a few streaming that focus on comics or comic book culture. I figured this would be good for a laugh. Or at least a way to waste a few hours.

Comic Book Confidential
Even though this documentary was made in 1988, it still feels very relevant now. The primary focus is on alternative comics — works and creators outside the superhero genre, although those are definitely acknowledged — and I think that’s a side of comics that rarely gets enough attention historically. Yes, we all know about the rise of DC and Marvel, the stories of superheroes, all of that, but these underground creators contributed more than I think most people realize to the look and feel of comics today.

I was delighted to see how many of them are still working today — creators like Lynda Barry and Charles Burns are featured here, along with Jaime Hernandez and Art Spielgman. I also think the sight of an awesomely long-haired Frank Miller at the end being all self-important is quite incredible.

But really, if you want to know the history of comics and side of that history that doesn’t get nearly enough attention, this is a good place to start. I have no idea why more people haven’t told me to watch this documentary before. Nor do I have any idea why I haven’t watched it until now.

Starz Inside: Comic Books Unbound
This is from 2008, and already seems a bit dated (in contrast to Comic Book Confidential, which doesn’t), especially since it was made before the economy tanked and Spider-Man got rebooted and the manga market took a downturn. And it definitely shies away from any criticism of the movies covered here, even when it’s probably deserved.

But it’s actually a pretty decent overview of the history of comic book movies. While there’s plenty of typical studio talking heads, it does feature interesting creators like Paul Pope and Mike Mignola as well as director Richard Donner. The overall tone here is completely flattering, even when they touch on some of the goofy live-action projects Marvel did in the ’80s and ’90s (but no mention of the TV movies for Nick Fury or Generation X, even though the Spider-Man and The Hulk series got passing mentions. I think some things are better off forgotten). But case in point: There was no acknowledgment that Marvel is still making bad movies (Daredevil? Elektra? I somewhat like Elektra, but I’m not going to tell you it’s good).

Still, I like that they do pay some attention to non-superhero comic book movies like The Road to Perdition and A History of Violence as well as American Splendor. And although the “looking into the future” predictions aren’t quite accurate now, I still think it’s clear that comic book movies are big business. I was surprised by this. I wasn’t expecting too much from it, but underneath the breathless tone of “these movies are awesome!” there is something of substance here.

Confessions of a Superhero
This 2007 documentary isn’t so much about comic books, except in the most abstract of ways. Rather, it’s about four people who dress up as superheros (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and The Hulk) and let tourists take photos of them for tips.

Christopher Dennis loves Superman a little too much — he has an overcrowded apartment full of merchandise and memorabilia and rarely takes the costume off. Maxwell Allen has inflated claims of his past as a supposed mob enforcer (as well as his resemblance to George Clooney) and seems to take being Batman a little too personally.

On the other hand, Jennifer Wenger, who dresses as Wonder Woman, and Joe McQueen, who dresses as The Hulk, both seem to understand this is just a way to make money in between acting jobs.

Wenger comes across the best of all four — she’s the most down-to-earth and genuinely sweet. McQueen also seems to understand his limitations and has overcome hardship (he was homeless for a while).

The other two? They both have obvious problems. Dennis claims to be the son of Sandy Dennis, but her family says he’s not. His obsession with Superman comes across as a compulsion (and his apartment is nearly something out of Hoarders). Allen is charming enough, until his outlandish stories begin to pile up (he claims to be great at various martial arts, but one scene in a martial arts studio would say otherwise. Perhaps not surprisingly, both seem to think dressing up as superheroes will provide them with their big breaks.

It’s a little painful in parts and it’s more about these four lives than any deeper message. But there’s still something sad and fascinating about how people are delighted and happy to pay money to get their photos taken with someone — anyone — dressed as their favorite heroes. There’s some power there.

Maybe this time next year, I’ll have the Comic-Con documentary that Joss Whedon, Harry Knowles and Morgan Spurlock are making this year. I suppose we’ll see how that turns out.