As the 10-year anniversary of September 11th, 2001 draws closer, I thought I'd pull
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (Vol 2) #36 book out of mothballs after not reading it for the last several years to see if it still impacted me the same way it did when I first got it.
Sadly, it did not.
In this issue, Spider-Man and the Marvel Universe (including Doctor Doom, Magneto and many other mainstay Marvel Bad Guys) break the fourth wall between fantasy and reality by helping clean up debris around the site of Ground Zero in NYC, former site of the World Trade Center, which was destroyed by a terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001.
2 weeks prior to 9-11, I had just purchased a comic book store. I can remember how noone came by my shop for between 2-3 days after 9-11 happened; my fellow Americans were numb, shocked and dismayed. It didn't last forever and things eventually got back to normal...as normal as it could be at a post-9/11 comic shop. Then many weeks later, Marvel published this comic in an attempt to honor those impacted and that lost their lives as well. I sold out of this book in the first hour of opening.
After rereading this book, you can grasp that Marvel (who's headquarters is in NYC as well) was doing their best to pay tribute to the events, but the book has an exploitive bubble around it that I just can't separate myself from. The story feels almost
INSENSITIVE at this point, perhaps giving me a taste of a more innocent time in comics when good guys and bad guys could be drawn on the same page helping each other out for a common good beyond the confines of the page, and it not feel like a marketing ploy. Or maybe it was a marketing ploy all along. Who knows? In an updated world where the bad guys murder, pillage and basically ream the world on a daily basis, the almost-quaint notion that Doctor Doom would shed a tear on this day makes little sense.
So today, this book left me scratching my head and wondering at exactly what point did exploitation and marketing become synonamous with each other?
Without sounding cheap or cold-hearted, this book will ALWAYS have a spot in Spider-Man collections and seems to usually command a higher secondary market price than the Death of Superman does, and the all-black cover makes it easy to spot. With this anniversary approaching, (and news about the new Ultimate "
diverse" Spider-Man abounds), this is my CCL Comic of the Week. If you want to buy a Marvel book that I feel TRULY honored the heroism beyond the tragedy of 9/11, I suggest
HEROES, a compilation of story and art that benefitted the families of 9/11 victims.
America is about a month from 9/11/11, and as we move forward and away from this anniversary, here's hoping the industry becomes more about unique stories and concept ideas to move the market forward, and not a ploy to market and sell a few more books.
But as always:
God Bless America.