was present for the birth of both of this summer's cinematic blockbusters. I first saw Spider-Man in the pages of Amazing Fantasy No. 15, back when I was only 6 years old. I first encountered the Star Wars universe in 1977 (when I was a supposedly more mature 22) back during the first release of Episode IV: A New Hope. Both experiences changed and delighted me. Perhaps because I was there when the seeds were originally planted, I feel more invested in the commercial and artistic success of this season's biggest hits than the average filmgoer.
Due to the vagaries of comic-book publishing, it's difficult to tell exactly when I first met Spider-Man. Amazing Fantasy No. 15 is cover-dated August 1962, but that doesn't tell the whole story. The month printed on a cover has never really been the true on-sale date; that month has always merely indicated the date the publishing company wanted newsstand employees to take the issue off sale. So Spider-Man's origin story could have appeared as early as May or June, just a few months after my sixth birthday. It was a time of change in the comic-book world. Journey into Mystery No. 83, containing the first story of the mighty Thor, was on sale the same month, and Fantastic Four had already published five issues—but it was Peter Parker who captivated me.
He seemed the closest thing to a real human being that I'd yet seen in a comic book. He wasn't pointlessly perfect, as the DC heroes seemed to me at the time. He was young, confused and misunderstood, just like us. And he lived in New York, my city. I had a sense that, unlike those heroes who lived in fictitious Gotham City or Central City or Metropolis, Spidey might come swinging around the corner at any moment.
As for Star Wars, I first encountered that universe 15 years later, when I was working at Marvel Comics, surely propelled there by my exposure to comics the previous decade. I saw the film in a theater filled with Marvel staffers and freelancers, who were all invited to a special screening due to the company's involvement with the comic-book tie-in. You'd think that such an audience would be too jaded to appreciate the film's simple charms, but we loved it. I loved it. Likable characters brought all of SF's pulp dreams to life, visualized with a future that was neither gleaming nor sterile, but rather visualized as a gritty, lived-in tomorrow that carried the weight of its past behind it.
Contrasting couples tells the tale
Fast forward to May 2002, when a motion-picture war was about to break out at the box-office. Spider-Man and Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones were about to hit theaters, and we all had reason to be nervous about them both. After all, Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace, while extremely profitable, was not universally loved (sorry, Jar Jar), and the Spider-Man project had been locked in litigation for years. As it turned out, both studios have reason to be ecstatic about their box office performances. In its first 12 days, Clones took in over $202 million, while Spider-Man snapped up over $334 million in 25 days.
So that means that economic expectations have been met, and the bookkeepers are happy. But what about the artistic concerns? To answer that question, we first have to ask—what is it that we look for in a summer sci-fi movie? Thrills and a sense of wonder, yes, and by these criteria, both films are successes. But it seems to me that we're looking for more than that. For a film to last, we're looking for more than just a ride on a roller coaster. We look for our adventures to be imbued with true human emotions, with love and passion and joy. We want to be made to believe that the characters believe what they say to each other, that they are more than just actors reading lines from a script.
With this in mind, which of the two blockbusters truly delivered? There's a quick and simple way of determining this—just examine a couple of couples. Do that, and it becomes easy to see that, on the screen, the vibrant team of Tobey McGuire and Kirsten Dunst are everything that Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman are not. One couple seems to have a history, to genuinely care for each other, to transcend their dialogue, while the other never connects; they say the lines, but never imbue them with life. No chemistry is ever created. (In fact, the whining, pouting Hayden Christensen even had me longing for the much-maligned Jake Lloyd.) Which is why though Clones had a gobs of cool, taking me to worlds of unimaginable beauty and dazzling me with strange vistas, it is Spider-Man that did more than merely wow me. It is Spider-Man that made me feel.
The 6-year-old who first discovered Spider-Man is happy. The 22-year-old who first was seduced by Star Wars is not. And the present-day editor of Science Fiction Weekly is surprised that it wasn't the other way around.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly back in 1974, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, in addition to editing
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. Currently, he also edits SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel. A collection of his short fiction, These Words Are Haunted, is available from Wildside Press.
