Been a while since I read some Spider-Man. I'm currently revamping my storage system now that we're in a new house, and it's involving some necessary shrinking of the amount of space my collection takes up. I'm making my way through my Marvel Comics collection right now, and I realized I actually have a pretty significant Spider-Man collection. I'm not 100% sure where these comics came from. The collection feeds from a couple of large collections that I bought when I had my store, as well as my own significant collection that dates back to the Doctor Who Weekly's I brought with me from England when we came to Canada. Had I had the foresight, I'd have traced the provenance of each part of the collection. That would be interesting information to have.
Anyway, this was a pretty disturbing comic, in retrospect. First, Peter is really rude about a lady's looks in this issue. He tries to smooth it over by saying she's not very nice, but Mr. Parker is definitely displaying a propensity for socially-constructed notions of beauty. Second, villains The Sandman and Hydroman get dumped in the river together and come out as a single gestalt creature, eventually dubbed "Mud-Thing." It shows rudimentary signs of consciousness, but is generally unmoving and unthinking. It's this unthinking that has me disturbed. Both Sandman and Hydroman possess complete control over the cells of their mutated bodies. But in order to turn completely into sand or water, they'd need to have a different way to store their software (personality, emotions, memories), as we've seen numerous times that their entire bodies can disintegrate into their constituent respective elements. Where is the soul in a pile of sand? I would imagine that the easiest solution would be that each grain, each drop, was encoded with the fundamental information of the whole - each atom contains the entirety of Sandman or Hydroman's personalities. So what happens when those atoms are, through the admixture of water, made into something else? What if the personalities are also mixed into a psychic mud? To me, Mud-Thing stands still because there are two psyches mashed into one, unable to move or think or do much of anything. And given the destruction by drying this creature suffers at the end of the comic, I'm curious how Sandy, at least, managed to come back to become Silver Sable's back-up.
I might read a bit more Spider-Man over the next few days. I'm intrigued.
More to follow.
No comments:
Post a Comment