Without a doubt, Spider-Man and Batman are my two favorite comic book superheroes. When July started, all I could think about was going to see both of my heroes grace the silver screen for the first time in years. To say I was hyped would be an understatement. Now July is gone, August has come around, and summer is unfortunately coming to an end. Looking back, Spidey and Bats were definitely the highlights of last month, as I saw each film in theaters three times so as to burn every moment of the new films into my memory. While I enjoyed both films tremendously, they are of course not without flaws. But when I look online and see how others tear into both films, a common complaint I hear about both of them is that they are not proper representations of the Spider-Man or Batman they grew up with.
While I disagree with these detractors (to a certain extent), it is worth noting that these new interpretations are a lot better than the previous incarnations we had on film, wherein Spidey became a jazz dancing emo and Batman walked around in plastic nipples brandishing a bat credit card. Here's the kicker, though: as horrible as both of those interpretations are, they are in their own way faithful to the Spider-Man or Batman mythos, just not aspects of the mythos that most fans like to acknowledge.
As any comic book fan will tell you, the history of the medium can be divided into certain "ages". There's the Golden Age, where superheroes like Batman, Superman, Captain America and Wonder Woman first came to be. These were swashbuckling tales of mighty heroes with powers beyond those of mortal men, who served their country in various ways like stopping wife beaters, crushing Prohibition era gangsters, and fighting the Axis Powers in World War II. Then came the Silver Age, where comics became more lighthearted and child oriented, often focusing on radiation and alien invasion type stories to reflect the Cold War. This was the age of the Marvel heroes, where our costumed adventurers were made more relatable with imperfections ranging from blindness to prejudice to puberty to inner rage.
Enter the Bronze Age, where heroes became a little more darker and reality began to set in. Supporting characters could die. Heroes often found themselves caught in societal conflicts such as the Vietnam War or the drug craze. The Bronze Age then gave way to the Modern Age, still going on today, wherein we are introduced to a slew of edgier anti-heroes amid tales that deconstruct the superhero myths, obsessed with grounding them in reality as much as possible. If you look at the trajectory of both the Spider-Man and the Batman film series, you will find that the films actually mirror the different ages of comic books.
When Sam Raimi directed his Spider-Man trilogy, he was the perfect man for the job because he grew up with the very first incarnation of Spider-Man: the Silver Age version, a lonely teenager living in the 1960s who never had any friends, was something of a clutz, and was always shy around women. As Spider-Man, he engaged in larger than life but often cartoony battles with villains dressed in silly costumes. Since it was the '60s, this was the style at the time, and it worked. When the Green Goblin killed Gwen Stacy and plunged Spider-Man (and subsequently the rest of the medium) into the Bronze Age, Spidey's stories became more layered, with characters like Harry Osborn suffering from substance abuse and Peter thrown into more socially relevant material. The Silver and Bronze Age Spider-Man of the '60s and '70s is the Spidey that Raimi had grown up on, and it is that Spider-Man that comes to life on the silver screen for most of his film trilogy. People loved it because it was the first incarnation of Spider-Man to be seen on the silver screen, and it was incredibly faithful to the character's roots.
Then Spider-Man 3 happened. Watching this film, you can tell which storyline Sam Raimi was passionate about, and which one he didn't care for. Raimi wanted to use Sandman, a classic Silver Age villain, and Harry Osborn's Green Goblin, a Bronze Age villain, as his main antagonists. But the studio and the fans, having seen enough tributes to the Silver and Bronze Age in the previous films, wanted a villain who was more popular with contemporary audiences. They wanted Venom, whose origins as a symbiotic alien lie squarely in the darker, edgier realm of the Modern Age. Because Raimi did not grow up on the Modern Age villains and stories, he was forced to include a villain who obviously didn't belong in the universe he was constructing.
When the Venom symbiote does show up, it is not in the way fans of the Modern Age stories were expecting. The symbiote arrives by meteor, like something out of a '50s B-Movie. The symbiote doesn't drive Peter to face his inner demons; instead it makes him act like a reject from a '70s disco movie. In short, a Modern Age storyline was reinterpreted to fit the Silver/Bronze Age stories Raimi was more comfortable with. The execution of the Venom symbiote may have been unfaithful to the Modern Age Spider-Man, but considering Raimi was adapting Silver/Bronze Spidey, the symbiote was reinterpreted through that lens instead of a more modern one. It was unfaithful to one set of stories but faithful to another set.
Now we get to the reboot, and all the people who decry that this new origin betrays the origin both featured in the Raimi films and in the original comics. Right off the bat, this new Peter Parker has more depth than the previous one, and more unresolved issues in his life with the death of his parents. He's not a clutzy nerd with no social skills, like Tobey Maguire. That's '60s Spider-Man. This is Modern Day Spider-Man. Adapted not from the original source, but from the Ultimate Comics, a modernized reboot of the Spidey universe. The Venom plot from SM3 was handled poorly due to shoving a Modern Age story into a Silver/Bronze universe, but everything in ASM works because they're now drawing fully from Modern Age stories. In other words, the reboot finally brought Spider-Man into this day and age, making the older films, while still considered classics of the genre, now in a way dated simply because they pay homage to an era most audiences are out of touch with.
And now we come to Batman. Without a doubt, Batman is the superhero who has had the most incarnations put up on screen. All of these versions are faithful to the Batman mythos, but to different ages of the Bat's comic book history, much in the same way that the Spider-Man films were faithful to different comic book eras. The first theatrical Batman film, the 1966 movie starring Adam West, was an expansion of the popular TV show running at the time. The film may be considered incredibly campy now, but back then this was what the audience wanted. Like it or not, this was the Batman of the '60s, and for the time it worked.
But when Warner Bros. decided to bring Batman back to the big screen in the late '80s, they decided that a film mirroring the darker style of the recent comic books was in order. Tim Burton delivered on this style when he made his first Batman film, and then one upped it when he created his sequel, Batman Returns. Both of these films present a darker, fantastical world of high tech gadgetry and freakish villains, where Batman is blindly devoted to his cause and even kills some of the criminals he fights. This is in tune with the earliest Batman comics, the first strips made in the late '30s/early '40s (The Golden Age). Like Spider-Man, these first films were sucesses due to being the first modern interpretation of the character on screen, embraced for bringing the hero back to his roots. All of this was accomplished thanks to Burton's understanding of Batman's inherently dark nature and harkening back to the Golden Age stories that spawned him.
Then Burton was replaced by Schumacher, and the series, in the eyes of many fans, went to hell. Batman Forever and Batman & Robin were bright, colorful films teeming with over the top villains, a heavy dose of sci-fi elements, and the introductions of Robin and Batgirl. This interpretation was hated by many, but in a way the transition from Burton to Schumacher mirrored the transition from the Golden to Silver Age comics. Silver Age Batman was light, colorful, family friendly, had help from Robin, and always involved campy villains brandishing sci-fi weapons. Like it or not, the Schumacher films were a perfect representation of Silver Age Batman, a return to the Adam West era that at the time wasn't appreciated, but certainly would have been if the films were released back in the period they were drawing influence from.
Since the Schumacher films were so bad, the studio decided to hire Christopher Nolan to return Batman to his dark roots. And now here we are with his critically acclaimed trilogy concluding, marking Batman's next cinematic transition from light and campy to dark, realistic and gritty. This reflects Batman's comic transition from the Silver Age into the Bronze and Modern Ages, where comics like "Year One", "The Killing Joke", "The Dark Knight Returns", "The Long Halloween", "No Man's Land", and "Knightfall" came into being. These stories became the definitive Batman comics, responsible for returning the comic Batman to his darker roots while injecting the series with a side of realism and modernization. It's no wonder Nolan chose to draw from these stories in crafting his trilogy, since in doing so he completely modernized Batman by making the superhero actually seem plausible on film. Once again, Batman's transition in film mirrored his transition in comics. The trajectory of the series is truly unique, in that like the comics it goes from fantastic dark (Golden Age) to light camp (Silver Age) to realistic dark (Bronze/Modern Age).
I love both Spider-Man and Batman dearly, and in watching their films I see how the characters have progressed every time a new interpretation hits the screen. Do I like every interpretation I see? No. I still hate Emo Peter and Nipple Bats. But bad as they may be, they are still faithful to their characters' comic book history, just periods that most modern comic readers would rather forget. But the one thing to take away from all of this, is that because of Spider-Man and Batman's extensive histories, they have had the chance to be reinterpreted multiple times, in order to reflect whatever is happening in society as well as to present truly unique versions of the characters. In crafting the films, the filmmakers chose to draw on these different versions, knowing full well that all these interpretations are faithful. When making future films about the Spider and the Bat, these filmmakers will do well to remember the multiple comic eras the characters have been interpreted through, allowing them to make new films featuring new takes on the characters that will still remain faithful to the spirit of the comics.
