Yeah, that’s Spider-man. The panel is from Amazing Spider-man #685 (July 2012). He’s in one of his new outfits that looks like a perfect excuse for a new multi-figure toyline, but that’s not what I am writing about—kids should have some new Spider-man toys to play with. No, what interests me about this panel is that it is part of a scene where Spider-man tortures Sandman for information, threatening to kill him by forcing him into a human shape and pouring acid on him. This panel demonstrates a normalizing of torture in our society in the post-Bush/Guantanamo era. It may be that I am romanticizing the Spider-man of my youth, but I am pretty sure that that old-time Spider-man wouldn’t have tortured anybody (Wolverine? That’s another story. . .). I am not trying to argue that superheroes shouldn’t change, because any honest examination of mainstream comic book continuity reveals that all superheroes ever do is change. Rather, I am arguing that how these characters change demonstrate something about the context under which their behavior is seen as okay. The easy use of American torture terminology, like “waterboarding” is really all the evidence you need.
Yes, sure. . . he does not go through with the threat to kill Sandman, so at some level we are supposed to accept that Spidey isn’t a torturer. . . except of course, that now he is. It is the pain and fear of torture that makes it potentially efficacious – at least until you can interrogate a dead body (though in a superheroic world, that could probably happen) – since sometimes it is the promise of death and relief from whatever pain is being inflicted that leads to the information being given up.
I guess it should be no surprise that a genre most often predicated on beating people into submission would draw a line that seeks to condone inflicting excruciating pain, while keeping outright murder in the realm of immoral. But just to be clear, while I am sure there has been plenty of torture and killing in lots of other comics, even some mainstream comics, for it to be an unquestioned part of a mainstream flagship character like Spider-man demonstrates its acceptability – not only through not undermining Spidey’s identity as the good guy, but by the fact that most of the reviews of the issue I could find online (like this one or this one) didn’t even mention the word “torture,” except for one that “loved it” and someone else who was “bummed out” about it.
It’s a brave new world.
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Seriously? Did you miss the part about saving six billion? I’ll never understand why the Left (I’m confident you’re a Lefty) feels the need to cry about this.
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I “cry” about this because these narratives that construct these Jack Bauer-like scenarios where torture is the plain and easy option to saving X thousand-million people say something about the increased acceptability of torture in the public mind post-9/11 (not the actual practice of torture, which I am sure went on to varying degrees with or without executive sanctioning) and reinforce the myth of its efficacy and moral acceptance through these imagined conditions. It represents a particular ideological myopia that I think is dangerous.
Now, I personally condemn torture of any kind and I think Peter Parker based on how he was written for about 40 years probably would too, but that is neither here nor there, but the idea that Spidey would practice torture without so much as questioning the morality of it (a character who questions the morality of just about everything he does ever since that thing happened with his uncle), demonstrates a shift in the range of what can be considered a good, or at the very least “a thoughtful” guy.
I “cry” about it because it is sad to think that to suggest that our heroes at least display some inner-conflict about the mortality of torture is somehow weak or “Lefty.”
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