Hitting newsstands in 1992, almost thirty years ago, Marvel’s Spider Man 2099 offered a curious glimpse to the future. New York got taller, deeper, wider. The Heroic Age went and left no traces behind, the spirit of development covering every world-ending threat, downtown crisis and every common recognizable mark that textures the belief that superhero comics could ever be The World Outside Your Window. Both parts Curiosity and Publishing Stunt, maybe if fortunes had been different kids all over would still be reading 2099 comics now.

Books with the capes, they do this all the time. Rebalance a universe, re-check power levels. Dig up whoever not getting solicitations at the independent places and try to get them to re-invent some seventy year old superhero again. We buy it. We love it. 2099 goes on to be followed by The New Universe and Heroes Reborn and eventually Ultimate Marvel. All worlds filled with gods pitched on the backs of creators that will hand them off to be dismantled, destroyed, torn apart. This is the turning wheel of the Superhero Universe, the status quo as not a gentle stream but an absolutely destructive force that pulls up every narrative thread laid down and breaks them, sets them on fire.

We’re two feet deep in our New Universe, now: Sony (of computer entertainment fame)’s Across the Spider-Verse is newly released, following up it’s just as frustrating to type out titled first installment, Spider-Man: Enter the Spider-Verse. I am hoping the third movie can get me a pay-by-word review somewhere, where I can have fun pushing up the count by name dropping two of the three entries in every single paragraph.

These movies are beautiful. They are, without dialogue, artistic movements dedicated to the language and style of The Comic Book, reaching out in all directions like the medium always has for artistic inspiration. Graffiti, Manga, Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko, the list unrolls and travels to the floor. Some scenes will paint the horizon or the light bouncing off of a character with dot-matrix printing effects. More than inspire any think piece, or win some award, some kid out there is drawing Spider-Man, while another one draws on the inside of their imagination the kinds of words that will sell books about the character 25 years from now. The Status Quo. Spider-Man isn’t a character, a brand: Spider-Man is a memory.

Fuck it, let’s do it: let’s go all in on talking all things Spider-Man. The first movie asks the audience to shelve “who is” Peter Parker, at this point everyone is familiar, but this will be the first time film-going audiences will see one of his alternate universe doubles bite it. I’m used to seeing Parker die, and actually I’m kind of a fan of it. I would like to remix the age old adage “anything can happen” and steer it towards the Superhero Comic Book medium: when a famous character dies, anything can happen* for like, five years. Long enough to turn around some issues, bring on some new talents and perspectives and tear it all down to put the original back in place at the end.

at any given moment, Peter Parker is married or not, a white guy with brown hair. Kind of a goofball? No no, that doesn’t make any sense – well, somebody has to be the loving and understanding father archetype across these movies. We all know who Peter Parker is – there’s a message that he’s nobody, because spider-man can be “everybody”. Spider-Man is a kid from Queens who never learned to back down, and that’s all that matters. Across asks us to put that face behind every mask that isn’t noticeably different: they all might be one guy but anybody could just as easily be under there, so we have Gwen Stacy as Spider-Woman and Hobie Brown as Spider-Punk and Jessica Drew  as another, different Spider-Woman.

Then! There’s Miles Morales, and he’s different. The Spider-Man of his universe has to die due to the ultimate Cosmic Trick of their being a one spider-man limit per universe. A guy named Miguel – our Spider-Man 2099 is running up the spider-verse universe cops, the people adhering to all of the Canon. I hate this. I hate this so much. I hate that one of the worst words to ever roll out of the bloated corpse of superhero fandom, and yes I know that’s know where it came from: those people, those…those “Superhero Fans” use the word like a weapon. I’ve been on the other side of it, and once it’s turned loose, nobody is safe. Someone’s out there right now innocently building a wiki mapping all of the references in this movie with asterisks below them. Now, nobody is safe.

But, everybody is spider-man. Seriously: there are so many spider-men in this movie. That’s no joke about this being “across the spider-verse”: every named character in this movie is tethered to Spider-Man in some way. Not Miles Morales, not Peter Parker, but Spider-Man. Or Spider-Woman, of which there are two. There is a scene with a repetition of the spider-man lenses trickling into the darkness of the background forever. The stuttering animation stays at a frame limit, experimental in the last movie but here in the weakest scene where all of the spider-men are Talking to Each Other and god if you didn’t get enough of Spider-Man talking to Each Other last movie, it happens so much, all the time, everywhere here.

Does it work? Who cares? What does it mean when something “works?” the movie’s title calls back to a Beatles song, or it calls back to a musical dramedy so up it’s own ass from sixteen years ago that footage of performances of the Beatles songs in it are used for examples of how to not make a movie. So Across The Spider-Verse is a little uneven at times, is what I’m saying. During one of the scenes where Miles is talking to the other Spider-People, the 3D animation that jumped out like a comic panel in the previous movie falls too much into the shadows and paintbrush strokes: the lighting and camera position texture the characters in a way that looks like an upscaled Robot Chicken skit, because the worst parts of this movie is when people are in costumes talking to each other about universes and destiny, and the best when it slows down to treat the rhythms of coming-of-age with the same bombast and emotion it does fight scenes.

Hey, did you know to be Spider-Man a cop has gotta die, and a loved one has gotta die? The two greatest failures of Peter Parker’s tenure as Spider-Man in the mainstream comics must infinitely kaleidoscope into themselves, forming bizarre pictures of a man that is The Same But Not. All of the names of the people behind the mask, repeating forever. For want of a nail.

Is Spider-Man a circumstance? the same ones, repeated forever, or if the character can be something even more powerful…a brand. No, maybe I’m joking a little bit – Spider-Man is already one of the most popular brands on planet earth. Enough of a brand Disney would happily deny parents of children that die Super Fans the right to decorate a grave with him. “Thank you for letting us share in the magic of your life. Your friends at the Walt Disney Company.” Words printed on 12 points in the white tapestry of an email, a somehow less personal method of telling the fans of a dead kid to get bent the character belongs to US.

In the 1990’s, there was a marvel comics series called Exiles. The Spider-Man of the Exiles comic is a deranged murderer, bonded to a symbiote that still cracks one liners even if most of them are about killing people. That’s the secret, right? The character has always really been the same: it’s about the costume, not the person underneath. You can have him show up anywhere and the audience knows what they’re looking at. Across the Spider-Verse is the best when it looks underneath the mask, but we all know that, right? That’s the key to a good comic book, and so much of the talking in Across is about re-learning that over and over again.

The story of Spider-Verse is that you need to be yourself, first off: but being yourself is going to land you in the cosmic trap of horror and failure. The sequel is going to refute all of this, I think – that’s the only place it can go without nakedly being darker than the MCU multiverse implying all of reality and fantasy is only one twist of the kaleidoscope outside of one core set of identities. No fantasy, no future, only lateral reality as far as the eye can see.

I wish it could end with a tearing of film and staple bound paper. Comic panels that go on forever, that say all of these characters and stories shouldn’t be the property of a company that refuses to pay artists, that celebrates when a movie moves a medium but doesn’t turn it into days off, wage increases or benefits. Artists and writers die working an endless grind of convention tables and reaching to cover any material they can. Independent publishing, crossover super-hype books, graphic novels, art installations. We love Spider-Man more than we love the artists, or the idea that a fifty-plus year old character should belong to anyone. When I think about the future of the superhero comic, I’m drowning in a sea of white-eye lenses and multiverses, of characters that schedule popularity because they are all just each other.

spider-nam, by James Stokoe