What I was trying to do was quickly record my first reactions to the new Spider-Man series, and get at some of the reasons I flinched away from it. As I tried to convey, I’m highly equivocal toward my own critique; one can entertain a response while holding it at arm’s length. In this case, I felt akin to a grownup in the 1950s reacting to that noisy rock and roll, or those lurid comic books. Positions we now understand as laughably reactionary, yet not without their poignant validity, if only in that they mark the typical and eternally recurring cultural orienting response to an emergent mode of art, measured against the established and/or receding modes that have over time become transparently naturalized. The “new” is always surrounded by a kind of raw psychological scar tissue, a fraught borderland whose affective texture is highly passionate (and I mean the term in its twin senses of ecstacy and suffering).

Venom is interesting to me because I now see that it marks my own point of departure from the Spider-Man mythology — the juncture at which I ceased to wholly grasp what exactly Spider-Man was “about.” Entirely my choice, in retrospect; I could have bought the titles, could have studied up. But I didn’t, so everything after that became somehow alien, an inversion of the familiar hero-world I had known. Since Venom itself is a kind of unwelcome intruder, an inside-out Spider-Man, it’s a useful metaphor for thinking through my shifting and not always consistent responses to transmedia evolution.

I see now, for example, that I enjoyed Raimi’s first two movies because they recapitulated the years of Spider-Man that I most enjoyed as a kid. I soured on the series once it reached the moment of my personal rupture, that fork in the road signposted by Eddie Brock, a character whom I’m afraid I shall always see as wrongly retrofitted into an established order. As with the Star Wars prequels, folks who come into the storyline after me will likely have no problem with Brock/Venom. I can no more avoid this contradiction than I can stop lines appearing on my face, or my beard turning gray.

Re: Bruce Timm’s other work, points taken. I’ve got Batman: The Animated Series saved up and am waiting for a chance to watch it (my current catch-up job, The Wire, is grabbing all my spare viewing time). The few episodes of Justice League I’ve seen struck me as rather dull and heavy-handed, but then I never really responded to the JL as a comic-book reader (the hotbodied Legion of Superheroes was more my thing). On the other hand, I love the Teen Titans cartoon, after an initial couple of encounters in which that series’ visual surface — like Spectacular Spider-Man‘s — left me a little dazed. So maybe old dogs can learn new tricks!

For example: Every single episode ends with the last shot graphically shifting/animating into a Ditko-esque circular Spidey-logo. Very nice touch.

I, too, was initially taken aback by the curious visual texture of the show when I first viewed it, but gradually I really came to appreciate how they really are able to a lot with very little, in essence. The action sequences on this show are extremely dynamic and expansive, designed beautifully to showcase how Spider-Man truly moves up, around, over, and about the city and how he encounters and battles villains inside, through and on top of buildings and various other structures. That’s not even counting what I think is a wonderful narrative fabric and spot-on characterization that underlines the whole show. It starts off innocently, but gradually develops and expands throughout the show’s season, to really create an ongoing universe where every character’s actions do have consequences, and do affect things in significant ways as the series moves forward.

I can kind of understand where you’re coming from re: admitting you’re not interested/out of touch with current Spider-Man comic book mythology (as am I) and perhaps you’re frustrated with the current approaches to this series, or indeed contemporary popular (western?) animation.

I can’t really agree with you, however, that in this Spider-Man, “the dialogue, characterization, and storytelling seem thin, undercooked, dashed off,” or your other criticisms of what could perhaps be called the “visual rhetoric” of the show.

I’m as sick of Venom as you are (and agree with you on Spider-Man 3, left me cold too, and almost offended!), but what you saw was indeed the first time he appeared in the series, and it was at the very end of the season. The whole “black costume”/Eddie Brock saga is actually adapted/built up quite nicely in many episodes preceding that encounter (from the very first episode!).

I think perhaps if you would check out the show from the beginning, you might be able to catch some of the subtler nuances of characterization that are thrown in there and the way they’re developed in interesting ways throughout (they don’t even introduce Mary Jane until at least halfway through the season, I think — and it’s classically done).

I am actually much more impressed with this show than I ever expected to be, I think it’s absolutely the best representation yet of Spider-Man in any media outside of his comics.

And the visual style’s grown on me, what can I say?

Oh, and in a whole other league, I find it interesting that you’ve seen Timm’s Superman Animated Series, but not much of his other stuff! You really need to check out Batman: The Animated Series (where it all began) and Justice League — I would say they’re a must for any animation scholar…!