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Today, we look at how Marvel made a raunchy Spider-Man meme become canon in an issue of Web Warriors, as Spider-Gwen saw much more than she wanted to see.
This is Foggy Ruins of Time, a feature that provides the cultural context behind certain comic book characters/behaviors. You know, the sort of then-topical references that have faded into the “foggy ruins of time.” To wit, twenty years from now, a college senior watching episodes of “Seinfeld” will likely miss a lot of the then-topical pop culture humor (like the very specific references in “The Understudy” to the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding scandal).
One of the interesting things about fandom is when a piece of pop culture makes the turn from “So bad it is bad” to “So bad it is good,” and that’s precisely what has happened with the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon series. Now, it is important to note the cartoon landscape of the late 1960s was pretty darn bad. Saturday morning and afternoon weekday cartoon shows were notable in just how CHEAP they all looked. That was because they WERE produced very, very cheaply. Making cartoons is expensive and once cartoons moved out of the lucrative short film ahead of a movie market or the similarly lucrative prime time television market, the money just wasn’t there for cartoons on Saturday morning television or afternoon television, especially when those earlier theatrical shorts and primetime cartoons could easily play in those other timeslots and wow the children of 1966 (a 1949 Bugs Bunny theatrical short or a 1961 primetime Bugs Bunny cartoon were typically a good deal better looking than a brand-new 1966 Saturday morning or daily afternoon cartoon).
When Marvel first started getting cartoons on television, Marvel Super-Heroes, the animation was done with what is called “xerography,” meaning that it took actual comic book images from the comic books and copied them and then slightly altered them to animate them. This cut down on the production needed to make the cartoons…
It also obviously looked extremely stilted.
So when Spider-Man’s cartoon debuted the following year, it was a big step up that it didn’t use xerography, but it was still done VERY cheaply.
The way this show saved money was by re-designing Spider-Man’s costume so that it only had webs on his head, webs and glove, thus saving a lot of effort, plus it re-used action shots CONSTANTLY.
However, the cheap production of the series has given it an almost charming quality to it all, sort of like a “Hey gang, let’s all put on a show!” sort of can-do attitude that has endeared it to fans over the years (and of course, that theme song is outright excellent).
SPIDER-MAN TAKES OVER THE MEME GAME
The cheap nature of the show also comes across as sort of unassuming, and that has a whole lot of charm attached to it, and as a result, when internet memes became a thing in the mid to late 1990s on discussion boards, the Spider-Man cartoon was a popular source for memes. A popular one shows Spider-Man just chilling on a ceiling fixture, noting that the floor is lava…
Spider-Man, in meme fore, is one of us. He’s just playing kid’s games like “The floor is lava.”
Perhaps the most popular Spider-Man meme involves an episode where the Chameleon has disguised himself as Spider-Man and the two now-identical characters are accusing each other of being the fake Spider-Man. This meme is used when two things being discussed are very similar…
Spider-Man memes are so popular that there is even a Spider-Man meme that gets used when people are using too many Spider-Man memes, declaring that the discussion thread is now a Spider-Man meme thread…
Anyhow, one of the raunchier memes is based around a shot of Spider-Man sitting behind a desk, with his left hand not visible. So the joke is that Spider-Man is doing something raunchy in the image, and thus the meme is “Insert news story of the day” followed by the classic line…
Most Spider-Man memes are not as ribald as that, but it is not that uncommon for Spider-Man memes to go that direction, as well.
HOW A RAUNCHY SPIDER-MAN MEME WAS MADE CANON BY MARVEL
An outgrowth of the various Spiderverse storylines in the comic books was the series, Web Warriors, following a group of alternate reality Spider-heroes, including Spider-Ham and Spider-Gwen, traveling to various universes in the Multiverse. In Web Warriors #1 (by Mike Costa, David Baldeon, Scott Hanna, Jason Keith and Joe Caramagna), the heroes travel to the world of the Spider-Man cartoon…
As the heroes take on Spider-Man’s villains from this simple world, Spider-Gwen is smashed by one of the villains and she inadvertently finds herself in front of the Spider-man of this universe and when she finds him, she is shocked at what he is doing behind the desk, thus recreating the infamous meme…
Of course, the comic book does not outright state what he is doing, as that would be a bridge too far, but it is still very funny of Costa to work that into a comic book period, thus making the meme canon. There are other great bits making fun of the old show (lovingly, of course), like how Spider-Man’s webs turn into butterfly nets.
Or when Spider-Gwen has another great bit about how her web-line seems to be attached to basically just the sky, mocking how the cartoon really didn’t put much thought into how Spider-Man was swinging into action from basically nowhere…
This was a very cute trip to a universe where Spider-Man certainly has his issues, but at least the problems are all pretty charming, even if sometimes it involves Spider-Man hiding under a desk to take care of Spider-business.
If anyone else has any suggestions for Foggy Ruins of Time, feel free to e-mail me at brianc@cbr.com
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