Is Spider-Man a 'fun' book?
Yeah, sure. Does that mean that it can't be occasionally tinged with sadness, darkness or melancholy? Hell no.

To get back to the M*A*S*H analogy, Spider-Man should be the early episodes. Where, yes, it's a serious world, and bad things happen, but sometimes, you just have to find the laughter at the heart of it, or be overwhelmed.
The danger is in becoming the later episodes, where any sense of comedy, or light-heartedness, of fun, has been buried beneath a ton of mawkish sentimentality and selfconscious melancholy.

I think Steve Wacker is talking out of his hat.

I really enjoyed the early issues of the JMS run and didn't actively object to Spidey's powers becoming explicitly magical, since the way his abilities work doesn't make a whole lot of logical sense (but does make a lot of dream-logic sense). The "Other" stuff was ill-timed and too ham-fisted, though, and the Gwen Stacy storyline is exactly what I was thinking of when I mentioned how easy it is for someone who should know better to perpetrate a completely terrible Spider-Man story.

After Stan Lee left, we had basically 10 years of mediocre Spider-Man stories, IMO. The next writer in the Amazing Spider-Man title that I think was really, really good was Roger Stern, and that was in the early 1980s! (Though there were several good Spidey stories in the 70s, it was more in Marvel Team-Up).

It may seem like heresy, but I also think JMS really got the mix of drama and comedy that makes Spider-Man great. Unfortunately, he also fixated on making Spidey a magic totem and retconning Gwen Stacy for the thousandth time.

It's a brilliant balancing act when someone can pull it off, but even the very good writers among Stan Lee's successors seem to have a harder time doing it consistently. This is probably why it's so easy for even a good writer to do a Spider-Man story that runs off the rails completely, just by over-relying on one or the other of the main Spider-Man tones. Usually too much tragedy in modern books, since sadness is the style of the time, but I've read comedy-oriented back issues that were pretty damn bad, too.

I think Spider-Man is definitely fun, but not FUN, if you get my meaning. Not in the way fans nowadays mean when they say "this is a fun comic", refering to a comic that goes out of its way to be light-hearted and irrelevant and purposefully silly and ironic.

Well, not in the main Spidey titles anyway. If there ever was a Spidey comic that came closer to "fun comics" it was Marvel Team-Up. But even that comic had stuff that people nowadays would say isn't appropriate to a "fun" comic. Bill Mantlo and Chris Claremont wrote a lot of issues.

The Wraith storyline that run in MTU 48-51 had Jean deWolff as a main character, and had a very strong theme of parental abuse, as her Dad had emotionally scarred Jean and her brother throughout. There was a time travelling adventure that run in MTU 41-46, so Spidey doing travel time, that must be all zany fun! Sorta, since the story dealt with themes of religious fanaticism and witch-burning in Salem that bloggers today would say is Mantlo being depressing and "partisan" and anti-religion, and certainly would not be considered a "fun comic".

T. -

I just re-read Denny O'Neill's Batman stories from the 1970s, and I thought they were quite dark. One typical story had a bitter journalist suffering from a terminal disease commiting suicide in a way as to frame Batman for his death. This is not light-hearted fun, I think. It's true that O'Neill's Batman is more emotionally balanced that today's Batman - he is a dedicated, tough detective, not a paranoid control freak, but he is still quite the menacing creature, beating criminals to intimidate them. I agree that the stories are not as dark as today's stories, but neither are they light-hearted fun.

You said, " That’s why Marvel fans read Marvel comics - for the potential of relevance in the larger tapestry." I have two problems with this statement. First, you seem to be assuming anyone who reads Marvel comics is a "Marvel fan" and not just a comics fan. Second, I personally read comics (Marvel or others) because I want a good story. If you look at current Marvel books like Captain America and Daredevil, they mostly stay out of the "greater tapestry" and yet still tell compelling stories.

They did. It was called One More Day. That's exactly what happened. The screw-up was the last twenty years. All of it, not just the marriage.

Spider-Man stories work best with a balance. A morose, neurotic Peter is balanced by a high-flyin' Spidey, and Peter having a good time with his friends is balanced by a grueling adventure to put Spider-Man through the wringer.

As a couple other commenters (Graeme Burk, Kirayoshi et al) allude to, Spider-Man has tragic things happen to him, but he is not necessarily a tragic figure — he's a *mediocre* figure. He was the kid who was supposed to go far after graduation but never seems to get ahead, and just when it looks like he might, the status quo gets reset and he's living in a crummy apartment working at the same job he's had since high school. There's the sense that it should have been *better* (and would have been if not for his responsibilities as Spider-Man) but at least it's *okay*.

Actually, it was likely meant as way to lighten up the series after the creepiness of the first symbiote storyline. Oh, I'm sure that, from Spidey's POV, it was embarrassing, but considering that Peter and Johnny are friends -the kind of friends who play pranks on each other- I'm sure he took it in stride.

And then got Johnny back for it later.

And even after the early 80's sometimes Spidey was both.

I propose this is a false dichotomy.

This is why I cringe when I hear Joe Q or any of the Brain Trust refer to Spider-Man as a loser. If Spider-Man were always the loser that the current writers paint him to be, the title Amazing Spider-Man wouldn't have lasted 50 issues, let alone 500 issues. Spider-Man is an Everyman, not a loser. Spider-Man is the hero whom fans can relate to, but still wish to emulate, not the person we look at and say, "Sucks to be you."

Dan Slott, ironically enough, hit it on the head in the last issue of his Spider-Man/Human Torch mini, when Johnny Storm revealed that he was always jealous of Peter Parker, since he had a loving family life, an exciting job(action photographer), a brain the size of Reed's and more than a few babes on his arm over the years. When Johnny referred to "The Parker Luck", he meant it as a positive. The truth is that Spider-Man isn't a loser, but he wrongly believes himself to be one. He's the George Bailey of the MU. He's not fully aware that he does have a Wonderful Life. Seriously, one of these days, I'd love to see Uatu show Spidey a What If universe where Peter was never born.

Seriously, at any given time from ASM #1 to when he married MJ, Peter Parker has had at least one, and more often than not two, gorgeous women interested in him. All men should be such losers!

The unbelievably sucky things that happened to Peter, particularly in the Lee/Ditko/Romita days were often like a comedy punchline-- he saved Jameson's son but made himself even more of a hated menace in the public eyes. He fought the Vulture but couldn't get the pictures for Jameson. He stopped Doc Ock, but he made Betty Brant hate Spider-Man and prevented him from telling her the truth. It's not complete and total tragedy, because if it were Peter Parker would be ground down. Rather, tragic things happen but he still soldiers on.

So yes, I do think he's fun because in spite of the bittersweet element there is something fun in watching someone keep getting existential pies in his superhero face.

Yup, much like how Nightwing has been mostly written in his own book as a version of Daredevil that's fun.

(As opposed to when Devin Grayson wrote Nightwing AS Daredevil)

I think the Spider-Man character isn't really a fun one, but a lot of the surrounding circumstances are. All the goofy animal-themed villains, for instance.

The paper bag incident happened right after Spidey had freaked out when he discovered his alien costume was a symbiote feeding off him when he was asleep, and he was feeling particularly depressed, so the prank Johnny played on him was like adding insult to injury and to illustrate Parker's hard luck in the sharpest way possible.

Not to say Spidey hadn't some stories that were really "silly", with guys like Gibbon, the Big Wheel, and others, but no more than most other superheroes.