Who is Miles Morales? Dissecting Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #1
SPOILERS AHEAD!!
In Scott McCloud’s seminal text “Understanding Comics,” the author discusses the basic principles of character/audience identification. Basically, McCloud says the most relatable character is also the least specific: a plain old smiley face. Not the most compelling character, to be sure, but one that we can impose our own personalities, hopes, and fears onto. As you make the character more specific, adding features and personalities, the character becomes more complex and nuanced, but also less likely to be 100% relatable to an audience. For the more cultured reader, eager to explore new stories outside the realm of their own personal experience. For some comic fans, though, it means throwing a borderline racist hissy fit when Marvel announces that their new Ultimate Spider-Man is half black, half latino, because that dude is different from them and therefore lesser.
This is the tightrope upon which not just comics, but all storytelling in popular media must balance: an engaging, dynamic, three-dimensional character who is also accessible and speaks to something common in all of us. Add to that the pressure of following up a career-defining run with Brian Michael Bendis’ take on Ultimate Peter Parker, the progressive-at-best-token-at-worst role as Marvel’s new diversity Spider-Man, and the unenviable heft of the legacy of arguably the most popular superhero of all time, and poor Miles Morales, our erstwhile new Ultimate Spider-Man, had a lot of pressure put on him even before the first issue of “Ultimate Comics All-New Spider-Man” hit this week.
So how did our boy hold up? Are we looking at the once and future Spider-Man? Well, no. We’re looking at an ordinary middle school kid, living in Brooklyn, trying to figure out where he belongs. Which is not to say he won’t get there. This is, after all, a hyper-decompressed, written for the trade first issue; an entr’acte before the meet and potatoes. I’m not going to argue the merits of that attitude, as I feel we all got out our “why doesn’t the main hero actually show up in his own book” ha-has out of the way with Justice League #1 a few weeks ago. But it definitely means I don’t really have an idea as to what kind of person we’re dealing with quite yet. Miles seems defined by the people and circumstances that surround him; even his eventual secret identity is passed on to him by someone else. How he will define himself is yet to be seen; but we better see it soon.
It just seems like the actual character of Miles is swallowed up by they hype both outside of his book and within it. The book opens up five years ago (where have I heard that before?), with Norman Osborne (pre-Goblin days) trying to make a second Spider-Man. Normie throws around a lot of talk of destiny and the myth of Ariadne (uncomfortable shades of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark here). All this talk of myth and the inevitable harkens back to J. Michael Straczynski’s run on Amazing Spider-Man, and each seemingly coincidental turn of events that leads Miles to a career in webslinging serves to strengthen that vibe. The very fates themselves are conspiring to bring us a new wallcrawler, and fate has decreed that it will be a child of Brooklyn!
Flash-forward five years (though not necessarily post-Death of Peter Parker; why are all these new #1s being so damn coy with their timelines?), and we meet young Miles Morales, emphasis on the young. Miles here seems younger than he did when we last saw him, and seems a tad shy and stand-offish. This is a kid still trying to find his place in the world, and who’s activities are defined by the relationships around him. He’s got an overbearing mother who wants nothing more than for her child to win a lottery to get into a new, fancy, charter school, in a scene straight from the documentary Waiting for Superman (IRONY!). He’s got a dependable if pessimistic father. This new Spider-Man even has an uncle who looks out for him, albeit a shady uncle whose at odds with Miles’ father with a penchant for breaking into science labs and stealing genetically altered spiders. At first, this Uncle Aaron fellow made me a little uncomfortable: why does the black Spider-Man have to have a shiftless, deadbeat relative? Although I suppose it wouldn’t be surprising for a white Spider-Man to have similar relations. This isn’t racial profiling; it’s character profiling, and the hero’s villainous relative is as much a trope as a hero’s noble relative, and Uncle Aaron looks like he could evolve into a dynamic mixture of both.
My biggest issue with this book is that I never got a clear sense of who Miles was really. He’s dragged to the lottery by his parents, coaxed into visiting his deadbeat uncle. Make no mistake, Bendis writes a hero’s family dynamic like no one else- it was one of the most consistent strengths on his previous work on this title. And I’ve noticed that, when one of the big two decides to tout a young “minority” hero (“Blue Beetle,” “Power Man,” and “Static Shock,” to name a few) the characters typically shine when introduced to the family dynamic. It’s as if the weight of being “MINORITY SUPERHERO” stifles the personality, and stripping away the mask really lets you understand who they are and where they’re coming from. This doesn’t seem to be the case so far for young Miles, who is really only given one surprising moment of character definition in the whole book. When he wins the coveted final slot at the new charter school lottery, Miles takes one look at the other kids who made it in and says “It shouldn’t be like this.” This is a great spin on ol’ Peter Parker’s trademark survivor’s guilt, but taken on its own, it ultimately amounts to telling us “Miles is a noble guy.” Not exactly earth-shattering characterization for a hero. Again, we’re dealing with a kid at a very young age, before he’s had a chance to develop a real personality, as opposed to the teenaged ball of hormones and webs that was Ultimate Peter Parker. He’ll likely grow into his own.
My main question is: did Bendis hold back on the big character beats here on purpose? Did he figure that switching the race of the title character of the book was a big enough change off the bat and decide to ease into any further changes for the sake of maintaining audience identification? Is Miles’ role as blank slate actually serve as a nifty narrative device? I suspect so, as the last page reveal of one of Miles’ unique powers seems to emphasize his emotional state here. Furthermore, if identification is the goal, why go out of your way to isolate Miles Morales as “the chosen one”? Ostensibly, one of the main reasons to focus on a half latino, half black young man in this book is to reach out to a new audience that can now say “Spider-Man is just like me.” Then why focus so heavily on Miles winning a lottery for a charter school, a situation that is, by it’s definition, limiting in all the wrong ways? Why go to great lengths to emphasize that the winning lottery number matches the number on the magical mystery spider that somehow finds its way to Miles in the heart of the city? This emphasis on “There’s something special about this kid,” runs counter to the notion that “This kid is just like me.”
Am I overanalyzing a scant single issue introduction? Probably. I’ve stated before that I’m not a huge fan of ultra-decompression in comics, and as such I’m far less likely to be accepting of that “wait for the trade” mentality. But just like Action Comics #1 last week, I believe Ultimate Comics All-New Spider-Man #1 really had to give me, at the very least, some kind of insight into what makes our main character tick. Instead, we got a lot of plot and posturing, with only a scant bit of character development. Again, I have supreme faith in Bendis. He can make teen heroes sing like no one else, and for that reason (and the promise of some beautiful, dynamic artwork and expressive characterization by Sarah Pichelli), I’ll keep this book on my pull list. But I’m going to need to see Miles evolve beyond just a smiley face in order to keep me engaged.
