For my entire life, Spiderman has been my favorite superhero. As a kid, the only reason that I probably liked him was because I thought he had a cool looking costume (which I still do.) As I started to grow up more and go through the awkward years of middle school and high school, I started seeing Peter Parker as someone to look up to. The story of Peter Parker’s evolution to Spiderman is fairly common knowledge, but I’ll give you a refresher anyways. Peter Parker is your typical nerdy, awkward teenage high schooler who is just trying to survive the growing pains of life. Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider and eventually gains his super powers. Obviously, I’m no web slinging super hero but I relate so well to Peter Parker in other ways.
I admired Peter’s work ethic. As a high schooler he had the ambition to use his photography talents to land a job at The Daily Bugle. I’ve been a web designer for years now, so I appreciate the fact that in Ultimate Spiderman he was a web designer. Maybe that is an odd reason on why I stuck with web design? Anyways, I had an incredible respect for how much he handled. He did it all. Student, boyfriend, superhero, taking care of Aunt May, you name it and he did it. Pretty incredible stuff for a high school kid to handle. Granted, I didn’t do near that much throughout high school but it helped me focus on and handle what I had to do.
This is about to get pretty personal, but hear me out. Similar to the way Peter lost Uncle Ben, my junior year of high school I lost my grandmother, who I was very close with. This was the first real experience of loss that I had up to that point in my life. It was very hard for my high school mind to deal with, or anyone to deal with really. Around this time, I started reading the Ultimate Spiderman series. This was the first time that I really dove in to the Spiderman’s story and the first time I read a comic regularly. Following the story and seeing Uncle Ben’s death outside of a movie for the first time hit me hard. I saw the pain that Peter went through and I could relate to that.
Ben’s line “with great power, comes great responsibility.” stuck with me after my grandmother’s death. I knew she would say the same thing. She always saw my potential, talents and wanted me to always make the best of what I had. Ben saw that Peter had potential to do something great and wanted to make sure that he met that potential. Peter Parker had been the nerdy awkward one his entire life and then realized he could do something great with what he was given. We’re all weak and human in our own ways, but we all have something great to offer the world and the people around us. Peter Parker is the regular guy that I can relate to, to make me believe I can be something better. Whether it’s losing someone, having a close friend believe in you or a simple comic book character, sometimes we just need a push to realize what we have to offer.
