Several years ago, my son first expressed an interest in reading comics. Deciding how to start his “education” was a bit intimidating, because as a parent you want naturally want to expose your child to the best of any given experience. With comics that can be especially hard because of how much the variance there is over the history of the medium, and even within the medium itself. I knew right off the bat that I was not going to start him on anything too independent. Though I personally enjoy some of the early Image books (specifically The Maxx) I knew that he needed a good base in comics to truly appreciate the missteps and successes of each individual offering. To that end I decided that it would be good to start him off with some Golden Age books. Ultimately I was stuck deciding between the original run of The Avengers, or The Amazing Spider-Man. Our local public library had both so it wasn’t an issue to get him a copy that he could read at his leisure, and in the end I decided on Spider-Man. I didn’t choose The Avengers because I have always felt that it was a far more unbalanced book than many of the other superhero teams, especially at the beginning. They always seemed to spend more time chasing after the rampaging hulk, or nearly screwing up a rescue than they did succeeding. While I do appreciate that now, I thought that the nuances of the team dynamics would be lost on a 6 year old.

Spider-Man on the other hand has a lot of benefits as a first book. Many of his classmates have older siblings, so the exposure to the high school atmosphere is something that he can relate to. The writing is some of the best that Stan Lee ever did, and more importantly it provides a good base for him to understand why the esteemed Mr. Lee is very possibly the most overrated comic writer ever (a subject for another post, so I digress). What is truly brilliant about Spider-Man, and I think was really captured in the first movie, is that his conflicts are nothing out of the ordinary. The action, and the heroics are all a foregone conclusion. There is never any doubt that Spider-Man will thwart The Vulture or stop the muggers, but there is always a doubt as to weather Peter Parker will make it through the day at school. This juxtaposition of realistic crisis with fantastical crisis is the main reason why I chose the first 50 or so issues of The Amazing Spider-Man as my son’s introduction to comics. The end result of this decision expressed itself in several ways. From asking me why his box of crayons didn’t have an appropriate green to color in the Vulture when he was sitting down with a Spider-Man coloring book at age 7 to the fact that his current favorite book is Jeff Smith’s Bone. I think it I can safely say it worked out pretty well.