#but the spider-man section is really interesting and i've thought similarly

[spider-xan]

JE: Spider-Man was never seriously defined as a teenager across the franchise for most of his history. And I think absent the success of Harry Potter where suddenly you have a coming of age series about a boy wizard who was already 13 years old when the First issue of USM dropped (Prisoner of Azkaban came in 1999, when Harry became 13 years old), I think that’s what made people realize that teen properties were big again. The 60s Spider-Man in some way was chasing the ambulance of Archie comics…whereas Ultimate Spider-Man chased Harry Potter. So I think Harry Potter is to blame for the tyranny of Teenage Spider-Man. [...] JE: Obviously, Marvel were trying to de-age Peter before…like Untold Tales of Spider-Man did that canon compliant, you had Ben Reilly, and you had Chapter One which tanked…but the success of Harry Potter maybe inspired them to keep giving an idea a third/fourth/fifth chance. At least that’s my theory, and you see it in Peter having these adult mentors, in having stuff handed down to him, and it’s all very Harry Potter. Like Stark is basically Dumbledore in the MCU. Feige said Harry Potter inspired MCU Spider-Man HT: I never thought of it that way, but now it makes so much sense. Comics Peter was a very self-made hero while now he has all this stuff given to him like HP. JE: Bendis made the web fluid come down from Richard Parker, and Richard Parker made the Venom suit…so that’s like James Potter and the Invisibility Cloak and so on. Still I guess Peter won’t end up with a trust fund and his own personal slave. So there are limits I suppose. But I think the neoliberal appropriation of teenage life, which is there in Harry Potter, absolutely seeped into Spider-Man in that time. People talk of superheroes being defining archetypes but basically they appropriate from stuff that works. OG Spider-Man trailed Archie, Ultimate Spidey likewise Harry Potter. Harry was by far the defining teenage character of the 21st Century. Ultimately for the worse. (x)