GWEN STACY, YOU IGNORANT SLUT!

(aka GREEN TEABAGGING THE GOBLIN GONADS)

I was setting my alarm clock for 4:30 the next morning. I had just finished watching my prerequisite weekend DVD episodes of Starsky & Hutch (second season) and Keen Eddie (file in brilliant, but cancelled category) and I was about to pack it in early- but on some nights I have trouble falling asleep if I don't have a newsradio station on the radio to serve as my lullaby. Sort of like keeping a pulse on the world after shredding off the burden of the day- which was a Sunday spent all day watching crime shows, but I did manage to get two pages of The Deposit Man scripted in the early evening hours. So at approximately 10:22 PM PST as I was just about to shut my eyes to drift off to a magical lethargic stupor of a Ashley Scott Wet T-shirt contest dreamland, the muscles in my eyelids refused to shut themselves when the announcement came through my tinny clock radio speaker, although not firmly confirmed: Christopher Reeve has just died at the age of 52.

Ya got be shittin' me- but, future president John F. Kerry was just talking about him and Michael J. Fox just the other day in order to raise those 'undecided voters out in St. Louis ' hopes that stem cell research shouldn't just cease to exist just because some squinty-eyed coke addict selected president saids it's not morally right to fuck around with nature.

This is really hard to absorb right now.

Because of Reeve's 1979 movie portrayal, Superman actually began to rub off on me.

I wasn't a giant fan of Superman while growing up. Spider-Man was the one I really identified with. I had maybe two hundred plus issues of Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, Marvel Team-Up, and the reprints of early Amazing Spider-Man in Marvel Tales-

but Superman? Maybe a few issues of Action Comics and Superman scattered here and there. Superman never really did much for me. The Cartoons bored me. The old fifties series didn't stretch too far beyond the imagination- because Superman was always chasing down petty crooks and not world threatening menaces like he should of (I assume the budget didn't allow it back then), and Superman was just too wishy-washy for me in Superfriends. The only version of Superman I could hold any appreciation for was the Bud Collyer voiced forties-radio show (and animated theaterical shorts)that Batman & Robin used to guest star on sometimes. I had a few lp records of the show that I got with some Kellogg's cereal boxtops and a dollar or two. I got into collecting all four volumes and I was immediately hooked on the more mature themes that were explored on each fifteen minute episode. I discovered that the characters Jimmy Olson and Daily Planet editor Perry White were first introduced on the radio show as well as the first pair ups with Batman and Robin and the misuse of Kryptonite that served as Superman's Archilles Heel. The scripts on those shows which ran for a total of 12 years had never depicted the man of steel in a more rougher and edgier demeanor other than was transcribed in the radio show and in some of the early Siegal and Shuster scripted comics (even though Supes was a hard-ass in the forties throwing thugs and man-servants around like they were pillows, but at least he was a hard-ass with a heart). Those elements could never translate well to the small screen- until they were integrated successfully into the first two Superman movies which starred Reeve and was directed by the two Richards (Donnor and Lester) until the series's popularity waned by the disappointing slide whistle of box offices receipts for the third and fourth one. Christopher Reeve kicked goddamn ass as Superman, epecially when it came to General Zod in II, whereas I have a very fond memory of sneaking in a bottle of blackberry brandy in the theater on opening weekend on the eve of my last day as a high school sophomore just as summer vacation was kicking in. Realistic looking super-hero battles captured on celluloid instantly made Reeve the idol to millions. In the late seventies, I discovered that it was fashionable to be into everything Superman again. The turnaround in popularity with everything Superman in was considered vogue in my book. He was even getting better respect in Superfriends where he would get to kick Lex Luthor booty every week in the Challenge of the Superfriends season and then went chasing after a Darkseid a few times during the Legendary Powers seasons. And I started to reading more of the comic book again- I even cite The Parasite (big purple people eater) as one of my old time favorite Super-villains. Much of Reeve's persona even made it's way to the mid-ninties animated series.

There were days I had actually believed that Reeve would live up to his word that he would actually stand up and walk again without any assistance through his perservance and advocacy of stem cell research. I had that gut feeling that he one day would - it didn't seem that difficult of a concept to wrap your brain around. You simply get up after lying on your lazy ass in a wheelchair for nine years after getting thrown off a horse with nary an effort. Except Chris's ass wasn't so lazy - he tried to make a difference despite his handicaps- going around to charities talking up the good fight of stem cell research, and being a virtual acting and directing dynamo in the Hollywood killing field all from the confinement of his wheelchair. That took a tremendous amount of balls to bop until you drop- and that's what made him a real-life Superman for the past nine years since that painful day, not realizing that it was the internal injuries that substituted as his personal kryptonite. And now, with a better appreciation of the Superman comics that were around during my hormonal growth years, it's just a tragic shame that we had to lose him in the same year that we lost former DC/Superman editor of the comics I once despised, Julius Schwartz.

Okay- the night before being shocked into the landing light of Reeve's passing, I was kinda even disappointed by the latest issue of Amazing Spider-Man that is now playing at a local comic book shop near you. The current storyline for those who haven't read my previous entries, I touched briefly on this absurd storyline of filling in Gwen Stacy's missing moments before she was whisked off this mortal coil that is currently being concocted by former Babylon 5 maestro J. Michael Straczynski. For the last four or five issues, Spidey has been attacked by a super powered brother and sister tag team who are believed to be the offspring of both Gwen Stacy and the webhead. For those too young to remember, Gwen had been bitchslapped off the Brooklyn Bridge by the Green Goblin wayyyy back in 1973 - by writer Gerry Conway, who I swear is still getting hate mail for his little atrocious misanthropic mistake and will probably still be receiving it up to his very dying day now out that he is hiding out in the sanctuary of the Universal Studios backlot posing as a co-producer on the NBC show Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Upon hearing this startling revelation, Peter tactfully tells his current wife, Mary-Jane Watson- that it's impossible that they are his offspring because Spidey has a policy of never going around shooting his web fluid inappropiately in any moist wet spots that he is unaware of, plus he painfully confesses that Gwen and he never got around to doing the horizonal bop while stuck to the ceiling or jumping off the Empire State Building Mile High Club. Sadly, Peter never got around to going beyond first base with Gwen Stacy period.

It's time to have a guy heart to heart, here:

Peter, you stupid shy insensitive naive fool..... how could you not bust a move on that fine piece of Gwen Stacy trim? That booty was just fucking ripe for it and you stood there with that web shooter up your spider scrotum and did nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nada. Zippo.

Instead, you got cockblocked by Norman Osborn. Holy shit! You poor, poor, pitiful Romantic fool!!!

But I feel your pain, dude. Really I do. Because I have a confession to make also - I didn't go all the way with Linda Freeman, my high school sweetheart in my junior year of high school either. But then, neither was Linda a 16 or 17 year old piece of jailbait like Gwen for Norman Osborn to drool over.

But Peter- you failed to realize something: you're not normal like other teen-agers. Goddamn it, you're supposed to have radioactive blood for cripessakes! And that means those radioactive hormones should have kicked into spider-speed overdrive. You could have taken her and ravished her with a hump that she would never would have forget- you could have eaten her out like a friggin' black widow, but instead - she spreads her legs for that brillo-pad mat headed schizophrenic sadist, Norman Osborn, who, in your pathetic demented world is secretly the Green Goblin. And you went to great painstaking lengths to conceal his true identity from the rest of the unseeing world- AND FOR WHAT? Just for him to get some nookie off your woman? Dude, you should have gotten your priorities straight before you started whining like a baby about not being the first guy to shoot any web-blanks into her pouch.

So what, if your buddy, Harry Osborn, Norman's pariah son was chewing on some plastic flashbulbs for all the world to see? You should have recognized the signs, Peter! Gwen's extended stays in Europe? Norman Osborn's plane tickets matching the same itinerary? Even breathing the same stale air in the same goddamn room with a powerful business man and your scantilizing blonde d-cupped barbie doll should have sent your Spider-senses waffing with some strange mixed signaled pheromones!!

Jeez, Peter imagine all the fun stuff you could have done with Gwen Stacy. And because of your pure puny moral thoughts on abstinence - your wayward dreams of a house, a career, a college education, and a two car garage has now evaporated in less of a time it takes for your webbing to wear off on a common street thug hanging off of a lamp post.

You disappoint me, Peter.

Gwen went down on Norman Osborn and you did nothing to stop it and now you expect us to sympatheize with your suffuring. Oh, go fucking cry yourself a river already, grad boy!!

Can you imagine what the hell is waiting to be discovered in Doctor Octopus's medical journals about how he done Aunt May on all fours? Er, or all eights?

And Gwen? You're a fucking filthy slut, you know that? I fucking idolized you. I made it a personal quest to date a girl in high school that even looked like you. How could you---?

You fragmented away my entire innocence- you stupid blond bi-polarized bitch!!!

Sniff.

Tomorrow: Why Vertigo comics and HBO should combine forces.

~

Coat