gumbercules81

I wrote this my senior year of college, on my twenty-first birthday. I'd been obsessing for the whole summer about Spider-man and the death of Gwen Stacy from the early 70's comic and how they'd changed it in the first movie. In the comic, Goblin drtops an unconscious Gwen from the George Washington Bridge, but when Spider-man's web hits her ankle and stops her fall, her neck breaks and she's dead by the time he pulls her up. In the movie it's Mary Jane, and they change things by having Spider-man save her. I found the idea of the hero failing to be so compelling and so tragic. I'd also been reading and re-reading the Marvels series that Marvel Comics did back in the mid-90's, a chronicling of 60's and 70's Marvel heroes from the perspective of the citizen, and that had a lot to do with this piece inspiration-wise. The prodding it took for me to write it came in September the week before Family Weekend. I wasn't a creative writing concentration, but my advisor twisted my arm into presenting something that Saturday at the senior reading. I hadn't written anything in over a year, but this just seemed to come naturally. I literally wrote it the morning before I read it, wrote it at the Salem coffee shop, no less. The best creative writing professor at Roanoke College is Melanie Almeder, and everyone who read thanked her in some fashion for her classes. I never had a class with her, but knew her decently well, and I had seen her at the coffee shop that morning, so I decided to thank her for her inspiration as well when I read. I wrote this and read it on September 28, 2002.

"Comic Book Philosophy: A meditation on turning twenty-one"

Colossus was always my favorite.
Truly, he was the Man of Steel,
Impervious to any sort of energy assault,
Safe inside his silver shell.
Maybe that's why he appealed to me so much
In the throes of adolescence,
Wanting that immortal steel
To shield the mortal flesh of the Self.
Hamlet once told me about
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Nobody can ever really, truly get over
What the fail-safes could not prevent,
What slipped through undetected into the mind.
Eight years later, and I still
Feel like Professor X,
Hunched over in his chair,
Squeezing the bridge of his nose
In frustration as Ilyana Rasputin lay dying
The Legacy Virus consuming her life.
When it happened, finally,
That was the one thing Colossus could not stop,
The one thing the steel failed to deflect.
Eight years separated from my friends,
Yet I can see him
In Beast's lab, coming to that decision,
Damning the steel, damning the fail-safe,
The seclusion, taking that final step.
When I read about his death,
I felt something fall away from me.
The impervious man is dead!
What a cruel world,
Killing the childhood hero
Like a kitten in a bucket.
I should just say damn it all, too,
And take it as unimportant newsprint
Whose literary value died out
Along with the soul of popular music.
But it's hard to break out of that shell.
I have spent eight years
Deflecting everything and everyone,
Living my life in a steel,
Full-body fortress of solitude,
And it's hard to shatter that mold
After so long.
Twenty-one years old,
And I still feel like Professor X,
Frustrated with the disease
That was eating away the little girl.
I shouldn't let this get away from me.
I wish I were Wolverine sometimes,
Standing alone before the nemesis,
Whether it's a legion of Sentinels
Or Sabretooth charging in an all-out attack.
I wish I could just damn it all,
Howl my rage!
"Shnikitty, shnikitty, shnakt, biotch!
Bring it. BRING IT!"
But even Logan has his demons.
Even Logan is fleeing the past
He does not know,
He does not remember. Hell,
Even Spiderman has his demons.
Even Spiderman had his Green Goblin,
Throwing Peter Parker's first love
From the George Washington Bridge.
But it was Spiderman himself who ultimately killed her.
His web hit her ankle with uncanny precision,
But I can hear her neck's dull snap,
Shock waving across the river,
Sending out the cry,
"Spiderman could not save her."
"Don't be dead, Gwen," he said.
"Don't be dead.
I don't want you to be dead.
Can't you see I saved you?"
Spiderman's confusion and frustration,
My bewilderment,
And Spiderman's fury as he fought Goblin,
The enemy impaled on a stake of humble tin.
There is no resolution to the story.
It just is.
And it keeps going.
Twenty-one years, twenty-one issues.
But everything stays the same.
No one hears the mighty fall.
No one sees the mighty fail.
It is quiet inside this shell.
Colossus, Ilyana, Gwen Stacy:
The new triumvirate for twenty-two.