Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and the return of slapstick is what we needed

Last week, a Marvel trailer featuring Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man was released and promoted on Twitter (this author refuses to call it ‘X’). The first look at this animated project features a sequence where Spider-Man webs at a free-falling brick and cracks someone in the head with it. It’s unclear if this was an accident or if Spider-Man simply didn’t mean to hit the guy that hard, but it’s followed by a side-by-side of many comic-like panels with several characters dramatically wincing at the hit. The people of Twitter have all come to the same conclusion: “Well, that guy is dead.”

While it’s very funny to imagine that our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man absolutely brained this guy with a brick, I think it’s more fun to think about what this actually means: we’re getting back our wacky comic-accurate slapstick.

In comic books and animation, fighting sequences are always more dramatic than they realistically would be. Especially on the flat, static pages of a comic, everything is very big and dynamic with exaggerated lines and overblown reactions. It’s meant to invoke the feeling of the action, not the literal events of it.

In early comic book film adaptations, this trend toward drama held true. You can look at the fight choreography of the Star Wars prequels or Black Widow’s opening scene in the first Avengers movie to see the kind of highly theatrical violence audiences could expect from a comic book. This fell out of fashion for more brutal realism when grittier adaptations came to the screen—the hallway fight scene in Netflix’s Daredevil Season 1 comes to mind.

The single-shot scene shows Daredevil taking down a number of combatants with brutal efficiency, but he visibly tires as the fight wears on and every big swing or flip is followed by a collapse or misstep. It’s not clean or dramatic; it’s grippingly real and messy, and it received a lot of well-deserved praise at the time for the break from the normal superhero formula. The problem comes when every other superhero property jumps on the bandwagon. Suddenly, large dramatic fights are cringe, and we have to be as real and edgy as possible.

Animation has always been a better platform for this: it’s much easier to suspend our disbelief when watching animation than when viewing something in live-action. While, yes, I would absolutely be worried that a man getting hit with a brick would be dead if it were live-action, because it’s animated, I’m sure he’ll walk it off. That’s the format. That’s the gimmick. That’s comics, baby.