Information on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the “circus rock ‘n’ roll drama” whose Broadway premiere has now been pushed back to the fall, is scarce so far. What we know now, though, is that it’s directed by Julie Taymor, of Across the Universe and The Lion King fame; that its songs were written by U2’s Bono and The Edge; that its costume design is by Eiko Ishioka; and that it will involve Spider-Man fighting a host of villains: Electro, the Rhino, the Green Goblin, Carnage, Swarm, the Lizard, and Swiss Miss.

Wait–who was that last one? Swiss Miss is a new addition to the Spider-Man rogues’ gallery. Her Ishioka-designed costume has been described as white dominatrix gear, and apparently involves corkscrews and rotating knives. She’s also a genuine anomaly in the world of Spider-Man, who’s been fighting bad guys for close to half a century now. And they’re almost inevitably bad guys. Spider-Man has no villainesses from comic books interesting enough to put in a musical because, historically, his relationship with costumed villains is all about his alter ego Peter Parker looking for a replacement father and failing to find one. That doesn’t seem to have been an intentional theme–but it’s present anyway, and it’s turned up in the three hit Spider-Man movies, too.

The central canon of Spider-Man stories is the forty-odd comic books about the character by artist Steve Ditko and writer Stan Lee that were published between 1962 and 1966. An endlessly inventive and very odd cartoonist, Ditko gave Amazing Spider-Man a sense of constant motion and trembling tension. He had a remarkable knack for action and grotesquerie and urban landscapes and broad comedy. His spindly, contorted figures inspired the style of every subsequent Spider-Man cartoonist. And he drew almost all of the series’ villains as old men–much older men than Peter Parker, men old enough to be his father.

Peter’s father, in fact, is conspicuous by his absence in those early stories: he wasn’t named or even mentioned directly until 1968. As the first Spider-Man story begins, Peter is a teenage boy, living in Queens with his elderly aunt and uncle. Uncle Ben is murdered within a few pages, and the disaster that drives the rest of Spider-Man’s career is Peter’s realization that he could have saved his second father’s life.

After that, Peter’s blown it. Again and again, Spider-Man finds himself fighting men who represent one model or another of bad fatherhood. The Tinkerer, Electro, Dr. Octopus and the Lizard are all scientists, like Peter, but instead of mentoring him, they turn on him. (Before director Sam Raimi’s plans for Spider-Man 4 were scrapped a few months ago, he had been pushing for the Lizard and Electro to appear in it.) Kraven the Hunter is the bad father as alpha male, bloated with his own machismo and his need to prove his superiority. J. Jonah Jameson, the editor of the Daily Bugle, where Peter works, is a furious, pompous, unsatisfiable father who parcels out precious crumbs of respect amid torrents of abuse.

And then there’s the Green Goblin, Spider-Man’s chief enemy–but it wasn’t clear what kind of father he was until Ditko left the series. In their first issue together, Lee and new artist John Romita put the crown on the series’ bad-daddy motif. The Goblin, they revealed, is the wealthy, successful Norman Osborn, who seems at first to be a good father to Peter’s friend Harry–but turns out to be the worst kind of father, the kind who passes along his legacy of violence and lies to his son. The Green Goblin went on to murder Peter’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy a few years later. (By that point, Gwen’s own father, police captain George Stacy, had been killed off as well. In Spider-Man stories, bad fathers never stop coming back, but good fathers are doomed.)

Spidey occasionally got to fight women: he tussled with Medusa, a supporting character from Fantastic Four; he had a run-in with the Black Widow, who dropped in from the pages of The Avengers. (“How can I fight her?” he asked on that issue’s cover. “She’s a female copy of MYSELF!”) But he didn’t get an actual recurring villainess to call his own until the Black Cat first appeared in 1979. (In more recent comics, they’ve developed what can only be described as an enemies-with-benefits relationship.)

That brings us back to the curious case of Spidey’s new hot-chocolate-inspired, castrating-weapon-wielding adversary. It’s hard to imagine a Broadway extravaganza like Turn Off the Dark not featuring a woman as one of its central characters; unfortunately, the 48-year history of Spider-Man comic books simply doesn’t offer many options. Taymor and Ishioka have created an option of their own, and it sounds like Swiss Miss will be a visual spectacle in the tradition of Ditko and Romita’s inventions. But it’s the painful undercurrents of masculine identification in Spider-Man’s early battles–the sense that he was fighting the substitute fathers he could never again have–that made them more than just a spectacle.

A great piece of art scars its creator forever. That’s what seems to have happened with The Magnetic Fields. The primary creative outlet for songwriter/producer/basso profundo/multi-instrumentalist Stephin Merritt made its commercial breakthrough (roughly a decade into its recorded career) with 1999’s 69 Love Songs, a three-CD monolith that was exactly what its title promised, and more: a cracked tour of the “American popular song” tradition and its offshoots, a formalist extravaganza, a triumph both as straightforward craft and as loving subversion.

It also raised the question of what Merritt could possibly do for an encore. (“It’s a stunt,” he told me when I interviewed him about 69 Love Songs, then still work in progress, in 1998. “It’s Evel Knievel jumping over 69 cars.”) For the past decade, most of his projects have been smaller leaps: a set of songs for Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Fortunate Events” books recorded under the name the Gothic Archies, some theater collaborations with Chen Shi-zheng, a score for the stage musical version of Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline.” Two more Magnetic Fields albums appeared in 2004 and 2008, each assembled around a formal conceit more rigorous than any of their pre-69 albums’. i was a set of songs involving first-person perspective (not necessarily Merritt’s) whose titles all began with the letter I, sequenced in alphabetical order; Distortion piled massive amounts of feedback on everything as a tribute to the formal purity of the Jesus & Mary Chain’s Psychocandy.

And now there’s Realism, another sort of stunt album. The argument to which it responds seems to go that “realness” is a great virtue in pop music–that the highest form of song is a direct, unfiltered expression of its singer’s emotions. (Therefore, singer-songwriters are better than singers performing other people’s songs, instruments played in real time are better than synthesizers and programmed rhythms, acoustic instruments are what you use if you want to sound really earnest, and so on; this is another way of saying that every other kind of music just wishes it could be the rock ‘n’ roll of the ’60s.)

Merritt’s response to that argument is, effectively: okay, you bastards, if that’s what you want, come and get it. Realism is almost entirely performed with acoustic instrumentation (some guitars, but also harp, toy piano, accordion, “found” percussion, and so on); its songs toy with the tropes of folk music, not in the sense of songs of unknown authorship that belong to the oral tradition but rather in the sense of pop with acoustic instrumentation (the “folk music” of ’60s starlets). The joke is, of course, that it could not possibly be more affected, more constructed, less “real” or less real-sounding–and that the mere fact of its being pop music does as much to make it unreal as anything about the particular details of its composition and performance and recording.

But Realism-as-”realism” seems like a riposte to a straw man. In the ’90s, the idea that a square, history-steeped, not particularly loud, grooveless, timbre-obsessed, deeply formalist little band like the Magnetic Fields could be part of a punk rock-dominated alternative-music landscape was surprising and thrilling. In 2010, when the alternative-music landscape’s champions include Animal Collective, the Dirty Projectors, the Decemberists and Grizzly Bear–none of whom particularly privilege “realness”–and when doctrinaire rock ‘n’ roll star Bruce Springsteen has released a Magnetic Fields soundalike song (“Girls In Their Summer Clothes”), it’s not such a big deal. The problem may simply be that some of Merritt’s ideas have already won their battles.

Or it could be that he’s letting the album’s concept do most of the work. If Merritt’s stock-in-trade is, as Robert Christgau once put it, “more songs about songs and songs,” then Realism seems at first in danger of being more Magnetic Fields songs about Magnetic Fields songs and Magnetic Fields songs. Its opener, “You Must Be Out of Your Mind,” has a Fields-by-numbers arrangement right down to its cello countermelody, and a lyric that covers pretty much the same territory as 69 Love Songs’ opener, “Absolutely Cuckoo.” “The Dolls’ Tea Party,” with its plinky toy pianos, is a lesser variation on Merritt’s (delightful) “Coraline” songs.

It may be unfair to expect an artist as deeply invested in the idea of genre and conventions as Merritt is to move beyond his own. (“Do something a little out of character it won’t kill you,” he mutters on “The Dada Polka,” supposedly a previously unreleased track recorded in the ’80s.) The way he’s using genre on Realism, though, sometimes threatens to turn the Magnetic Fields into a novelty act. There’s always been a touch of comedy about Merritt’s lyrics, but his best jokes–think of 69 Love Songs’ “Papa Was a Rodeo,” or “Strange Powers”‘ romantic evocation of a ferris-wheel scene “under more stars than there are prostitutes in Thailand”–come off as the bubbling-up of real bitterness or despair. Even “The Nun’s Litany,” the jokiest song on Distortion, was also the most cutting: an escalating catalogue of depravities that doubles as a dead-on commentary on longing for sexual identity.

Realism’s “Seduced and Abandoned,” on the other hand, is nothing but a jape: a broad burlesque of he-done-me-wrong folk laments, sung by Merritt in his most cod-lugubrious Irish balladeer’s voice. “Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree,” a sort of “Daydream Believer”/Donovan pastiche, runs out of ideas after a minute or so and throws in a beery chorale sung in German: ha ha. (It does, however, include the album’s emblematic line: “Must your every word be sincere?” Both the sentiment and the syntax are pure Merritt.) The cult-folk singalong “We Are Having a Hootenanny” features a jolly ensemble declaiming “Come and take our personality quizzzzzz!” It’s funny once.

And yet there are the gifts that Merritt probably couldn’t shake off if he tried: perfectly formed melodies, a mastery of arrangement that makes every instrument sound like it was built specifically for his purposes, a knack for loading affectless singing with emotional force. (The way he intones “you must be out of your mind, son” is both funnier and more striking than the way he rhymes “down on your knees, yeah” with “sans anesthesia” a few seconds earlier.) Nearly every song here includes elements so beautifully executed that the clinkers and infelicities wrapped up with them are doubly irksome.

The one inarguable keeper on Realism is “Always Already Gone,” a gorgeous waltz-time farewell whose sole joke is that its hook lifts a turn of phrase from modish literary theory. It’s not particularly a folk song, or an acoustic song; it doesn’t have anything much to do with the album’s theme. It’s just a melancholy, immaculately formed thing. And the fact that it stands out in its company suggests a weird leftover shard of rockism lurking near the heart of this least rockist of bands: the idea that the album takes precedence over the song–that formal gestures are more meaningfully applied to a suite of songs than to an individual three-minute tune. It’s strange and frustrating that Merritt, with his enormous command of pop history, keeps aiming for concept albums at the expense of individual songs. He’s capable of much more than stunts.