I’ll preface this by saying that I’ve never been much of a comic book freak. I had childhood flirtations with X-Men, Spiderman, and, of course, Wolverine, but it didn’t take long for me to grow out of them. The rampant use of dues ex machina, the soap opera relationships, and the sometimes unintelligible back-stories and tie-ins quickly had me throwing up my hands in despair at the superhero genre altogether. It was actually William Blake that wooed me back, half-unwilling, to the pages of story told with pictures. So, now I’m discovering late a bunch of comics that lots of people like me probably never discovered at all.

Transmetropolitan Vol. 2

One of the first books I read upon returning to the fold was Transmetropolitan, and it’s still one of the best. Think Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Blade Runner. Spider Jerusalem, a drug-addled gonzo journalist of the future is forced out of seclusion by his publishers. Armed only with his laptop, a pair of camera-glasses and a ray-gun called “the bowel disruptor” (which does pretty much what it sounds like) Jerusalem proceeds to rampage all over the dystopian city of the future, culminating in a battle of words with two corrupt presidents.

The story, characters, and art are simultaneously engrossing and gross; I think there’s more vomit than sex in the series, which I know isn’t selling it, but there’s something less cheap about vomit in a comic book. I mean, I don’t often hear people exclaim, “That’s just how it is: vomit sells! We need more vomit!”  But bowel-disruptors and other ejaculations from various orifices aside, the story pulls you in with a coherent over-arching plot bedecked now and again with amusing side-shows that are expertly interwoven back into the main line by the end of the series. Oh, and that’s another thing going for it: this series knew how to end. I don’t know if the creators had the ending in mind from the beginning, but it reads like they did, like a satisfying novel rather than a rambling attempt to end every little stint with a cliffhanger and see how long they could drag me along.

Jerusalem himself is also surprisingly coherent (as a character, not as a person). He’s a little schizophrenic, but one passably assumes that this is due to his steady diet of unnamed narcotics and not due to unimaginative writers forcing their characters into bizarre molds to fit whatever absurd story happened to occur to them on that particular day. And, though he’s not even super-likable, which I always found likable in hero, you still find yourself rooting for him most of the time.

Meanwhile, throughout the series the writers use their darkly comical vision of the future to deal ironically with issues both real and invented. Corporate corruption allows the use of information pollen, a kind of biological advertising agent that causes incurable degenerative mental diseases. The perpetual absurdity of our party system is personified in the Evil and Eviler Presidential candidates, one of whom is modeled after Nixon, the other of whom masturbates into an American flag while editing the Constitution. Gender issues are dealt with by way of the transient movement, a group of social outcasts who splice their genes with that of aliens to transform their bodies. The preservation of culture in the face of progress is accomplished through a system of “Reservations” in which people sacrifice modernity to constantly reenact otherwise extinct forms of human culture. And, perhaps most hilariously, the apathetic attempts to rehabilitate thawed cryogenic refugees mock our desire to forget our cities’ least desirable occupants.  It’s all there, and it’s all funny, and most of it is pretty smart.

Perhaps the coup of this book, though, was the fact that Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise, bitches!) expressed an interest to the writers in playing the aging Jerusalem in an as-yet-undeveloped movie adaptation. I don’t know about anyone else, but the thought of Stewart playing a sex-crazed, drug addled, cyberpunk Hunter S. Thompson gets my geekdar pinging… Although, with our luck, the movie would just be picked up by JJ Abrams, Stewart replaced with Tom Cruise, and all the vomit would just be CGI glittering with lens flare. But we can still dream.

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1. Complain about their busy hectic life

For the lucky rich people who don’t have to work, making their life seem busy becomes their full-time job. They litter their days with pointless appointments to give the illusion of productivity. “I can’t meet you for a four-hour lunch today. I have to meet my scoliosis fundraising team to discuss streamer options! You obviously don’t get that I actually have a lot of responsibilities with my charity. They depend on me!” Things other people would see as luxuries are viewed as absolute necessities to them. “I can’t miss yoga. That’s like asking me to die. Do you want me to die?!” I lived in Beverly Hills for a hot minute (#dark) and would see women behave like this every day, scurrying from lunch to eyebrow threading to their yoga studio with such a sense of purpose, like they were going to a business meeting or something. If I didn’t have to work and someone asked me what I did for a living, I would just say nothing. Why is honesty such an issue? It’s an easier pill to swallow than having to pass off “charity supervisor” as a real occupation.

2. Have anxiety

Sometimes when you grow up with a lot of money, you become ill-equipped at dealing with real life issues. The wealth coddles you and creates a protective bubble, making insignificant problems seem like the biggest deal ever. Rich people love to be stressed out. It’s like their favorite thing other than buying bars of organic soap that cost forty dollars. The following things can trigger a full-blown anxiety attack: Organizing a party, bad help, bad weather, bad food, airplanes, stingy doctors, poor people, being in love, exes, and most of all, vacations. Oh, don’t even utter the word vacation! It sends chills down a rich person’s spine because vacations involve lots of planning, breathing, and moving from place to place. There’s also luggage involved, which terrifies them! “Aggh, take that big boxlike thing away! What does it want from me? My clothes? Well it can’t have them!” It’s weird because the things that bring most people joy are the same things that cause rich people to have complete meltdowns. Freaks!

3. Travel in packs

Rich people typically stick to their own kind. Maybe it’s because they all grew up in the same neighborhoods and attended the same schools, but socializing strictly within your own class is a very real thing. I’ve hung out in groups where the words “vacationing in the Hamptons” was treated as NBD. Conversely, I’ve hung out in groups that couldn’t fathom the concept of vacationing outside their own bedroom. It’s like they speak two different languages: “Oh, just another Prada bag”, and “I wish I had money to eat.” I find this implicit division of the classes fascinating and also sort of unnerving, which I guess also sums up my feelings towards money in general.

4. Shop/eat/workout/do anything in a special entitled atmosphere that’s designed for other rich people

Fact: The best part about being rich is that you have your very own bourgie grocery store, gym, neighborhoods, coffee shops, restaurants, airlines etc. You can belong to all of these exclusive clubs and fraternize with other rich people, making it so you don’t have to deal with the riffraff at Safeway or the YMCA. You can go to Gelson’s and Equinox Gym! Thank God! “I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t pay twenty dollars for an Asian pear!” Overpaying for things is the oxygen that rich people need to breathe!

5. Pretend they’re poor

Occasionally you’ll encounter someone who has so much guilt about being wealthy that they’ll try to adapt a blue-collar lifestyle to fit in. I once knew a guy who came from serious money, but would always talk about getting a job as a dishwasher. I’d be like, “You live in a doorman building in downtown Manhattan. You even have a dishwasher in your apartment. What’s the deal?” He just couldn’t deal. He wanted to struggle for his money so he would turn his luxurious apartment into a thrift store Grandpa den and act as if he couldn’t afford a falafel. Pretending that you’re broke when you actually have a lot of money can be just as bad as behaving like a grandiose snob. Telling someone who actually doesn’t have any money that you want a real honest {read:humiliating) job is sort of rude and insensitive, right?

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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.