The publication history of Spider-Man is rife with stories that regularly appear on lists of “all-time” best Spider-Man stories, all-time great comics, etc. One story that belongs on that list, but hardly finds representation in that roster is “The Daydreamers” (Amazing Spider-Man #246, released on August 2, 1983). I can think of no other story to inaugurate the first of a semi-regular series where I do close-readings of my favorite comics (both Spider-Man and non Spider-Man), some famous and well known, some less so. Join me on my first deep-dive.
There’s a point in fandom where you go from checking up the official lists of best stories, to making your own “discovery”. We all have the version of that: the little known song on that little known album by a major musician or music group that nobody talks about, that unheralded film, the little-seen episode. Discovery like that is as close as it gets to stumbling a priceless relic in some forgotten cave, cellar, flea market (see Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin to see this trope in action in the opening scenes).
If I were to name my “discovery” it would be “The Daydreamers” written by Roger Stern, penciled by John Romita Jr. Now of course, there have been people who have talked up this great issue. Amazing Spider-Talk listed this as a “lost gem” [1]. Roger Stern himself in an interview with George Khoury cited this as one of his favorites from his run [2]. In my opinion, it’s one of the greatest stories in Amazing Spider-Man with some of the sharpest and most poetic storytelling; an example of the subtlety and nuance one can achieve in a “traditional” superhero story.
“WORLDS OF THOUGHT AND MIND”
ASM#246 begins with The Watcher, the Marvel Universe’s all-purpose narrator figure who knows and sees all, introducing the theme of the comic, which explores the “daydreams” of four characters: Felicia Hardy/Black Cat, J. Jonah Jameson, Mary Jane Watson, Peter Parker/Spider-Man. The Watcher, best known for intervening during “The Coming of Galactus” and introducing Marvel’s What If comics, acknowledges his ability to see other worlds. But he describes in this comic, “worlds not of energy and matter, but of thought and mind…worlds which exist only in the imagination of the dreamers and…” which segues right into the issue’s title of “The Daydreamers!”.
The framing device provides the issue with the aspect of an anthology comic. “The Daydreamers” is a series of vignettes of a few pages exploring the four characters (in order: Felicia->Jameson->Mary Jane->Spider-Man) rather than a single overarching plot. At the same time, the way Stern and JRJR structure the story from start to end gives it an overarching unity; much in the way a Robert Altman ensemble movie groups together a series of seemingly disconnected episodes with a thematic and stylistic continuity.
- The first vignette concerns Felicia Hardy/Black Cat who is at the start of the story, hospitalized. She’s restless and laments that the doctors have taken her costume and prescribed rest. Then Spider-Man arrives through the window and offers her the forbidden Black Cat costume, and takes Felicia on an adventure.
- We then transition to J. Jonah Jameson on his way to the Daily Bugle in a garish 1980s tracksuit. As Jameson looks at the latest headlines praising Spider-Man he fumes only for Spider-Man to arrive and annoy him.
- We transition to Mary Jane Watson walking past the Schubert Theater alongside an acting buddy and she sees a poster marquee announcing auditions for a theatrical production.
- Spider-Man is perched below a building and he glimpses Jameson getting jumped by villains and then drops a camera that captures an epic battle where he saves Jameson’s life. Upon victory, Spider-Man is approached by the Fantastic Four and The Avengers to join their respective teams.
- CODA: Spider-Man sees a child bullied by students for his reading habit. Spider-Man dives down and rescues the kid and helps him gather his books and gives him life lessons.
BREAKDOWNS
Looking at ASM#246 as a standalone comic, one can readily see that the comic has four main characters. And here’s how it all breaks down, page by page, panel by panel.
- The narrative of the comic is quite diligent in its composition, with John Romita Jr. using a five panel grid with a clean average panel per rate of 5 (22 Pages x 5 = 110 Total Panels). I haven’t done a comparison with Stern’s ASM run in total to contextualize it, but if I were to compare it to Ditko’s ASM run (till ASM#30), then it’s certainly less dense and sprawling by comparison. Ditko’s Average Panel/Page Rate tended to be 6 or 7. His lightest issue in panel weight (ASM#29) still ran 117 panels in 20 pages, far more than Romita Jr. achieves with 110 Panels in 22 Pages.
- While I have identified the 4 Main Characters of this issue, I felt it necessary to make everyone else into “extras”. This includes the Watcher, Aunt May, the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, Marla Jameson, as well as real-life celebrities like Cary Grant, Woody Allen, Meryl Streep, John Travolta. If I were to do a deep-dive of Stern’s run the way I covered Steve Ditko’s high school era then I’d identify these figures (save the celebrities) as key figures but for the standalone issue, they are too minor to count.
- “The Daydreamers” is a typical monthly superhero comic and as such there’s an expectation that it feature action. “The Daydreamers” is clearly a wistful character piece and not a superhero action story so Stern/JRJR cleverly put all the ‘action’ bits in the daydreams while the only bit of real action is Spider-Man appearing on scene to defend a bullied kid and scaring away his attackers. I’ve divided each page into “Character Scene” (aka a moment where characters are moving and interacting without punching someone) and “Action Scene” (showing fights and punch scenes).
- More interesting to me are the ‘transitions’ . Felicia, Jameson and Mary Jane transition to each other whereas Spider-Man starts right away but the end of Spider-Man’s daydream transitions into that of a civilian at the end. Showing a loop of daydreams, of reality going into fantasy and back again.
Focusing on just the four main characters:
- I have created separate columns for Spider-Man and Peter Parker because a good part of “The Daydreamers” relies on the fact that the characters in the story (seemingly in the case of Mary Jane) don’t know Peter Parker is Spider-Man. This applies to Felicia Hardy who doesn’t yet know Spider-Man’s identity, while Jameson clearly believes they are two people. Since Felicia’s daydream version of Spider-Man is “Cary Grant” it makes sense to identify that Spider-Man as “Spider-Man” and the same with Jameson’s Spider-Man whose fight is photographed by Peter Parker in that daydream.
- Given that the “Spider-Man” featured in the comic isn’t always Spider-Man/Peter Parker, the inflated appearances of Spider-Man at 51 Panels must be qualified. If I were rigid with the number of panels with the ‘real’ Spider-Man/Peter Parker it would be 28, which still makes him the ‘lead’ but not so far beyond Felicia, Jameson, MJ, or significantly upsetting the ensemble nature of this issue.
- Felicia Hardy gets 7 pages with 22 Panels, whereas Jameson achieves 22 Panels in 6 and Mary Jane falls two panels short with 20 Panels but with 5 Pages. That indicates the density of the character in their respective vignette. Jameson and Mary Jane are far more centered in their vignettes than Felicia is in hers, with more balloons in individual pages than hers.
- Of all the vignettes, Mary Jane Watson’s has exclusively character scenes without action. It’s also the one with the most ‘new’ material. The other vignettes play on established versions of the characters (Felicia, Jameson, Peter) and while revealing in its psychological portrait, it does not in any way provide additional backstory. Mary Jane’s vignette is the first hints of her backstory and origin that Roger Stern had conceptualized (his notes were referred to by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz when they outlined her origin in full in ASM#259). In publication history, it’s her section that has the most long-term continuity value, and certainly what attracted me to this issue when my online friend Menshevik referred to it off-handedly some six years ago. The closing Letters’ column has Danny Fingeroth in the farewell paragraph also single out Mary Jane Watson’s backstory as the most salient subplot to promote from this comic.
- It must be pointed out only Jameson’s vignette, and that of the child at the end, resembles actual day-dreaming in the person being fully conscious and actively participating whereas the other daydreams (Felicia, MJ, Peter) are structured like dream or nightmare sequences. The spirit of ‘daydreaming’ gives it a comedic approach, but the other daydreams seem out-there in going from active day-dreaming to actual fantasizing.
Data-crunching the issue is time-consuming and fun when you see the numbers reveal in concrete terms the stuff you intuited as a reader. In this case, we see how “The Daydreamers” is character driven rather than plot driven. That said, data-gathering is not interpretation. In general, most superhero comics are so formulaic that once you break them down into action scenes, panel appearances, recurring settings and figures, you pretty much know all there is to know. But a really good standout issue, and “The Daydreamers” is one, is different and it’s worth going over it vignette-by-vignette, using the data as tools to interpret more carefully.
COLLABORATION AND STYLE
Roger Stern liked using the “Plot-First Script” as elaborated here. The Plot-First Script is sometimes called “Marvel style” or “Marvel Method” but in my view this is imprecise because it conflates the Plot-First Script with Stan Lee’s collaborations with Ditko and Kirby which comics scholars are increasingly seeing as being of an altogether different kind.
Stern provided his collaborators with a script that narrated the story and images but left panel breakdowns to his artists. Ron Frenz has testified to this in his account of the collaboration behind “The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man”. So the fact that ASM#246 has a rigid 5 Panel Grid is down to John Romita Jr. and not Stern. Writers who use Full-Script typically have much more of a say on paneling and layout scene-by-scene and page-by-page. The layouts used by Romita Jr. where sometimes the five panels are arranged sequentially but other times are stacked rhythmically in sequence, either horizontally or vertically, seems Romita Jr’s doing and not Stern’s. There’s basically only one way to use a 9 Panel Grid on a typical size comics page but other grids offer variant layouts and “The Daydreamers” is good proof of it.
As such, we must discuss ASM#246 as a collaboration — between a writer with a humanist approach to character, a fine ear for dialogue, and effective tonal balance with a young artist with a dramatic flare for layout and scene breakdowns. For instance, the way JRJR conveys a great deal of Mary Jane’s sense of fear and guilt is fully apparent where following the appearance of her sister Gayle and her children, the next page’s top panel has this drastic close-up of MJ’s eyes which reflects fear, guilt, and self-loathing at once. In cinematic terms it’s called “the extreme close-up” (often called “beeg eyes” in faux-Italian because the spaghetti western director Sergio Leone used it in westerns like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and this is the only time we see it used in this comic.
The Plot-First Script has the writer hand the plotted out script to the artist who supplies the pencils, to which the writer then adds in the dialogue and the sound effects which is then submitted to the letterer (Joe Rosen for this issue). One thing that distinguishes “The Daydreamers” is that every aspect of the comic is telling the story, and we can clearly see that Stern after gaining Romita Jr.’s dramatic layout and paneling is complimenting the images with restrained use of dialogue and captions, complimenting the visual with the verbal, using very few thought bubbles and only when required. Stern also uses captions in a creative way working with Rosen to do interesting tricks especially at the end of the first vignette.
VIGNETTE #01:
“YOU’RE CARY GRANT!!”
The first vignette is obviously important in setting up the style, theme, motif of the comic.
- The trick of “The Daydreamers” is that it never specifies when reality moves into fantasy. It’s important for the readers to feel like the characters, and be confused about where waking life ends and daydreaming begins, just as the characters do in their scenes.
- The style of the comic, in the art and the text maintains a suspense that conflates reality with fantasy so we see Romita Jr. seguing from “objective reality” to “subjective impression” seamlessly without obvious visual tricks used to signify a dream or fantasy segue. So it’s left to the reader to figure out when dream is going to fantasy because it starts “real enough”.
- The first vignette is the longest because it has to set up the style and get the twist concept out of the way since once you do it the first time, it’ll be obvious from the latter vignettes when the segues and transitions are transpiring.
Felicia Hardy is the first of the four characters spotlighted in “The Daydreamers”. In many ways she’s the most fitting because the divide between fantasy and reality gets blurry around her in a way it doesn’t with other characters.
When the comic starts, Felicia is at a hospital. The captions tell us she was injured fighting alongside Spider-Man. An elegant introduction; telling us all we need to know to set up the scene. Continuity-buffs know that the events alluded to is “The Owl/Octopus War” (by Bill Mantlo and Al Milgrom, a great story in its own right) that ran in the pages of The Spectacular Spider-Man but Stern sets up the scene without any need for a recap or allusion. One can read this scene without any introduction or buildup.
- JRJR’s art in this sequence accentuates Felicia’s body in a manner catering to the “male gaze”. We see Felicia doing splits and stretching in a manner that seems to allude to the ‘gym craze’ of the 1980s.
- The first four panels show Felicia by herself and the fifth panel shows Spider-Man by the window. Felicia is bored because the doctors prescribed bed rest and have taken away her costume but Spider-Man brings her a spare.
- The first two pages of this vignette play similarly to previous Spider-Man and Felicia interactions in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man and The Spectacular Spider-Man. So if you read ASM#246 for the first time and were wondering when the daydream begins you might be confused because there’s no real separation between panels connoting ‘reality’ and the ‘fantasy’ because so far nothing is untoward and out of character.
Then Spider-Man takes Felicia web-swinging and now you get a hint that something’s off because Spider-Man says he and Felicia are going to steal stuff.
- Of course it’s a bit heroic because, “the burglary is in the name of freedom”. They land at an embassy with Felicia sent in a heist sequence that looks forward to the 90s Mission Impossible film.
- It’s a successful heist, no-drama and no fight scenes in and out (typically a heist scene should have some suspense) which is another clue that something is off because undramatic heists are not the stuff of a mainstream action comic.
- They then land in the docks and Spidey hands over stuff to a shady guy in a trenchcoat. So far, while the setup is a bit atypical, it’s not far from the typical Spidey/Black Cat story. The Owl/Octopus War which ran in the pages of The Spectacular Spider-Man also had high wire pulp action like neutron bombs, gang wars, fights in the dockyards, underground bases.
Then we have the final page and it’s worth going through it, bit by bit.
- JRJR uses five panels but this one is five rectangles stacked on top, so you have to read it top to bottom rather than the other pages which made you go from left to right.
- The first panel has Spider-Man and Felicia saying goodbye to the agent on the docks and Spider-Man heading to the rear of the yacht.
[Fun Fact: In nautical terminology the rear of the boat is called the stern].
- Then the next two panels has Spider-Man say that the boat is in fact his yacht and that’s the first direct confirmation something is off. Because Spider-Man doesn’t own yachts and will likely never own them. Not merely because of low income but because Peter generally does seem to be environmentally conscious and has reasonably good taste.
- Felicia herself is amazed that Spider-Man owns a yacht and Spider-Man then says there’s many things she doesn’t know. The balloon overlaps between the third and fourth panel as Spider-Man unmasks and reveals himself to be Cary Grant to Felicia’s shock.
- Cary Grant was a movie star from the 1930s to the 1960s famous for playing romantic comedies as a suave sophisticated smooth guy (A more recent actor in his mold is George Clooney of the early 2000s). He appeared in notable films by Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. His performance in North by Northwest was an inspiration for the James Bond movies, and he also played a sophisticated cat burglar in another Hitchcock film To Catch A Thief (which Felicia explicitly refers to in the next page as the movie she had seen the previous night).
The final panel is interesting because it has a “The End” logo stamped next to another balloon designed in a yellow spark (separate from the other balloons) going “Miss Hardy! What are you doing–“.
- This is the first time the comic tips its hand and makes a hard extra-diegetic separation between reality and fantasy. We have the fantastic “The End” title in Page 6 of a monthly non-anthology comic that runs around 22 pages. And the second balloon indicates per the genre norms, a voice from someone outside the story indicating we’ve had a dream sequence.
- We then snap to reality and we see Felicia outside her bed on the floor chastised by her doctor. So at most everything from the fifth panel of Page 2 to the first panel of Page 7 is a fantasy.
Felicia then laments that Spider-Man is probably not Cary Grant but she hopes he’s cool. For reference, here’s her reaction when she found out Spider-Man’s identity for real. The later issue, her revulsion on realizing that Spider-Man is simple working-class student Peter Parker, makes all the more sense upon reading this issue and being inside Felicia’s fantasies.
FELICIA FANTASIA
If we look at the number of balloons in this vignette, we can see that Spider-Man in Felicia’s daydream has 23 balloons, while Felicia has 18 Balloons overall. Felicia’s fantasy frames Spider-Man as the active figure who can sweep her off her feet, in sharp contrast to how in her reality she’s the one who stumbles into Spider-Man’s life and wrecks his routine. This indirect psychological approach presents a fair bit of insight into Felicia as a character.
Black Cat was only a recent addition in 1983. She made her debut in ASM#194, created by Marv Wolfman and Keith Pollard. After Wolfman stepped down (ASM#204), Black Cat was shelved until Roger Stern brought her back in a two part story (ASM#226-227) that more or less codified her personality and dynamic. Bill Mantlo then developed her subsequently in the satellite title The Spectacular Spider-Man. He made Spider-Man and Black Cat into a romance which Stern didn’t address until this issue.
Felicia Hardy is generally speaking a very weird character among the Spider-Man supporting cast.
- Other characters have a plausibility in terms of social background but Felicia is a walking mid-century pulp throwback. We can talk of Spider-Man supporting characters in terms of class and background, but a cat burglar who seems to never have had issues with education and work, and steals for the thrill and is somehow a capable thief feels incredibly remote from the other characters in “The Daydreamers” leave alone other Spider-Man characters in general.
- Stern emphasizes this artifice in her characterization here. With Felicia as a protagonist, as readers we can immediately buy segues like stealing documents from foreign embassies on behalf of Uncle Sam. What we can’t buy is Spider-Man by her side in that world.
- Felicia’s fantasy projection of Cary Grant as Spider-Man based on Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief likewise dates her as old fashioned. Cary Grant had long retired by 1983, Alfred Hitchcock had died in 1980 and while he was still famous to young readers of the 1980s: To Catch A Thief would have been a much more dated reference compared to more recent films. The reference emphasizes how much Felicia is wrapped up in fantasy, basing her identity on mid-century pulp glamour.
- The interesting thing is that her daydream runs up to “The End” in the style of an old movie and it takes an external voice to snap her out of it. Suggesting that Felicia’s sense of reality always blurs towards fantasy. This contrasts heavily with the other characters.
When Felicia snaps back she laments briefly about her daydreaming and her longing for Spider-Man to be Cary Grant. This illustrates the mood of the comic and daydreaming in general, which tends to mix a quiet sadness with a light approach. One longs for the most far away things in our present day. Which shows the deft way in which Stern uses genre tropes and characters to address things we deal with in our real life. The main thing this vignette does is comment on the nature of comics character and their ability to connect to the reader by common references. How realistic and believable can Felicia be if her fantasies aren’t so far from her reality?
VIGNETTE #02:
“THE BUGLE PRINTS THE NEWS”
We transition in the same page from Felicia’s vignette-end to the start of the next.
- We see two panels showing the Daily Bugle from the outside, and then showing the printing presses on the inside. Then we see Jameson walking into office in a purple tracksuit.
- The next page uses a 6-panel grid which amounts to a typical JRJR five-panel with an additional single panel pillar on the left, showing a full-page size Jameson walking with total swagger and confidence, almost as if he’s in some hip TV show or a major celebrity.
- Jameson reads the latest edition of the Bugle and harrumphs at the positive headline for Spider-Man, only to be interrupted by Spider-Man noses in and mocks him by insisting that if not for him nobody would care for that magazine. This enrages Jameson who tears up the magazine.
- In the next page, Jameson clobbers Spider-Man and beats him silly while the staff in the press and the Daily Bugle staff (including photographers Lance Bannon and Peter Parker) show up and document their boss’ triumphs. Then Jameson’s wife, Marla shows up.
- Marla hugs Jonah whose hair grows long and loses its grays, while the press staff hands him the updated edition showing the fight everyone witnessed.
- It transitions out of the daydream when Jameson himself flashes out of his young dreamy self to his present self thinking to himself, “A shame it can’t be that way. But the Bugle prints the news…not fiction.”
The last page which transitions to the next vignette has a cool gag, where Jameson likens Spider-Man to a bad habit while he himself snuffs out a cigar whose tobacco content is injurious to his health (and would be banned in Marvel comics for all cigar smokers around the 2000s).
JAMESON’S BAD HABIT
The Jameson vignette is obviously shorter than the Felicia one because as the middle story and bridge to the rest, it obviously lacks the twist element of dividing fantasy from reality that was kept in suspense in the Felicia sequence, so Stern and JRJR go for obvious visual comedy.
- It’s much more obvious and outlandish when Jameson’s daydream begins, i.e. when Spider-Man arrives and Jameson decks him in the face and beats him up.
- The main comedy is Jameson himself. We see him strut into the Bugle in a garish purple tracksuit of the kind we hardly have seen him sport before at any time. Certainly Ditko’s Jameson who was a dignified old fashioned newsman wouldn’t have been caught wearing this outfit. So the tracksuit has the air of Jameson trying to keep himself young, getting into the 1980s exercise fad (which we saw referred to with Felicia in the first vignette), and the subtext of this comic is in part Jameson feeling his age, being a bit out of touch, having a rivalry with an obviously younger person (Spider-Man). The opening caption describing the Bugle presses also alludes nostalgically to “the odor of printer’s ink and old newsprint” that is toxic to most but not to Jameson who loves his job and is passionate about his vocation as a journalist.
- Where Spider-Man’s appearance in Felicia’s daydream initially seems plausible this one avoids it entirely with Peter Parker showing up as a separate person taking photographs of Jameson’s victory.
- Jameson is the oldest of the four characters, so it makes sense to emphasize his age and the subtext of “mid-life crisis” that hangs over this comic. After beating Spider-Man, Marla his wife rushes in and gives him a hug while JRJR’s art shows Jameson with a 80s style mullet and losing all his grey hairs. Jameson gets hot before our eyes and we can sense from the images the yearning to be as young as his wife (not exactly ‘may december’ but certainly a decade or so younger and has no gray hairs) and also the desire to be a young superhero in a gaudy costume hence sporting a tracksuit.
What redeems Jameson finally is that he’s able to take control over his fantasy. He snaps out of his daydream by himself unlike the other characters, unlike Spider-Man himself, and is able to indulge in his vain dreams while being a bit at peace at his current lot, even if he’s still clueless about his “bad habits” such as cigar smoking. There’s underneath it all, an immature maturity to Jameson.
VIGNETTE#03:
“A PART FOR ME IN YOUR LIFE STORY”
The Jameson vignette ends and then transitions to the outside of the Shubert Theatre on Broadway. Mary Jane Watson is walking alongside an actor friend making plans for a dinner date.
- Mary Jane sees a theater marquee and comments about her love for theater and a need to see her name in lights.
- She then turns behind and sees the marquee advertising “The Mary Jane Watson Story” and then finds herself mobbed by press and autograph hounds.
- She then enters the theater and sees performers auditioning for roles of people in the biographical play. Meryl Streep (yes, that Meryl) auditions for the role of Mary Jane but is rejected by the producer who reduces her to tears (!). The producer then decides that Mary Jane should play herself on broadway.
- Mary Jane reads for her part, where John Travolta plays Spider-Man and Woody Allen plays Peter Parker. Both major stars praise MJ and she’s mobbed by the press again.
- Then Mary Jane hears a voice in the corner and turns back and sees her sister Gayle standing with her two children asking if there’s, “a part for me in your life story?” leaving Mary Jane shocked.
She then snaps out of the dream but walks away with a look of fear, guilt and remorse on her face.
THE MARY JANE WATSON STORY
The Mary Jane Watson vignette is interesting for a variety of reasons:
- Where the Jameson and Felicia daydreams have hints of action, the Mary Jane Watson vignette is without action of any kind. It’s purely dramatic and it’s material could have been carved out and put in any independent comic about a struggling young actress in a big city.
- The Mary Jane Watson is also exceptional because where Felicia and Jameson are essentially the same characters in the regular ongoing at the time (i.e. Felicia approaches supervillainy as a fantasy roleplay, Jameson is an old windbag with a sense of grandiosity), MJ is a drastically altered character in this vignette.
Not that Roger Stern was the first to write Mary Jane dramatically.
- Gerry Conway did it from the end of ASM#122 to his final issue of ASM#149. Yet Stern was the first to attempt to provide a psychological basis that explained the inconsistencies of Mary Jane’s character ever since her first appearance(s). Before Conway, MJ was written by Stan Lee to be a flaky joke character. Conway made her work as an effective partner to Peter Parker but he never really did much to explain why the serious version of Mary Jane in his run didn’t surface before.
- The explanation was that Gwen Stacy’s death left a mark on the character and that did make sense but then after Conway stepped away, writers who came after like Len Wein and Marv Wolfman backslided the character to what they saw as a “default”. Rather than progressing along the character handed down to them, they regressed the character. Ironically enough, it was Marv Wolfman who first hinted there was more to Mary Jane’s life when he had an errant thought bubble in her final appearance claim her parents were divorced [3].
- Mary Jane then dropped out of the title for some 40 issues until Roger Stern’s run. She returned in Amazing Spider-Man #238 and Stern had developed and outlined a backstory for her which he slowly set out to unfurl. In ASM#247 (right after this issue), Aunt May when explaining to Peter why she tried to match him up with Mary Jane explained, “you’ve both lost so…so very much” saying “You have more in common that you might think”.
“The Daydreamers” is a great chance for Stern to get inside Mary Jane’s consciousness and reveal aspects of herself while also teasing out her origins that ultimately Stern left for Tom Defalco and Ron Frenz to put into effect in Amazing Spider-Man #259.
It also leads to a lot of interesting experimental touches in storytelling as used by JRJR:
- For one thing we have repeated visual rhymes. Three panels of Mary Jane staring over her shoulder glancing backwards with a kind of fearful/haunted look. The first is when the daydream begins, the second is when she gazes back and sees her sister Gayle and her children, and the last is right at the very end.
- The segues also have a more stream-of-consciousness association. For instance, when MJ transitions out of her daydreams back to reality, it comes because the word “sister” visually and aurally conflates between her biological sister Gayle and a Nun passing by in her way. We don’t see such word associations in the Felicia flashback (where the doctor calls her out and snaps her back) or Jameson’s (where he steps out himself), and Spider-Man that comes after.
The result is that MJ’s daydream feels most fully realized of the vignettes as comics storytelling.
- Mary Jane is obviously desirous of fame and success, but her daydream also hints at a great sense of guilt, and an unexpressed tragedy that comes from leaving the world she was born and wanting to leave her roots, and abandoning the people she loved for her career. So her daydream is serious and lacking in comedy.
- Mary Jane gets fame in her daydream but she’s not satisfied by it, and doesn’t feel she deserves it. When she sees “The Mary Jane Watson Story” on broadway the daydream implies she’s already famous, thanks to autograph people praising her, but she doesn’t want fame so much as wanting to be up on stage, auditioning and performing, unable to imagine herself outside her ‘striving for success’ phase.
- Likewise, as an actress, Mary Jane auditions to play herself or rather a version of herself, which is mostly the flaky version of Mary Jane from the Lee-Romita era. Normally performers dream of playing other people, or great roles of theater but Mary Jane thinks that her own life is quite the performance in and of itself. Hinting that she’s spent a lot of time hiding her true self and putting on a show for people around her.
The non-verbal association of the character is quite rich and detailed in this section. The sequence showing the auditions for “The Mary Jane Watson Story” are likewise rich in allegory:
Right: Actual Meryl with normally proportionate eyes (and let’s face it, young Meryl would totally crush it as Mary Jane).
- We see Mary Jane watching “Meryl Streep” (a very poor likeness by JRJR of early 80s Meryl it must be said, the eyes are way too big). Meryl is blonde of course and she offers to dye her hair color (a reference even at the time to her famous commitment to her roles). On the other hand, Meryl allegorically stands in for Gwen Stacy, the blonde female love interest who was upstaged by Mary Jane in star power and charisma.
- The reference to Meryl dying her hair perhaps alludes to the few issues in ASM comics of the 1960s where a coloring mistake gave Mary Jane “blonde hair” by mistake, as well as referring to how Gwen Stacy was converted from her original design into a semi-clone of MJ with blonde hair on the latter’s popularity.
- Then we see Mary Jane reading scenes of her life, including bits of her previous interactions with Spider-Man and Peter, with Spider-Man played by “John Travolta” (in his 1970s Saturday Night Fever) and Peter Parker is played by “Woody Allen” (well before the controversy in the early 90s that resurged the last five years).
- It was established later on that Mary Jane knew Peter was Spider-Man for a considerable time and so it’s a funny thing for her to divide Spider-Man the superhero and Peter Parker the constant worry-wort into corresponding star actor types. This might be Roger Stern weighing in, through Mary Jane’s cinephilia, his own thoughts on who “might” play Spider-Man in live-action feeling it would need to be someone as nebbish as Woody Allen on the inside and as tough and macho looking as Travolta on the outside.
- But leaving that aside it’s interesting that Mary Jane sees herself in a love triangle between Peter and Spider-Man. MJ knowing the secret identity wasn’t what Roger Stern intended (that was Defalco and Frenz’s innovation) but in either case, in narrative terms, Stern implies that Mary Jane sees a subconscious connection between her and Peter in both having double lives, and that Peter’s only competition is Spider-Man rather than say Flash Thompson or Harry Osborn, or her actor friend Greg who accompanies her.
The connection between Mary Jane and Peter in having similar connections and personality is much stronger in the final vignette transitioning right from her to Spider-Man, establishing parallels between the two that in some way or form shaped the characters. In many ways, “The Daydreamers” is the ancestor to the Spider-Man OGN Parallel Lives by Gerry Conway and Alex Saviuk.
VIGNETTE#04:
“I NEVER SET OUT TO BE A HERO”
Spider-Man is perched upside down below a ledge gazing at the Avengers Mansion. He ponders about whether he should join the Avengers or if he’s cut for the big leagues.
- He then spies on Jameson running to work in his purple tracksuit (which at the very least hints that Jameson is known in this aspect among his coworkers and that the purple tracksuit thing is a real bit from his off-panel life).
- Jameson then gets jumped and attack by several villains including Spider-Man’s full active rogues gallery as well as rogues from the wider Marvel Universe (Doctor Doom, Absorbing Man etc). Spider-Man dives in and beats all of them at once while his camera becomes giant size and captures it all, including a shot of Jameson kissing Spider-Man’s boot in gratitude.
- The photo of Jameson kissing Spidey’s boot nets Peter a Pulitzer which he collects in person. Then his University Professor announces that Peter’s scientific paper has ground-breaking scientific potential and that Peter’s likely to get, “a Nobel to go with your Pulitzer.”
- Peter’s uncomfortable with this attention and then decides to bail out as Spider-Man. He goes web-swinging only to find The Avengers and the Fantastic Four both of whom fight to have him included in their rosters.
- Peter argues he can rep both teams as long as they agree on his time-table which Captain America agrees but then he catches a glimpse of Peter’s ‘real identity’ on his shield and both Avengers and Fantastic Four walk away, leaving Peter alone and sad.
A NOBEL TO GO WITH YOUR PULITZER?
Roger Stern’s vignette of Spider-Man and Peter’s daydream is really interesting for how atypical it is from what a number of people think is the default character of Peter:
- Rather than emphasize guilt or forgiveness from the ghosts of the past, Stern focuses instead on Peter’s yearning for fame and acceptance.
- In doing so, Stern returns to the original instinct of the character. When Peter first got bitten by a radioactive spider in Amazing Fantasy #15, his original instinct wasn’t heroic or vengeful, but merely a longing for fame and success. He became a showbiz performer.
- This original instinct and yearning for fame is related at the end where after he’s rejected by the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, Peter admits, “I never set out to be a hero! It was an accident!”
What the daydream hints is that deep down Peter doesn’t consider himself a superhero. At the same time the dream also hints that Peter doesn’t consider himself to be fully Peter Parker either.
- When Peter achieves fame after winning a Pulitzer, he then gets mobbed by his professor that he’s also won a Nobel. The level of discomfort Peter feels at achieving fame for something he did in his “Peter” identity makes him very uncomfortable.
- He then dresses up as Spider-Man and goes web-swinging, signifying that Peter Parker such as he is does compartmentalize himself into two aspects. He doesn’t see himself as wholly Peter or wholly Spider-Man but as both together.
Peter and Spider-Man both yearn for fame but also reject fame and are uncomfortable with it. Like Mary Jane, you have a character with an uncertain sense of identity with a lingering sense of guilt and unease.
- The vignette opens with a bombastic action set-piece where Spider-Man saves Jameson from an entire squad of rogues. And in the course of this battle, we see JRJR slip a great gag where Spider-Man tosses a camera to take photos but it’s not the regular camera but a professional caliber camera with a tripod and a telephoto lens. The camera gets giant-size as it records an entire fight in detail.
- Later when Spider-Man is head-hunted by The Avengers and the Fantastic Four, which has an air of athlete being scouted by two major football teams, we see that what ends the fantasy is when Captain America’s shield magically reveals Spider-Man unmasked as Peter Parker with both major teams rejecting Spider-Man as a skinny kid (though at the time Peter was in his early 20s, and not exceptionally younger than Johnny Storm among others).
The use of the giant camera and the reflection conveys a theme of Peter constantly in the gaze of other’s eyes. Spider-Man is meant to be seen by the world. After all, Peter originally created the costume to perform on television in AF#15, and in his job as freelance photographer, he records his fights with villains and sells the photos to Jameson. And yet, eventually when he gets the respect of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, by magic, his reflection reveals him as Peter an act which punctures his dream.
It’s a hint that deep down Spider-Man isn’t as purely fantastic a genre character as the other Avengers and the Fantastic Four who mostly don’t have civilian identities or a real sense of private life. Spider-Man is too bisected a character to work entirely one mode or one way. Never entirely Peter and never entirely Spider-Man, but both together.
CODA:
I CAN DREAM, CAN’T I?
Spider-Man sees a boy being bullied.
- The child is picked on for wearing glasses and reading, and Spider-Man dives in after the bullies knock him down.
- Spider-Man dives down and saves the kid and then helps him pick up his books. Spider-Man praises his reading habit but warns him not to get too caught up in his reading habit that he forgets the real world.
- The boy sees Spider-Man flying away, in awe at his superpowers and his kindness. He laments that he’ll never be like him but, “I can dream, can’t I?” and he imagines Spider-Man wearing glasses much like him.
The final coda of Spider-Man is quite obviously Stern addressing the default comics reader who is incarnated in the skinny boy with glasses:
- Readers of comics of the early 80s were presumed to be young teenagers much like this boy here. Today’s average comics reader is no longer that young. Though when I started reading Spider-Man comics, I was that age. The boy reads books and is hazed and bullied for doing so and Spider-Man comes to his rescue, being very much an allegory for Spider-Man coming to save the average reader in their lives.
- Spider-Man also gives the boy advice saying that reading is great but one must not neglect one’s life, which is Spider-Man addressing the reader telling them that reading comics is great but one must not let that get in the way of our lives.
- Spider-Man then swings away however the boy he rescues then segues into a daydream of being Spider-Man, i.e. Spider-Man swinging while wearing glasses just like him.
At the same time, there’s also an in-character epiphany here:
- Non-verbally, we as readers can tell that the kid being bullied is very much Peter Parker at the start of AF#15. When Spider-Man intervenes, which is the only bit of action that takes place in the ‘reality’ of the comic, he is essentially saving his past self.
- Spider-Man’s advice to the kid as such feels like a catharsis for him, and the reader, a sense that he can be for others what no one was for him as a young man. He can allow other people to live normal lives and appreciate and reconcile with their mundane issues of identity through the intervention of his story.
Daydreaming at heart is a longing for validating our present lives. Most of our lives are mundane and without adventure and we daydream because it’s not that we see our lives as mundane but we are aware that society sees our lives as mundane and that develops angst about the lives we should have instead of that which we have. All of “The Daydreamers” pivots on that theme and it does so non-verbally and lyrically.
CLASSICAL VERSUS DECONSTRUCTIVE
“The Daydreamers” is not a deconstructive comic, it’s a classical superhero genre story about hanging out with familiar characters and seeing what makes them tick.
Generally speaking, when people look at superhero comics, the assumption is that the only “mature” comics that can be found is stuff featuring self-aware humor and meta-jokes, stuff that features gratuitous violence, or deconstructive “end the genre” stories. The reigning aesthetic ideal is the works of Alan Moore and Frank Miller, and while those two creators did not intend it, their legacies are tied to the perception that they “ended” a more conventional style of superhero comics.
Roger Stern emerged as a contemporary of Moore and Miller in the 1980s, and between 1980-1987, Stern after serving as an editor on a variety of titles, went into a highly consistent and versatile period where he wrote two major runs on The Amazing Spider-Man and The Avengers, contributed a significant run on Doctor Strange and Captain America and eventually the Marvel OGN Triumph and Torment. These stories are on the surface typical superhero stories done straight, but in my opinion and others, they often have the same depth of character and insight that you find in Moore and Miller. Little of Stern’s later career matched his best work in the 1980s of course, but then that’s true of Frank Miller as well, and numerous other creators who peak early. In Stern’s case, the fact that his style of storytelling went out of fashion perhaps had a good deal to do with it.
Duy Tano of The Comics Cube pointed out:
People like Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison (and even Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, if you think about it) relied on the overturning of genre conventions, and such an approach would not have worked if these conventions were not firmly established to begin with. Although this approach definitely gets more acclaim and draws more attention to the writer, I think it is also quite a feat to actually be able to adhere to the conventions and to tell the best story you possibly can.
Duy Tano “Reclaiming History: Roger Stern.” Jan 19 2012. [4]
That’s what Bronze Age writers did, and that’s exactly what Roger Stern did. He did push some of the boundaries of superhero comics and ventured into territory that hadn’t been done before, but he never went so far as to give superheroes complex psychological issues, have them meet their creators in a metaphysical tale, or stoop to rape or decapitation as plot points. What he did was to tell a superhero story in comic book form to the utmost capability of his talents. And his talents were considerable.
I share Duy’s enthusiasm and judgment about Stern (i.e. one of the best “classical” genre writers). I am not sure I completely agree that Stern never gave complex “psychological issues” because I would argue that in works like “To Have Loved and Lost” (Doctor Strange Vol. 2 #55), Triumph and Torment and of course “The Daydreamers” he did in fact marry the superhero genre conventions and tropes to real-world relatable psychology.
The trick about the “classical” whether it’s the classic film, the classic blues song, the classic play is that they play with established conventions and framework but update and ground those conventions in something real and tangible. In film studies, a classical romantic comedy with a “happy ending” isn’t without complexity, nuance, and real emotional truth. The classic 1930s romantic comedy The Shop Around the Corner with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan was remade into the 90s rom-com You’ve Got Mail starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The 90s comedy has a more cynical sensibility, and self-aware acknowledgement of some of the “dated” elements of the 30s movie, but even with that, most would say that the original film of the 1930s is better overall because the conventions of the genre are grounded in emotional truth while the 90s movie, for all the charm of the actors, feels too hollow in its “knowingness” for mistaking cynicism for insight. It comments on genre conventions by self-awareness but the end result is that it only tells us about genre conventions and nothing about real life.
A lot of the deconstructive comics or self-proclaimed “deconstructive comics” are similarly handicapped because it’s more concerned with genre stuff than the ‘traditional’ comic using conventions as effective tools ever do. Mark Millar in stories like Civil War, Old Man Logan, The Ultimates is challenging our relationships to familiar genre and narrative tropes and disturbing our associations but the end result is empty of meaning and fun, unlike his best superhero work Marvel Knights: Spider-Man which is a conventional straightforward Spider-Man story that in small moments such as a high school reunion, interactions with supporting characters, and the final scenes touches on themes like mid-life crisis, impostor syndrome, guilt, and being in a marriage. It’s more than a little sad that the latter remains obscure (and uncollected) while his inferior works attracted attention less for its content and more because it fit the surface tenor of the times. It’s a good example as any to bring fresh attention to the seemingly “classical” approach.
Roger Stern/JRJR’s “The Daydreamers” works within the genre and expectations of a superhero comic and uses the trope to address stuff grounded in reality.
- “The Daydreamers” works as a quirky one-shot light on action story on Spider-Man, with a kind of wistful twist at the end. It works very well on the surface intent. So well, that it’s easy to mistake and neglect this comic because in Roger Stern’s run, the serial story of the Hobgoblin, the action-packed story of the Juggernaut, and the tearjerker of “The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man” (which followed 2 issues after “The Daydreamers” and feels like an extension of the final vignette) registers as more dramatic and serious than a comedic rumination on daydreaming.
- Beyond the surface level, we can see various characters as metaphors, Felicia Hardy so caught in living her fantasies that are daydreams are harder to separate from her ‘reality’ than for others. Jameson is the midlife crisis man who long experience has better prepared him to separate life from fantasy whereas Mary Jane and Peter are internally divided about their messy lives has resulted in a schismatic sense of self.
- At the same time it also works as four portraits of established characters in continuity that is completely standalone. Without any external references to pre-existing continuity, it presents a psychologically rich view of all four characters. More recent comics would present complicated references, and have the characters flashback to prominent “high notes” in continuity (think Spider-Man Blue) but Stern in this comic through motif of “daydreaming” stays in the present of these characters trusting that the characters are interesting on their own. That’s the classical approach at its best and most useful.
The classical approach done right eventually turns around and becomes modern when no one’s looking:
- While the story’s title character is Spider-Man, you have the spotlight shine on characters who aren’t Spider-Man and we only come to see the “protagonist” of the comic title in the final section. In other words, “The Daydreamers” is about privileging the supporting cast and giving them depth and shared spotlight. It entertains the possibility of Spider-Man not being a comic about action.
- The four characters are also individualized and separated. While two of the characters are defined by their relationship with Spider-Man (Felicia and Jameson), that relationship is defined by their perspectives and life experiences. Felicia wishes Spider-Man were Cary Grant rather than the real Spider-Man, while Jameson’s rivalry with Spider-Man is a vent for his mid-life crisis. Felicia is adolescent or late-adolescent while Jameson is an adult. Spider-Man and their connection to them is a tool to reveal their perspectives rather than say a clip-show explaining aspects of Spider-Man genre history.
- The most modern is Mary Jane. Her “life story” is mainly concerned with her own baggage independent of Peter and Spider-Man. To the extent they feature in her life, it’s as part of a complicated gag. We get in her story, someone with depth and detail that could potentially become a co-protagonist and co-lead of the entire title, which of course came to pass.
In other words, the classical superhero genre story done straight and sincere, with subtext left as subtext and open to interpretation, can be more complex, nuanced, and human than any recent comic that drops four or five dollar words.
CONCLUSION
Comics criticism has rarely engaged with the typical examples of superhero stories, being far too content in writing the genre off as juvenile trash for teenage boys as opposed to the non-superhero classic comics of Carl Barks, Walt Kelly, Will Eisner and the more advanced work such as Watchmen. The majority of comics in fact falls within that distinction of course, but so does the majority of any medium or any genre. Most westerns are white supremacist hegemonic propaganda about manifest destiny, in the same way most stories about medieval chivalry were feudal fantasies reinforcing aristocratic hierarchy, and most superhero comics have been focused on teenage boys and male entitlement. But obviously the best in any genre does touch on concerns accessible to a wider audience, and the same applies to the classical superhero genre story, which has generally escaped the serious embrace one finds with regards to classic Westerns by John Ford or Hitchcock’s thrillers.
In the case of Roger Stern, much ink is spilled on the focus of the “Hobgoblin Saga” which is a long serial story with a murder mystery that has a legendary reputation among Spider-Man fans. In my opinion — in isolation (the issues of Stern’s run ), subsequent continuity (the fiasco with Defalco, Owsley, Peter David), and aftermath (Hobgoblin Lives) — they do not in any level register as the “masterpiece” that some claim it to be. Even were it not botched, I severely doubt it could ever have been as great as the Hobgoblin Saga that lives in the memories of its fans since so much of that storyline stands against Stern’s best qualities as a writer and storyteller, as evidenced in both his runs for Spider-Man and The Avengers. It’s “The Daydreamers” along with “The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man”, the 2-part stories with Juggernaut and the Vulture, that are Stern’s best work. It’s interesting to note that while “The Daydreamers” is far more obscure a story than the “Hobgoblin Saga”, it’s Stern’s development of Mary Jane’s character in this story that proved to be his most lasting contribution.
Roger Stern is a writer whose artistic output I admire and respect. Often for the ways it stands in stark contrast to his stated pronouncements elsewhere. It’s an evidence as any of the complex attitudes and ironies that you find in the works of talented authors in any field. Stern ranks in my estimation among Spider-Man’s four or five best writers/creators (alongside Steve Ditko, J. M. Demateis, J. Michael Straczynski) and “The Daydreamers” is in my opinion among the very best Spider-Man stories.
In my estimation, if you want people to know what Spider-Man is about (thematically, metaphorically, aesthetically) then it’s “The Daydreamers” that ought to stand atop the list of best Spider-Man stories, rather than stories like “The Night Gwen Stacy Died.” It is more representative tonally of the optimistic and comedic main currents of Spider-Man in general rather than the more exceptional go-for-broke tragic departures from the norm.
[THIS POST IS DEDICATED TO “MENSHEVIK”, ONE OF MY OLDEST ONLINE FRIENDS, WHO FIRST POINTED ME THE WAY TO “THE DAYDREAMERS”]
SOURCES
- AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (1963-1998) #246. Marvel Entertainment (July 2015). Kindle Edition. Accessed via Comixology.
- Writer: Roger Stern
- Penciler: John Romita Jr.
- Inker: Dan Green
- Letterer: Joe Rosen
- Colorist: Bob Sharen
- Editors: Tom DeFalco & Danny Fingeroth
- Editor in Chief: Jim Shooter.
REFERENCES
- https://amazingspidertalk.com/2015/11/lost-gems-the-daydreamers/
- http://www.marvelessentials.com/features/int_stern_1006_2.html
- https://www.cbr.com/spider-man-mary-jane-break-up-divorce-background/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20210623001550/https://www.comicscube.com/2012/01/reclaiming-history-roger-stern.html
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