It won an Oscar, has legions of fans and is now considered by many to be one of the best superhero movies ever made.
But Charlie Michael, an assistant professor in Emory's Department of Film and Media, says 2018's "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" is much more than masterful storytelling and movie-making excellence.
It gives license to embracing a different perspective on a beloved character that's more inclusive than its traditional archetype, Michael says.
Michael's recently published book, "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: Youth, Race, and the Hypertext," breaks down the movie's multiplatform storytelling, identity formation and minority representation and analyzes its hypertextual design and animation techniques.
In the film, when Miles Morales becomes Spider-Man, he is not only saving the city from a villain hellbent on world domination, he is broadening the idea of who can be a knight in shining armor in an industry that almost exclusively assigns such roles to white males.
"The movie takes on the gatekeeping and says, 'This is everybody's story and someone like Miles, an Afro-Latino teenager, he can be the hero too,'" Michael says. "It's a very empowering movie both intellectually and culturally. It's just beautiful."
The book is part of the recent Routledge Publishing "Cinema and Youth Cultures" series, which examines youth representation in film and how young people engage with movies.
In the book, Michael traces the roots of Morales' creation, which began in 2011as a reimagined Spider-Man in Marvel's "Ultimate Comics" imprint. Marvel's interest in character diversity later generated new versions of other popular characters like Ms. Marvel (also known as Kamala Khan), a Pakistani-American successor of Captain Marvel, and Ironheart (also known as Riri Williams), who is a female, African American take on Iron Man.
Not everyone supported the introduction of non-white superheroes, Michael says.
"When Miles first came out, he did meet with a lot of resistance," Michael says of reactions to Morales as Spider-Man. "There were definitely the traditional fanboy types who kind of said 'This is not who Spider-Man is.'"
But the creators of the character stood firm, Michael says. They later even doubled-down on the importance of diversity in storytelling, addressing it both directly and subtly.
The end of the first "Spider-Verse" movie, for instance, features a cameo appearance by another alternative Spider-Man: Miguel O'Hara.
The appearance sets up a battle in the sequel — "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" — where O'Hara tries to eliminate Morales from the Spider-Man timeline. He claims Morales is an anomaly that threatens other Spider-Man stories.
"In the sequel, they make O'Hara into one of those gatekeepers," Michael says. "But they are saying, 'Bring it on if you have problems with this kind of character.'"
Central to the movie's success is its focus on Morales' youth, Michael says. The soundtrack includes classic hip-hop and Morales is an avid graffiti tagger, continuing the tradition of the web slinger as the younger population's superhero.
"Spider-Man's mystique and relatability come from a combination of amazing skill and youthful inexperience," Michael explains in the book.
Michael praises the way the movie weaves together numerous references to previous Spider-Man lore into its narrative. The book uses the term "hypertext" to refer to how the Spider-Verse cleverly recognizes what has come before. Think "Lord of the Rings" or "Star Wars" and how each successive movie is built on the audience's knowledge of the events of the previous films.
"What really fascinated me about the 'Spider-Verse' film is that it was so overtly hypertextual," Michael says. "At the beginning, Peter Parker says, 'You've heard this story before.' And in the opening montage, he refers to all the tie-ins in a jokey way. 'I've been a popsicle, I've been a breakfast cereal, I've had a Christmas album.' This isn't just a game though — it primes the audience for Miles, and his new take on the story, to emerge."
Department of Film and Media chair Michele Schreiber says Michael's book offers a look at what it took to get the film greenlit. In an industry averse to risk, a superhero in this version who was both non-white and lacked a box office track record was a long shot.
"One of the things he does really successfully in the book is talk about the industry context of the film," she says.
In a review of the book, Marcus Haynes, a faculty member at Georgia Gwinnett College and author of the youth-oriented novel "The Orange Scepter," calls Michael's take on the film approachable and deeply analytical.
"His gradual unfolding of Miles Morales's debut film covers the vast complexities of its narrative and construction, from the animation to the racial politics at play, that offer a way for future superhero films to appeal to a youthful demographic that sees Miles Morales as 'our Spider-Man,'" Haynes says.
Michael says the Morales character was inspirational. "In the end, the movie kind of gave me the license to take my own leap of faith like Miles and to write about something that I was not necessarily an expert on when I started."
