Broken Frontier

I've been to a few press junkets in my day, but there's something decidedly odd about the one I've just been ushered into: Everyone in here is having the time of their lives.

To put this in perspective, this is Comic Con we're talking about. It's blasted hot outside, there is a crush of humanity surrounding the entire Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego, and if their travel was anything like mine, a normally two-hour drive south became five hours because there was a flaming overturned semi truck obstructing the highway. So why is the cast and crew of the animated Spectacular Spider-Man series smiling?

"I LOVE my job," supervising producer/story editor Greg Weisman raves. "I'll do this for the next twenty years if they'll let me." Weisman and much of the heavy talent behind the smart, engaging, and thoroughly charming return of Spider-Man to the animated series are in the room to meet the press and do the rounds before they take the stage in San Diego. There they will meet the fans, answer questions, and reveal a first peek at what's on horizon for the second season of the show. Backstage, they can barely contain their excitement, and with good reason. Everyone who comes around to talk to me has been a Spidey fan for years and years.

Lead character designer Sean Galloway tells about biking ten miles as a kid to the nearest comic shop and recalls with great fondness the Spider-Man clock he owned as a young man. Weisman has a 20 year-old action figure and now a script signed by Stan Lee that's a treasured possession. Josh Keaton, the voice of Peter Parker, goes one step farther, recalling a number of similarities between his teenage years and Peter's. "I see a lot of Peter in me. I was the biggest dork. I was 5'4" and 120 pounds. I got pushed around a lot. And I was the guy on call whenever the computers went down on the yearbook."

The cast and crew's passion for the subject matter is evident in the show, which Weisman describes as a concerted effort to ground this incarnation of the show in the classic stories and iconography of the comic book. "We have what we call the Four Cs: Coherence, Cohesion, Consistency, and Classic," he explains. So while there are a few liberties being taken with chronology, dedicated fans of the classic days of the comic book ought to have very little to take issue with upon seeing the strong thematics, characters, and even a number of the iconic "off-the page" moments from the comics faithfully restored in the animated series.

"We try and work on multiple levels," Weisman explains. "Boys 6-11. We HAVE to get those, but we're not satisfied with that. We also want girls to watch the show and we've seen a 300% rise in viewership among girls. Part of that we attribute to the relationships. Boys say they don't care about relationships, but they do. So we focus a lot on that, and not just the romantic relationships. Peter and Eddie. Peter and Jonah. Gwen and Mary Jane."

What's resulted is a surprisingly pure, mature, and honest take on the now-classic characters and stories. When characters from the college and adult years of Peter's story get transplanted to the show's high school setting, they arrive as the show runners imagine these characters would have been like in high school. Show runners, ecstatic with the rich pool of supporting characters from Spidey's print legacy, have vowed not to create any new characters for the run of the series. It's one thing to make a vow like that because there's already plenty of story to tell; it's quite another when the supervising producer won't have any part of it because he considers the idea to be hubris.

This is a group of people in love with the story they feel honored to be telling. Mary Jane Watson voice Vanessa Marshall tells me she literally fainted when she got the news she'd been cast and then goes on to admit her agent had to force her to practice uttering some of MJ's classic lines during the audition, lines Marshall felt were too sacrosanct for her to speak. Eddie Brock/Venom voice Ben Diskin's eyes literally light up with excitement when he relates his favorite moments from the recording booth, which on occasion sees as many as eleven or twelve of the cast members crammed inside, cracking wise between takes and daring each other to sneak unusual words into the "walla" crowd noise in a way that makes sense if you managed to make it out. Keaton tells me he prefers to watch himself on the show in what he considers to be the only acceptable manner: live, as they air on Saturday mornings, at home in front of the TV with a bowl of cereal just like when he was a kid.

They say if you love what you're doing, it shows in your work. After these interviews, I cut short my afternoon after getting my hands on a few more of the episodes of The Spectacular Spider-Man. This isn't a show for kids. This is a show for everyone who's ever loved the webhead, and nothing should make one of pop culture's most notoriously jaded subsets happier than to know it's in the hands of people who feel the same way.