Spider-Man: Life Story is based around a pretty cool gimmick: The six-part saga follows Spider-Man’s life in “real time,” with each issue covering a decade of his life from the ‘60s to the 2010s. That’s different from regular comic books, which tend to… not allow time pass at all, ever. (It’s been literally 20 years since Dani Cage was born, it would be cool if she were allowed to stop being a baby at some point.)

But there’s a clever gimmick on top of the clever gimmick, which I think is what makes Spider-Man: Life Story really cool: The events of each issue vaguely tie in with plot points that were happening in the Spider-Man comics in that era of real life. In the issue that takes place in the ‘80s, a version of Secret Wars happens and Spidey gets his black suit (just like how the Secret Wars comic came out in the ‘80s), and in the 2010s issue there’s a reference to Doctor Octopus taking over Spider-Man’s body (just like in Superior Spider-Man, which came out in the 2010s).

It’s smart! I liked it! But it also gave me an idea: Why doesn’t Spider-Man have a Patreon? He’s always having such a hard time juggling his superhero career and his regular life, but what if he could make money by being a superhero? Then there would be less pressure to sell photos to the Daily Bugle or work for the tech company he founded or whatever he does for money these days. I haven’t read a current, mainline universe Spider-Man comic in a while, now that I think about it. Somebody email me and tell me how Peter Parker pays his bills.

So, anyway, there could be a dark twist where Spider-Man starts getting manipulated by his Patreon subscribers. People give him more money for stunt videos than they do for crimefighting, and it turns out that Norman Osborn or whatever has been funding his Patreon, trying to distract him from doing regular superhero stuff. Or maybe it just becomes too easy to be a superhero, and he gets caught up in the celebrity of it. Or maybe some hacker villain gets into the Patreon servers to find out Spider-Man’s real identity. (Though, knowing how susceptible right-wingers are to grifts, maybe the Punisher should be the one with a Patreon.)

There’s juice here, right? It’s time for Spidey to get with the times, unless he has already and Marvel has turned him into a DoorDash driver or whatever. Again: Somebody let me know.

One of the coolest dudes in comics: The Question! Also, another guy with some historically weird politics (he was the inspiration for noted fascist Rorschach from Watchmen), but he did choose a lesbian POC as his replacement when he died. That probably won’t come up in my essay, because that happened way after this comic, but that’s pretty progressive of him, right? Speaking of, let’s do Gotham Central soon. I’ve been meaning to reread those.