Into The Spiderverse took 100% of its critically acclaimed visuals from comic books and street art and while there are obvious in-universe reasons for this it can’t be ignored that BOTH of these are traditionally seen as “lowbrow” populist art forms, here celebrated for their inherent beauty, complexity and sociopolitical importance. In this essay I will-
Where’s the essay OP
Not a full essay but lemmie tell you. Spoilers below.
Why does Miles stop at a time-sensitive moment to paint one of Peter’s suits when he’d probably want to get going as quickly as possible? Three reasons.
One, on a character level Miles is about to go into the scariest endgame fight he’s been in the entire movie. Taking the time to make the costume his own, to take this little part of the old Spiderman’s legacy and probably get some encouraging words from Aunt May is important to pysch himself up enough to do this.
Two, suiting up for the first time is an important rite of passage in superhero comics. It represents the character deliberately taking on the role. Miles has been wearing a kid’s costume because he feels like a kid trying to take on the role of a hero. By putting on a real costume, his own costume that he designed, he is becoming his own hero.
Three, his costume is an extension of his art. He uses spray paint to alter it, and we see little drips and splatters in the costume’s design. Miles is a street artist and his spider-suit is a street artists’s creation.
Miles’s street art and his coming into his own as Spiderman are directly linked in the narrative in a way that’s too perfect to be accidental. His costume is made with spray paint.
He’s bitten while painting a mural. He uses his spider-powers to put a sticker where his dad can’t find it. Jefferson doesn’t like Spiderman’s methods or Miles’s art. But in the end, he’s willing to work with both. And street art is the shared history Aaron, Jefferson and Miles all have even if they ended up on three drastically different paths.
Miles paints murals, throws stickers up on street signs, etc, both as self-expression and an expression of love for his city. It’s that same love for his home that makes him Spiderman, the city’s protector. His vigilante heroism and his illegal art are expressions of exact same thing.
And comics! This movie loves the language of comics!
It loves the humor in seeing the words float in the air around the characters! It loves stylized human figures and kirby dots and dynamic transitions! It loves the way comics tell stories (note that every time a characters is narrating their backstory in Into The Spiderverse it switches to comic format, doing highly comic-specific things like having three characters telling their stories side by side.)
Miles reads Spiderman comics in-universe and they’re what helps him understand what’s happening. How many people who worked on this movie do you think read a comic at a formative age and saw themselves in it, in some way?
Of course, if I’m going to talk about the “language” of comics or the “language” of street art I can’t ignore the fact that these two art forms have influenced each other immensely over the years, joyfully borrowing from each other at every opportunity.
in 2019 we’re not gonna purposely make ourselves sad anymore!!! no more looking at that blog bc you know it’ll make you sad! no more clicking on a link to a song that brings back bad memories or a post that reminds you of bad times just to make yourself feel bad!! we’re gonna start to love ourselves in 2019 and strive to be happy bitch!!!!!
one of the millions of things i liked about spider-verse was that not only did all the female characters look different from each other, they gave mary jane her classic dimples and square chin, which might not seem like a big deal but you’d be surprised how much tiny details like those can make women in comic books look distinct
also seriously it feels like some animated films are pushing it to have two female characters who look even slightly different so i appreciate that spider-verse made sure every woman in it looked distinct from each other
ya ever slip into fic for something that you haven’t watched yet and now you really want to but are sure the tone of it won’t be what you’re expecting/want it to be?
STORIES THAT WERE TOLD BY PEOPLE SPEAKING LANGUAGES WE NO LONGER KNOW
STORIES TOLD BY PEOPLE LOST TO THE VOID OF TIME
STORIES
GUYS LOOK AT THIS
OH MY GOD YOU GUYS
GUYYYYYSSSS
“Here’s how it worked: Fairy tales are transmitted through language, and the shoots and branches of the Indo-European language tree are well-defined, so the scientists could trace a tale’s history back up the tree—and thus back in time. If both Slavic languages and Celtic languages had a version of Jack and the Beanstalk (and the analysis revealed they might), for example, chances are the story can be traced back to the “last common ancestor.” That would be the Proto-Western-Indo-Europeans from whom both lineages split at least 6800 years ago. The approach mirrors how an evolutionary biologist might conclude that two species came from a common ancestor if their genes both contain the same mutation not found in other modern animals.”
How do they control for stories that were borrowed, which almost certainly happened?
“ Unlike genes, which are almost exclusively transmitted “vertically”—from parent to offspring—fairy tales can also spread horizontally when one culture intermingles with another. Accordingly, much of the authors’ study focuses on recognizing and removing tales that seem to have spread horizontally. When the pruning was done, the team was left with a total of 76 fairy tales.”
This article doesn’t say how, but I bet those methods are in the paper.
For this, they used a library of cultural traits for each culture a fairy tale occurred in, and then measured the likelihood that trait t occurs in culture c due to either phylogenetic proximity (inheritance) or spatial proximity (diffusion), using autologistic regression:
(Autologistic regression is a graphical model where connected nodes have dependencies on each other, except instead of an undirected graph, ALR is a special case that requires sequential binary data and assumes a spatial ordering. In this case, the binary data are the cultural features).
Cultural traits states are generated using Monte-Carlo simulation and phylogenetic or spatial influence are fitted as local dependencies between the nodes in the graph representing cultural traits. I can’t find this in the paper (though it may be mentioned in the citation of the method they used), but presumably if the spatial influence exceeds the phylogenetic influence by a certain threshold, the trait is removed.
