We're gonna go ahead and blow some minds right now: in reality, if you got bitten by a radioactive spider, it would not turn you into a superhero with lots of amazing powers, a skintight costume and a surprisingly expressive mask. You'd just have a bit of a dicky tummy for a few days. That's just one of the many leaps of logic we make in order to read and enjoy Spider-Man comics. It's one of the suspensions of disbelief we make in reading any comic book, or really any fictional work - it just so happens the adventures of our friendly neighbourhood wallcrawler are particularly fraught with utter nonsense. Like the idea that injecting the blood of a lizard into the stump where your arm used to be would turn you into a giant monster. Or that people actually wanted to read Spider-Man: Reign. There's plenty of larger-than-life concepts in superhero comics that we all readily accept without question. The costumes, the team-ups, the fact that the public at large just accept the widespread property damage caused by these costumed weirdos' scraps. Sometimes they manage to stretch credulity - just a little - if you step back and think about them for more than five seconds. Even by the metrics of their own internal logic, the comic books which chronicle the life and times of perpetual punchline and occasional life saver Peter Parker gets a little bit silly. Enemy motivations which remain unclear, plot lines that were dropped without explanation, hazily defined powers and the amount of game a huge dork manages to have - these are ten crazy things you just have to accept to enjoy Spider-Man.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
