The Comic-Book Aesthetic Comes of Age in “Across the Spider-Verse

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The latest comic-book movie associated with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” certainly knows what kind of film it is. Most of the movie follows Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy, two animated teen-aged Spider-People, but, for the sake of the fandom, live actors from live-action blockbusters make surprise cameos. Gwen quips at one point that Doctor Strange—last seen in the M.C.U.’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”—should not practice medicine. Miles’s high-school roommate references another audience favorite, “Spider-Man: Homecoming” (2017), when he tells Miles, “I’m not your guy in the chair.” Inevitably, there is a meme-inspired scene of Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man. This is the kind of self-aware fan fodder that, in lesser films, might feel tired.

And yet “Across the Spider-Verse,” which came out on June 2nd, does something that no live-action superhero movie has done before—or can do. It leans hard into, and emulates onscreen, the storytelling devices and the visual flair that make comic books special. Even more than its predecessor, “Into the Spider-Verse” (2018), the film feels designed to show young people, many of whom were raised on superhero movies, why they might care about the comics that launched these characters. It does this so well that, at a time when some Marvel movies haven’t been doing so hot at the box office, “Across the Spider-Verse” has already raked in nearly four hundred million dollars. At 7 p.m. on a Wednesday night, with local schools still in session, my seventh grader and I found most of the seats in our suburban multiplex full.

The first scene in the movie reintroduces us to Miles’s long-distance best friend, Gwen Stacy of Earth-65, a.k.a. Spider-Gwen (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld). Her world looks painterly, as if rendered by brushes and pastels; she often appears in Expressionist shades of blue and pink. That’s how the rest of the film will roll: each Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, or Spider-Villain, and each new Earth on which they live, has its own eye-popping art style. Miles (voiced by Shameik Moore), a Black Puerto Rican physics star who draws in all his notebooks, inhabits a world that evokes hip-hop album covers and graffiti. Miguel O’Hara, or Spider-Man 2099, comes with clean lines, techno details, and RoboCop vibes. Spider-Byte appears as a glowing avatar like the nineteen-eighties film “Tron.” Pavitr Prabhakar, a.k.a. Spider-Man India, swings through his home city of Mumbattan, all tropical colors and curvy architecture. (When characters move between dimensions, they pass through a portal made of hexagons—a basic geometric unit of Hollywood animation.)

Almost all of these characters existed in comic books before they hit the screen, and, crucially, all of them have what the scholar Hillary Chute identifies as the core property of comics: they look like somebody chose to draw them. They bear the mark of their creators’ hands. The Spot, a villain who sets the movie’s main plot in motion, looks like a blank page splattered with ink; each of his splotches opens up a little wormhole, in the same way that the pen stroke of a comic can open up another world. The animators of the film owe a lot to Marvel’s comic artists: the credits thank a “Black Panther” illustrator, Brian Stelfreeze; a co-creator of Miguel O’Hara, Rick Leonardi; and the nineteen-eighties titan Bill Sienkiewicz. All three have contributed to the making of “Across the Spider-Verse.”

The film’s version of Miguel O’Hara (voiced by Oscar Isaac) behaves like a stern, bad Spider-Dad. He resolves to stop Miles from disrupting something called a Canon Event—a plot development so important that it has to happen in every parallel world, lest the entire universe be at risk. “You break enough canons,” Miguel warns, “and we could lose everything.” He sounds almost like a Marvel Comics editor, telling writers that they can’t go too far. (One writer, Grant Morrison, called his longest project at Marvel “more like a prison than a playground.”) In the tradition of print comics, the film offers explanatory notes in 2-D colored boxes; some of them, in an homage to the comics of the nineteen-seventies, are even signed “--Ed.,” for editor.

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