‘Spider-Man’ Comic Fans Say He Passes Screen Test

You know you’ve done something right when your harshest critics become your biggest fans. So, if that’s true, then “Spider-Man” has definitely done something right.

Comic-book readers, who for years have pored over issue after action-packed issue, devouring details of the characters’ lives until they felt a sort of kinship with them, normally come out of movie theaters disappointed by film adaptations of their favorite superheroes. But not this time. “Spider-Man” is a big hit, even with ever-critical comic-book fans.

“I’ve been reading comic books since I was about 6 years old, and I have over 3,000 comic books at home,” said Matthew Jeffrey, 21, who wore a black-and-red Spider-Man T-shirt to Golden Apple Comics on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles on Saturday after seeing the movie on opening night.

“It was awesome,” he said. “They’ve been selling the Spider-Man comics for about 40 years. It’s hard to get all that into a two-hour movie. It seemed like they fit all of that in.”

Spider-Man was created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1962 and has since become the most popular of the Marvel comic heroes and villains. Upon hearing that the story of Spider-Man--a geeky teenager named Peter Parker who gets bitten by a spider and transforms into a one-man/spider crime-fighting machine--would be turned into a feature film, comic readers were skeptical.

“A lot of the comic-book movies don’t really follow too well with the comic,” said Richard Dunfee, a 21-year-old clerk at Comic Odyssey in Old Town Pasadena, “but this one did.”

There were some changes that the comic-book aficionados were quick to point out: “Like Peter Parker--his first love was really Gwen Stacey,” said Joshua Hunter, a 15-year-old shopping at the Comics Factory in Pasadena. In the film, Parker’s love interest is Mary Jane Watson.

“He didn’t meet Mary Jane until they were adults,” said Eric Delgado, 25, at Golden Apple Comics.

“People don’t like the fact that the Green Goblin’s face was a mask,” said Mike Johnson, 39, a manager at Golden Apple Comics.

And, of course, there’s the webbing that in the movie is part of Parker’s genetic makeup. In the comic, he has to make devices that shoot webs. Still, for many, such details didn’t really matter.

“It was not exactly like the comic book, but it kept to the story,” said Gerson Rodriguez while shopping with his family at Another World Comics & Books in Eagle Rock. The 25-year-old Spider-Man fan had three tattoos of spiders on his arms.

Some comic-book readers said they doubted the cast would be believable in their roles.

But Matt Hawkins, 32, said that Tobey Maguire, who played Peter Parker and Spider-Man, “carried across the geekiness better than a Freddie Prinze Jr.”

And Kirsten Dunst, who played Mary Jane, fit the part well enough, even if some fans thought she didn’t make a suitable supermodel like her character was supposed to be. “She screamed real well,” said Jennifer Dos Santos, a 27-year-old from Studio City.

The fans were even able to put aside their reservations about the computer-generated imaging used in the film’s action sequences.

“I thought it was going to look like a big video game,” Mark Dos Santos, 28, about scenes in which Spider-Man was swinging through the city on his webs. “It looked computer-generated, but it didn’t bother me.”

James Kuroda, 27, said the filmmakers’ use of computer imaging allowed the designers to pose Spider-Man in the same poses from the comic. “He moved just the way I always envisioned him to move,” Kuroda said.

Justin Fox, 20, gave “Spider-Man” a glowing review. “I think it was one of the best comic-book movies I’ve ever seen,” he said. And he’s already waiting for the sequel.

So is Mark Dos Santos, as long as “they don’t do it like the Batman movies where it’s nothing but the villains,” he said.