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.
