Nerd Lessons: Spider-Man: Bruised, Beaten, Still Fighting

We love our fandoms. For those on the outside looking in, it may be their impulse to discount our devotion as superficial or childish. That’s because they don’t understand or see how nerdom has effected us. At BNP, we know that comics and movies and anime and cosplay does so much more than entertain us, it shapes us; we learn what kind of people we want to be—and who exactly we are fighting against becoming. We sent out that bat signal, we sent out notice for an open call for submissions on what nerd lessons you learned and y’all answered the call. The Author of This Piece and Teacher for This Nerd Lesson : Charles J Eskew: @CJEskew The same Friday night that mom explained to us that Daddy was going on a little trip — he’d made a bad choice but wouldn’t be gone long — I’d just found out that it was actually the Chameleon who’d orchestrated the false return of the long dead Richard and Mary Parker as life-model decoys to torment Spider-Man. It’d made for a long weekend. As a child I couldn’t tell you which hit harder. Jail and its many splendors were successfully shielded from me, so I imagined landing on the right Community Chest box would advance my pops back to Go. Spider-Man’s parental figures being psychotic robots, and the knowledge of having to wait thirty days for sweet recompense, was the more palpable concern. I’d learned though, and kept learning month to month and writer to writer, that if anything *endurance* was Spidey’s real power, and one that I would need to…