Spider-Schlep

In one of the letter columns in the late-80s Question, Denny O’Neil refers to Peter Parker as a schlep, and always having been one. That’s Yiddish, and a little confusing because that precise word is a verb meaning to lug something inconvenient, but here, and as I’ve often heard or used it, it’s short for schlepper, meaning an inept, stupid person.

Context!

I love me a timeline. This one’s built mostly from Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, mainly because I couldn’t help but scribble it out as I went along. In the year since I did that, so many of my posts presume knowledge of the content that it’s simply good sense to get the thing on-line for reference.

The river

I know why Heraclitus cries

Picture the Marvel I first encountered, as a multi-year pile roughly centered on 1971: comics as physical objects are pure junk product; the brand is known to everyone but beholden to nobody; the Perfect Film & Chemical Corporation (soon renamed Cadence) seeks Hollywood but the actual product is still selling ad space to X-Ray Specs and plastic rats.