Peter Palmer, the Amazing Spiderman

So yesterday I posted my little gripe about The Professional Media’s laxness when it comes to correctly rendering such things as proper nouns—using as an example the frequent references to Spiderman one sees in print and online, rather than the correct trademark, Spider-Man—and what that may say about the media’s inattention to other details they place before us.

Today’s e-mail, coincidentally, brings an offer to read—for free, even—a digital copy of the inaugural issue of Spider-Man, from March 1963. I’ve got it somewhere in the archives, on paper, as a reprint in a later Spider-Man “annual” (as mentioned yesterday, I didn’t come on board till Spider-Man number 16, which I mark as the genesis of my comic-book meekness), but having not looked at it in many years I thought it’d be worth a nostalgic peek. Did I mention it was free?

Worth the download it was indeed…but I was amused to discover that, in those early—and, I suspect, hurried—days, not even Stan Lee himself seemed to have a firm grasp on the character’s name. Here’s the cover:

Plainly, the intent seems to be to call the character Spider-Man, hyphenated. The name appears three times on the cover, each time punctuated the same. Very good.

Oh, but look:

There on page one, the name appears another three times…twice as Spider-Man, but then as Spiderman. This is getting slippery. 

Skipping on to page nine, we have Spidey’s name presented yet another three times (coincidence? I think not), and I’m going to say it’s given as Spiderman each time. (Bit of a coin-toss there in the second panel, but I’m guessing the hyphen is there to break Spiderman at the end of the line, not to indicate the letterer—or whoever ultimately made the decision—meant to have it Spider-Man.) 

 

By page two of the second Great Feature-Length Spider-Man Thriller, “Spider-Man vs. The Chameleon,” which includes a completely pointless fight with the Fantastic Four, whose presence here, I imagine, was to boost sales and nothing more, things seem to have settled down a bit: Peter Parker’s alter ego is being consistently rendered as Spider-Man. Alas, young Peter Parker himself is not faring so well, in that twice on the same page his creators seem to think his name is Peter Palmer. 

 

Alas. Even 50 years ago Spider-Man was being victimized by sloppy, hurried editing. And so was Spiderman. 

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Part of the Problem

Our letter carrier left this slip at our house the other day. Evidently someone had sent us a letter that required an additional 20 cents’ worth of postage.

It’s a good thing we know where the post office is, since, evidently, the post office does not. You could spend the rest of your days driving the streets of our fair city, you could comb through maps, atlases, and gazeteers, you could MapQuest, Google Map, and Google Earth until overcome by hunger, thirst, and sleeplessness, and you would never find 320 S WND AVE. Indeed, you would never find WND AVE at all. There is no such thing.

You might, however, with a certain amount of detective work, stumble upon 320 S 2ND AVE, which is where the downtown post office (Downtown Station, in current parlance) resides. And where, 20 cents later, our daughter claimed our undelivered envelope.

It’s true that 2 and W sit awfully close together on the keyboard. And it’s true that in this era of budget cuts and over-reliance on electronic backstops, proofreading by actual breathing, thinking human beings is one of the first fatalities (at the hands of breathing but not thinking human beings, usually). But it is both true and deliciously ironic that mail sent to the address provided by the post office itself would be returned as undeliverable by, yep, the post office.

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Choose One

Call it self-serving, but I do believe that even in our technological age, editors—of the human variety—still matter. Why? Well, here’s yesterday’s Daily Briefing from USA Today:

I presume that any editor worth his or her salt would have paused at those last two headlines, and determined that one of them must go. But maybe not. There’s a lot of low-salt editors out there.

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