Thirty years ago, and change (it could be late 1994 or early 1995, I don’t really remember) I had one of those weird moments as a comic book fan.

I realized when something in super hero, specifically Spider-Man, culture had shifted.

Now, one of the things you have to realize about me concerns the ability to see trends as they develop.  There are people who have their fingers on the pulse of the culture and know exactly when something shifts.

I…am not one of those people.

I rarely realize when the paradigm shifts. It’s usually a few years later when I am looking back and see some dots get connected and think, “Oh, that’s where things changed. It’s so clear…now.”

However, there are those moments when I realize that the change is happening and one of those moments was, as I just wrote, thirty years ago (and change).

I was eighteen years old and, at the time, more or less on my own. That wasn’t true. I was living at home and commuting to college. My dad was living in Georgia, so I didn’t have a parent keeping track of me. Or buying my groceries, so if I wanted something to eat at the house, I had to get it. On one trip I made the very mature decision to buy a box of Spider-Man cereal. It was that box of cereal that led me to my moment of realization that something in the culture had shifted.

It was the drawing of Spider-Man.

It looked…weird.

Odd.

Off.

And I couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, but he just didn’t look…right,

Then it hit me.

It didn’t look like a Todd McFarlane Spider-Man.

Now, to be fair, Todd McFarlane did not draw Spider-Man for very long in the grand scheme of the character. Spider-Man is nearly sixty-five years old and Todd’s time with the character was from November of 1987 to September of 1991.

Nearly four years.

But, continuing to be fair, those years felt different than four years feel like now that I am…a lot older. I was well into my sixth-grade year in November of 1987 and had barely begun my tenth-grade year in 1991. That was the end of elementary school, all the way through junior high and nearly two weeks into high school, because I lived in a school district where high started in tenth grade, not ninth grade. It felt like it took forever to get from ’87 to ’91.

2022 feels like yesterday.

But (and here is where I get to what I’m trying to be fair about) despite that time feeling like forever, I do have to acknowledge that by 1994 Amazing Spider-Man had two pencillers that followed McFarlane after he was given his own title to write and draw. Erik Larsen and Mark Bagley. And, if we’re being honest here, Bagley has had the longer career with Spider-Man, both in the main book and with Ultimate Spider-Man. Bagley’s art became the merchandising standard of the early 2000s. By just about every metric, Bagley belongs on any Spider-Man Artist Mount Rushmore.

So, both at the time and now, McFarlane can be considered one of the most popular Spider-Man artists, but other artists that have followed in his footsteps have left bigger tracks.

Those statements are not mutually exclusive.

And yet, back when I bought that cereal and looked at the image of Spider-Man I thought it looked wrong, because it didn’t look like a McFarlane Spider-Man.

It was mainly the face. The Spider-Man on that cereal didn’t have the elongated jaw that McFarlane’s Spider-Man did. Also, he wasn’t as lean. He wasn’t posed at an impossible angle.

And, by coming to that conclusion, I realized that something in the super hero culture had shifted.

Because this was a big-time cereal that was associated with an upcoming animated series. That series would go on to create an entirely new generation of Spider-Man fans.

The funny thing is I never collected Amazing Spider-Man or what we all started calling Adjectiveless Spider-Man (which, a little over a decade ago, I realized was ironic because by calling it Adjectiveless Spider-Man we were applying an adjective to describe it). I bought one or two issues during his tenure on Amazing, and I bought maybe two issues of the Adjectiveless book.

Actually, I know exactly which issues of that series I bought. The first issue and McFarlane’s last issue. The one that crossed over with X-Force. I would never call myself a fan, then or now.

But, for some reason, McFarlane’s version of Spider-Man is the one I thought was the “right” one.

And this one on the cereal box…it wasn’t “right”.

Eventually, as I alluded to a few paragraphs ago, Bagley became the “right” version of Spider-Man to my eyes. Well, Bagley and John Romita, Jr. Those two artists are my absolute favorite when it comes to Peter Parker’s other identity.

Still, there is a part in the comic book portion of my lizard brain that sees a McFarlane Spider-Man and smiles and thinks, “Oh yeah…that’s the stuff.”

For those interested the Spider-Man cereal was…okay. Essentially it was Rice Chex with marshmallows, which is something I would never have thought to put together. I think I bought one or two boxes of that cereal and then it went away.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

Or cereals.

More to follow…