As a long-time fan of Spider-Man stories, I was somewhat disturbed at the changes that were made to the canonical Spider-Man for the recent movies. The radioactive spider was out, replaced by a genetically-spliced one — more hip and new-millennium, you know. He now generated webbing from within his arms, instead of using a fast-setting (but short-lived) chemical glue and mechanical web-shooters, both of his own invention — a neat trick, and it prevented the writers from using the rather tired trick of having him run out of “web fluid” at just the wrong moment, but he doesn’t give the same impression of being a science geek without them.

Fortunately, the stories have been very well written so far, and the differences in the details didn’t detract from my enjoyment of them. We’ll soon see if the magic extends to the third movie as well, as it’s supposed to hit North American theaters tomorrow (GoddessJ and I will probably see it sometime next week). The “Saga of the Alien Costume” is one of my favorite Spider-Man stories, and Venom one of my favorite bad guys (if he’s in this one at all, I’ll be very disappointed if they don’t have him say something about eating Spider-Man’s spleen or other internal organs at least once), so you can bet that any major changes to the main storyline will be carefully and critically examined.

To make a long and rambling story a little shorter, I ran across this article the other day, on how the new and improved Spidey compares to real spiders. I didn’t realize that some spiders actually can spin silk from their legs, or that there were so many different kinds of spider silk. If you’re at all a fan of Spidey, or just like science or nature stories, have a look.