I love Spider-Man – but would my son? How I learned a hard lesson about heroes

He's my all-time favourite comic character. But do the real heroes still wear spandex?

A decade ago I got married in a wedding outfit that, because of the shambles of assembling it, I can remember thread for thread. I had a new suit (dark grey, secret pockets) that I was shyly proud of; but with a couple of hours to go, I hung it in the wrong place in a public bathroom and the jacket was sprayed at close range by an auto-dispersing air freshener, the rich and tangy scent of which I could never scrub clear. My smart shoes, fine in the shop, turned out to be so unrealistically sleek-soled that I couldn't stay upright on the walk to the venue and had to arrive in trainers. Way too late in the day, I noticed that my fancy dress-shirt needed cufflinks and all I had in my drawer was a pair of bug-eyed scarlet superhero heads, given to me once as a joke. I wound up at the altar, making my solemn vows, wearing a little Spider-Man on either wrist.

The older I get, the more that Spider-Man cameo, at such a big juncture in my life, comes to feel right. Where some people look to religious texts for spiritual comfort and a sense of continuity, others to Shakespeare or spirit animals, or the Harry Potter series, I've always been a sucker for the relentless reliable churn of superhero stories. I'll watch or read just about any of them in a pinch. But Spider-Man has always been the one.