If you’re like me you loathe the endless slurry of formulaic comic book adaptations churned out by the Hollywood machine over the last few years. And I say this as someone who has been off and on a comic book enthusiast since the early 1980s. Some of my fondest memories are of sitting in the park, reading older comics I picked up for a quarter a pop, enjoying the smell of the paper, and ink, and age almost as much as the plot-lines themselves. Almost, as this was the great age of comics storytelling and art. I started writing and illustrating my own comics when I was nine or ten, inspired by the masterful way certain stories and characters were handled. I doubt I’d feel the same way had I been reading contemporary comics as opposed to stuff produced in the 70s and 80s.

I couldn’t figure out how to play the B&W version, but that didn’t matter. The colored version was really well done, showing the vibrancy and almost garish use of color during the interwar years, which almost never comes across on film. And it does a really good job of presenting the casual racism of the time by showing things like the segregated Armed Forces or how performers had to go in through the service entrance rather than the front door, without beating you over the head with it. And the obligatory gender- and race-swapping doesn’t take you out of the story the way that the continuation of the Tolkein mythos or Nolan’s upcoming Odyssey most certainly will.

In addition to the masterful casting of Nicolas Cage as Ben Reily/the Spider some of my favorite characters are his spunky Girl Friday, the intrepid reporter Robbie Robertson, and this world’s Felicia Hardy who is played by Chinese actress Li Jun Li. Although only one of those is cast consistent with their comic iteration the performances are so good you simply don’t care. They also do a superb job explaining how the villains (and possibly the Spider too) acquired their powers through experiments conducted on POWs by German scientists rather than random accidents as in the mainstream comic universe, which lends an air of tragedy to these characters lacking in the originals. (Hollywood could learn a lot from watching this series.) The city is almost a character itself, with grimy run-down tenements contrasting with the giant towers and opulence of the wealthy who seek to remake the city in their image, even if they have to resort to illegal tactics to do so. There are no clear-cut good or evil characters, with everyone painted in shades of grey. The good guys resort to criminal activities to get the job done, and the bad guys are visionaries trying to improve the general state of things after years of neglect and corruption and pointless laws like prohibition. This is best exemplified by Cage’s character who in the pursuit of truth and justice for his clients resorts to some pretty nasty tricks and even nastier underworld informants to get the job done. And that’s just his day job. He’s even worse when necessity requires him to don the Spider costume again after the death of his wife had forced him into a five-year hiatus. And many of the criminals are victims of what happened to them whilst serving their country during the Great War, and the indifference of their government and society upon returning home.

I’m only about half-way through the show, so my opinion may change as we approach the end of the season, but I doubt it. Another thing that I appreciated is that they dropped all the episodes at once, rather than forcing you to wait week by week for new additions, which I hate. Why are we paying so much for these streaming services if they are going to act like conventional cable television, only worse? If I want to binge an entire season over a weekend I damn well ought to be able to.

There are a couple more things I could nit-pick as a comics and film nerd, but the amount of stuff the show gets right dwarfs those minor criticisms and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Cage’s performance alone is worth the price of admission (a subscription to Amazon Prime) and each episode just gets better and better. I don’t normally recommend media unless it has something to do with polytheism generally or the Starry traditions specifically, but Spider-Noir is a notable exception. If you haven’t already, give it a shot.