The Undeniable, Daffy Greatness of BEN COOPER’S SPIDER-MAN

But the mask was perfect!

If you pressed me hard enough for an answer when I was a kid, I would probably have said that Spider-Man was my second-favorite superhero.

Batman was far and away my favorite (still is, obviously), but I had a healthy love for the web-slinger that endures to this today.

The funny thing, though, is that with all the opportunities to dress up like Spidey for Halloween, I never took it and to this day I wish I had.

Batman and Spider-Man meet — in a fashion — in Rutland, Vermont. From 1971’s Batman #237, by Denny O’Neil, Neal Adams and Dick Giordano.

From the time I was maybe 5 or 6, I was Batman almost every year until maybe middle school when I chose to be a baseball player or a Rutgers football player. By high school, dressing up was more about irony than earnestness. (Though even at 16, I still went for the cape and dressed like Superman to impress a girl I knew. Much to my eternal surprise, it worked.)

But I never took the opportunity to be Spider-Man – which is really weird because I always envied the kids who did.

And it’s not like I didn’t have my chances. One of Ben Cooper’s most popular Halloween outfits was its off-model model and I even remember gazing at it on the shelves of the local store.

The bizarrely decorated jumpsuit really didn’t bug me much because it came with such a great mask.

Naturally, I would have loved a comics-accurate costume but it seemed to me that it would be too difficult to pull together: no skin showing, all that webbing. Plus, how would I see out of the white eyes?

Kids (and adults) today have so many more options than we had. I mean, I would have begged for something like this:

My Mom was handy with the sewing machine so you’d think I would have hectored her to custom-make a Spider-Man costume but maybe it just came down to the fact that most of the time I wanted to be Batman anyway.

Still, the great thing about being a 21st century man-child is that you can still grab a Ben Cooper Spider-Man costume off of eBay for a decent price.

Naturally, it doesn’t come close to fitting — not that I would try — but having it on my shelf is little nod to correcting a minor childhood misstep.

And I still love that mask!

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MORE

— The Greatest BATMAN Costume a Kid Could Have. Click here.

— What If 13 Superheroes Wore BEN COOPER Costumes Instead? Click here.

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NOTE: This first ran in Oct. 2020 in slightly altered form.

* This article was originally published here