Amazing Spider-Man 2 Viral Campaign: “Spider-Man: Hero Or Menace?” Finally Comes Into Play

The viral site for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has been replicating features from the Daily Bugle, Peter Parker’s most regular place of employment in Spider-Man comics, with one major difference: Editor J. Jonah Jameson hasn’t been using the paper (here a Tumblr) as a venue to rail against your friendly neighborhood wall-crawler.Until yesterday, anyway.They’ve so far been playing up the tabloid elements of the Bugle, and it seems that sensbility is where Jameson’s disdain for Spidey comes from in the Amazing universe, with the thrust of an “editorial” by Jameson basically being two pronged: that he’s skeptical of technology and youth culture, and annoyed with Spider-Man in specific for refusing interviews to the press.The end result, though, is navigating the paper into where we would expect it to be at the start of the movie: skeptical at best and sharply critical at worst of Spider-Man.You can read the entry below…March 28, 2014An Editorial from Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah JamesonIs social media a powerful tool to connect people around the world or is it home to a cyber-den of cyber-losers who spend their time spreading cyber-lies about a certain “hero” named Spider-Man…So is Spider-Man a hero because some bearded Brooklyn hipster posted a cyber-video of him webbing up a mugger outside a coffee shop? Is he a hero because a misguided high school student starts a fan club on cyber-Twitter? Is he a hero because a “cyber-blogger” like Melissa Hutchins encourages fans to plaster stencils of the masked vigilante on crosswalk signs across Manhattan?These days it seems like everyone is talking about Spider-Man, except for one person of course: Spider-Man himself, who refuses to talk to the press. The wall-crawling weirdo would probably say actions speak louder than words, but the longer Spider-Man doesn’t talk, the longer he ignores legitimate questions about how his actions have frustrated on-going police investigations. How he has used excessive force in foiling minor crimes. How his web swinging has distracted city drivers and led to a documented twenty-four accidents (and counting).Has Spider-Man stopped a mugger, a carjacker, or a bank robber here and there? Yeah, okay, I’ll admit he has. But can Spider-Man answer this: do those actions offset all the problems he’s created? Even if he could, I doubt he will.