By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Bruce Wechtenhiser cautioned his audience at the BGSU “Spider-Man in Popular Culture” conference that he may get emotional at some point during his talk.
That moment came later in his “Spidey and Me: Over 50 Years of Connecting and Collecting,” presentation when he showed the audience a Spider-Man radio he got for Christmas when he was 9.
He felt bad about even putting the item, which cost $25, on his Christmas wish list, he said. He had a single mom who raising four kids working a minimum wage job. But her “being a good mom,” on Christmas morning, the radio was under the tree. Wechtenhiser loved the radio so much he later purchased another just so he could have the undamaged packaging like he had frantically opened on the Christmas morning 50 years ago.
Wechtenhiser has collected a lot of Spider-Man stuff over the past 55 years. More importantly, he’s collected a lot of stories about the character whom he refers to familiarly as “My man, Spidey” and his identification with him.
Wechtenhiser was the first keynote speaker at the recent conference. Over two days scholars, writers, artists, and fans from here and abroad discussed Spider-Man from a variety of angles.
For Wechtenhiser, Spider-Man is personal. It started, he said, when as the youngest of four, one of his three siblings plopped him in front of the TV to watch a Spider-Man cartoon. The four-year-old related to it immediately.
Wechtenhiser projected a slide of an illustration of a child watching the cartoon. That illustrator could have been at his house. That was him at 4, Wechtenhiser said, in his pajamas, munching on his cereal, his gaze fixed on the character on the TV screen.
Then one of his siblings bought him his first Spider-Man comic book. When the young Bruce opened it up and saw Peter Parker shirtless, he realized: That’s me. With the help of his siblings (because he hadn’t learned to write yet), Wechtenhiser wrote his name inside the comic, the final “E” in Bruce adorned with multiple horizontal lines.
Wechtenhiser still owns that book, which in itself is amazing. Soon after, his mother left his father, who was an alcoholic. The family moved just a few blocks away. They spirited away while his father was at work, and someone thought to bring along the Spider-Man comic.
That was the start of 55 years of collecting.
Wechtenhiser, 59, said he does not have the largest collection of Spider-Man memorabilia, that honor belongs to a collector in Ohio. But it would be hard to match the enthusiasm on display during his BGSU talk.
Since he was a child, he has been a “spidey-vangelist.” He has dressed the part from a mask made by his mother, which looked more like a bag, to professionally designed and tailored costumes.
And he acted the part. In the summer, he went to summer program held at a school. When he got bored winning at board games, he did what he believed his hero would do – he climbed up the four-story tall fire escape by scaling the support beam that attached to the brick wall. And the adults let him do it, he said incredulously.
Some of the items bear the marks of coffee cups or mishandling. Others are items that he had wished for when he was a kid, and now with “adult money” and eBay he can acquire.
There’s a Spider-Man ash tray, which he purchased. He wasn’t even sure it was an authentic, Marvel-approved item. But the price was right. Later he was approached by another collector who had a similar one with the image of the Human Torch on it. These was given to Marvel employees at a Christmas party. So, they were rare. The other collector asked his price. Wechtenhiser said he usually didn’t sell items but made an exception.
He used the money to buy an engagement ring for the woman who became his wife, and with whom he has two grown children, including a daughter with a Spider-Man tattoo.
He later purchased another similar ash tray.
Many of his items are signed by the creators who brought Spider-Man to life – Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, and John Romita.
Like Wechtenhiser, Ditko, the original illustrator, grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Wechtenhiser only discovered this when he was in his late-20s. He’s worked to get Ditko recognized in his hometown, including playing a small part in the creation of a 28-foot-tall mural.
In his introduction, Matthew Donahue, of the BGSU Popular Culture Department, said that “collecting is such a huge part, the essence of popular culture, and essence of our lives. It provides us with an opportunity to have a deeper connection with our interests and passions.”
Wechtenhiser collected in private, then a couple years ago he connected with Brad Douglas, who operates the website Spider-Man Crawl Space. Douglas did a two-hour remote Youtube video interview on his collections, which he later turned int a podcast. Wechtenhiser and his passion for Spider-Man had been discovered. “The media avalanche has continued.”
For the past year and a half, he’s been giving this presentation, and is at work on a book.
Yet, for him, “I’m still the little kid wearing the t-shirts. I’m still the little kid buying the toys, buying the comics, and reading them.”
