Okay, once again, this is something they got into because of me. I turned it on. But it’s definitely one of those shows that I can’t watch if I’m trying to get them to do something, because they’ll stop and watch it with me. It’s more kind of a series of short movies than a TV show, I’ll further admit, but honestly I like animated superhero stuff and have often preferred it to live action stuff.

This is Ghost-Spider (Dove Cameron) and Ms. Marvel (Kathreen Khavari) and Squirrel Girl (Milana Vayntrub) and America Chavez (Cierra Ramirez) and Inferno (Tyler Posey). Sometimes, there are others—on the episode Heart of Iron, Dee Bradley Baker is credited first . . . as Lockjaw. But they’re teenagers doing assorted superhero things. They’re all explicitly still learning what they do, and sometimes, that goes better than others.

I like, for example, that Gwen Stacey has a lot on her plate. Not just her dad, whose abuse of power I think should be considered more unsettling than funny. (Seriously, it’s Not Cool that he’s running background checks on her friends, especially given how many of them are presumably minors.) But she’s in a band and she’s Ghost-Spider, and she’s just busy. That’s something that only happens now and again in superhero fiction, and it should come up more. Unless you’re a serious introvert—and I’m not sure that’s in the personality profile of choosing to be a superhero—you’re going to have had a social life before, and your friends and so forth will notice when you suddenly have less time for them.

There’s also an episode where a pair of supervillains (I don’t have credits for them) have a daughter who turns out not to have powers. And that immediately makes them mistreat her, because the kind of parents who are going to be supervillains are probably not going to win parent of the year anyway. And she doesn’t rebel and become good, in part because she simply hasn’t had good modeling in the home and really only knows how to be like her parents, and that feels real.

It’s extremely low-rated stuff on IDMb right now, and that’s frustrating to me. It makes me wonder in part how much of it is because, yes, the three characters who seem to be the focus of most of it are Gwen, Kamala, and Doreen. And all three girls have different character design, too, and that sort of thing goes over so well with a certain class of superhero buff. But both my kids enjoy it; I do keep saying that my three-year-old daughter is already getting into stuff that’s going to be getting her called a fake geek girl when she’s older.

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