The unintended consequences of being a Batman fanatic… 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. 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....