What is Spider Ham Radio?

Watch Steve Crawl Around the InterWebs

This week, Death Ray Squadron Lieutenant Commander @StevenDKent gives us a briefing on the best wall-crawling centered podcast on the interWebs, Spider Ham Radio. 

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What’s Spider Ham Radio?

Hi there, True Believer! Spider Ham Radio is the only podcast as goofy as Spider-Man. It’s two brothers, Steve and Will Kent, talking about their favorite webslinging superhero.

What’s it like?

It’s like listening to a couple of goofy nerds with sleepy voices get excited about Spider-Man. Every full-length episode starts with a radio drama based on a classic Spider-Man comic book -- most of them written by Stan Lee and drawn by Steve Ditko in the early ’60s. Occasionally Steve and Will trick somebody else into helping with the voice acting, but for the most part, they do every character themselves. The Bros Kent round out the rest of Spider Ham Radio with discussions of upcoming Spider-Man comic book titles, recommendations and usually some sort of discussion making fun of the world’s first teen-aged superhero.

Are the Bros Kent good at voice acting?

Next question, please.

What does “Spider Ham Radio” mean?

It’s an allusion to three things:

1. Spider-Ham, the Spider-Man parody character created by Tom DeFalco and Mark Armstrong for Marvel. Since we’re hams and we’re lampooning Spider-Man as well, it’s a good fit.
2. Spider Radio. Originally, Spidey could intercept certain radio frequencies with his Spider-Sense. While you don’t see it very often now, Stan Lee worked this ability into three plots within the first five issues of Amazing Spider-Man.
3. Ham Radio. Because podcasting is the new ham radio.

How often do you publish episodes?

We post something every (almost) Saturday. It alternates between full episodes and Fat-Free Spider Ham, which are original short parodies involving the characters. The Bros Kent have about eight pages of plots for Fat Free episodes, like “Aunt May tries to convince Peter that she’s Spider-Man” and “Spider-Man is elected mayor of a small town in Idaho.”

Those are both real Fat-Free Spider Ham episodes.

Why Spider-Man?

Spider-Man is one of people’s favorite superheroes for a lot of reasons. I think most of his appeal is in the fact that he’s a goofy kid that doesn’t always know what to do.

And he doesn’t get a lot of support -- in the past, his boss has paid for the creation of Spider-Slayer robots. He thinks if he talks to his Aunt May about his superhero life, she’ll have a heart attack and die. His love life has been very complicated. And a couple of times a month, some weirdo dressed as an animal pops up and starts punching up New York.

But he keeps going. No matter what kind of grief he’s dealing with, you see him swinging around the city and making jokes.

So that’s why we love Spider-Man. Because life is hard and humor makes it better. Because you don’t have to be popular to be passionate about something. And because you don’t have to be perfect to do the right thing.

‘Nuff said.