Just inside the first gallery devoted to “Marvel’s Spider-Man: Beyond Amazing — The Exhibit” at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, there is a life-size Spider-Man statue or mannequin. I don’t know what you call this, but he looks real. He’s not, because he’s Spider-Man and Spider-Man is not real. But Spider-Man may as well be real. Most of us have never known a world without a web crawler patrolling Queens. Here, he’s bursting out of a comic book as if blasted out of a Spider-Cannon, fingers on his left hand curled into the universal symbol of web-based travel.

As I entered this room, I found myself unable to move on, as if hypnotized by the overlords of Marvel who have licensed it, or just the clever people who put together this somewhat thin but charming character celebration.

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