Spider-Man

• 1. Introduction

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  Spider-Man debuted on the 5th of June 1962, when Amazing Fantasy #15 went on sale, introducing a nerdy teenager from Queens who would become one of the most recognizable fictional characters on earth. Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko placed Peter Benjamin Parker in a world with no mentor, no team, no glamour. His parents were dead. His uncle would soon follow. He had pimples and an overdue rent bill. Nobody had tried this before in superhero comics.

  What made a publisher approve such an unlikely pitch? Why did a teenager who could have stopped a thief, and chose not to, become a symbol of responsibility rather than shame? And how did a character the publisher called a certain failure end up outselling every rival in the business? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Fight Over Credit

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  Martin Goodman, Marvel's publisher, told Stan Lee that Spider-Man would never work. In a 1986 interview, Lee recalled Goodman's objections: "Nobody likes spiders; it sounds too much like Superman, and how could a teenager be a superhero?" Lee pushed back with the idea of an average man who happens to have superpowers. Goodman only agreed to a tryout because Amazing Fantasy was already scheduled for cancellation after issue #15.

  Before a single page was drawn, the character's authorship became contested. Lee first brought the concept to Jack Kirby, who connected it to an unpublished 1950s character he had developed with Joe Simon called the Silver Spider. In Simon's later account, Kirby drew sample pages, but Lee rejected them because the result looked like "Captain America with cobwebs." Lee handed the assignment to Steve Ditko.

  Ditko did far more than finish someone else's blueprint. He discarded Kirby's pages, threw out the magic ring the character originally used, and completely redesigned the costume and the origin. In Ditko's version, Peter Parker gets his powers from a radioactive spider bite, not a ring. Fetish artist Eric Stanton, who shared a studio with Ditko at the time, recalled in a 1988 interview that he may have contributed "the business about the webs coming out of his hands." Kirby himself, in a 1971 interview, said it was Ditko who "got Spider-Man to roll."

  Lee later acknowledged Ditko's centrality. He noted that because the costume fully covers the wearer's body, people of every race could picture themselves inside it. That design choice, Ditko's alone, gave the character a universality few superheroes have matched.

• 3. The Everyman Formula

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  A 1965 Esquire poll asked college students to name their favorite revolutionary icons. They ranked Spider-Man alongside Bob Dylan and Che Guevara. One interviewee explained the appeal plainly: Spider-Man was "beset by woes, money problems, and the question of existence. In short, he is one of us."

  Sally Kempton, writing for the Village Voice that same year, described Spider-Man as bearing "a terrible identity problem, a marked inferiority complex, and a fear of women." Comics scholar Phillip Lamarr Cunningham later argued that Peter Parker "epitomizes the conflation of everyman and nerd better than any popular culture figure." Peter struggles to pay Aunt May's rent while fighting supervillains. His editor at the Daily Bugle, J. Jonah Jameson, publicly despises the very hero he employs without knowing it.

  Cultural historian Bradford W. Wright identified how the 1960s stories reflected the political tensions of the Cold War era. Comics scholar Peter Lee found a theme of generational consciousness for Baby Boomers in the early Spider-Man stories, with a recurring emphasis on the gap between young people and their elders. Douglas Wolk pointed to the frustrated bildungsroman at the core of the character: Parker is repeatedly on the verge of reaching maturity when something knocks him back.

  Comics writer and historian Paul Kupperberg credited Lee and Ditko with creating "the flawed superhero with everyday problems." That idea, he argued, sparked a revolution. The insecurity running through early 1960s Marvel titles changed what superheroes could be. Spider-Man's rogues gallery contributed to this texture; Rick Hudson observed that most of Spider-Man's enemies are "ordinary guys in a fantastical world," rooted in scientific accidents rather than operatic gothic origins.

• 4. Deaths That Changed Comics

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  In issues #96-98 of The Amazing Spider-Man, cover-dated May through July 1971, Marvel published a three-part story arc showing the negative effects of drug addiction without the Comics Code Authority's approval seal. Harry Osborn's addiction to pills was the plot vehicle. The Nixon administration's Department of Health, Education, and Welfare had asked Stan Lee to run an anti-drug message, and Lee chose his top-selling title. The Code refused to endorse any story depicting drug use, even negatively. Marvel published anyway. The issues sold so well that the industry's self-censorship code was subsequently revised.

  Two years later, in issue #121, cover-dated June 1973, writer Gerry Conway killed Gwen Stacy. The Green Goblin threw her from a bridge tower. Spider-Man shot a web to catch her, and a note on the letters page of issue #125 confirmed what readers feared: the whiplash from the sudden stop had broken her neck. The subsequent issue, #122, showed the Goblin dying in the same fight, accidentally. Historians of the genre have argued that this story, "The Night Gwen Stacy Died," marks the shift from the idealistic Silver Age of Comics to the darker Bronze Age.

  That darkness had a lasting structural impact. Peter grieved Gwen for years in print, gradually developing feelings for Mary Jane Watson instead. Parker proposed to Watson in issue #182, cover-dated July 1978, and she turned him down. The story of that refusal, and what it said about two people not yet ready for commitment, ran for nearly a decade before the two finally married in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 in 1987.

• 5. Symbiotes, Clones, Retcons

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  The black costume that first appeared in the mid-1980s Secret Wars miniseries started as a plot device and became a franchise. Spider-Man wore the alien suit from 1984 to 1988 before the costume was revealed to be a living symbiote that he had to physically reject. The symbiote then bonded with Eddie Brock, a reporter who despised Spider-Man, and became Venom. Because the symbiote already knew Spider-Man's powers, Venom is immune to the spider-sense.

  The real-world wedding to Mary Jane Watson in 1987 was promoted with a ceremony at Shea Stadium on the 5th of June 1987, with Stan Lee officiating before actors playing the characters. Writer David Michelinie said in 2007 that he had not wanted the marriage to happen at all and had "planned another version, one that wasn't used."

  Two decades later, editor-in-chief Joe Quesada ordered the marriage erased. In the "One More Day" storyline that concluded in issue #545, cover-dated January 2008, the demon Mephisto magically removed the marriage from the memory of everyone in the world in exchange for saving Aunt May's life. Quesada justified the rollback by saying "Peter being single is an intrinsic part of the very foundation of the world of Spider-Man." Writer J. Michael Straczynski threatened to remove his name from the final two issues of the arc. Between 1994 and 1996, the Clone Saga had already tested readers' patience with a three-year storyline in which Ben Reilly, a clone of Parker, appeared to be the original. Ben was killed in Peter Parker: Spider-Man #75, cover-dated December 1996, and his body immediately crumbled into dust, confirming he was the duplicate.

• 6. Scale of an Icon

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  When Marvel became the first comic book company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1991, the Wall Street Journal announced the news under the headline "Spider-Man is coming to Wall Street." An actor in the Spider-Man costume accompanied Stan Lee to the exchange floor.

  From 1966 to 2012, The Amazing Spider-Man sold an estimated 145 to 150 million copies. As of 2014, Spider-Man was the world's most profitable superhero. That same year, global retail sales of licensed products tied to the character reached approximately $1.3 billion, a sum that exceeded the combined global licensing revenue of Batman, Superman, and the Avengers.

  The launch of Todd McFarlane's "adjectiveless" Spider-Man title in 1990 set a commercial record: all four variant covers combined sold over three million copies. In 2014, IGN named Spider-Man the greatest Marvel Comics character of all time. A 2015 poll at Comic Book Resources reached the same conclusion. Comics scholars Robert G. Weiner and Robert Moses Peaslee place him among the best-known superheroes worldwide, rivaled only by Batman and Superman.

  The character reached the Supreme Court in 2015, in the case Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC, a royalties dispute over a patent on an imitation web shooter. Justice Elena Kagan's opinion for the Court concluded with a direct quote from the comics: "with great power, there must also come great responsibility." In 2022, Penguin Random House released a Penguin Classics edition of the original Spider-Man issues, placing a character born in a discount anthology alongside the literary canon.