Look Within: You'll Find a Spidey There
There are other superheroes, to be sure, and they all have their appeal. Everyone knows Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman. Even people who have never read a comic know Superman's "Up, up and away" and the catchphrases of the other heroes. But no superhero has ever captured our hearts like Spider-Man.
What magic did Stan Lee and Steve Ditko unearth when they created the web-spinner in 1962, and why does it still touch us so deeply today? Why, to put it another way, did the first Spider-Man movie make close to a billion dollars -- and why is the next one, which opened Wednesday, poised to make even more?
When I was editorial director of Marvel Comics' Spider-Man line, we used to refer to Spidey as "the regular-guy superhero." He really could be any one of us. To be Superman, you had to come from another planet. To be Wonder Woman you had to be born a mythological Amazon princess. But to be Spider-Man, you just had to be bitten by a radioactive spider. (Hey, it could happen.) You didn't have to be from a superhuman race. You just had to have it happen to you, and we all have things happen to us.
And when the spider gave Peter Parker his superpowers, he did what any of us would have done. He didn't go out and fight crime right away. He set out to make some money to help his kindly aunt and uncle, and also to have a few bucks to enjoy life. He was just a teenager. But when his uncle was murdered, things suddenly got a lot more serious. Peter captured the killer and realized that "with great power there must also come great responsibility." End of fun, time to be serious forever, right?
Wrong.
Because no matter how bad things became for Peter/Spidey, he always approached his responsibilities the way we all do -- ambivalent and complaining all the way. Sure, he felt a responsibility to use his powers for good. He was brought up right. But he wanted to have fun -- because, really, how could swinging through the canyons of New York not be fun? Sometimes he loved being Spider-Man, sometimes he hated it. Sometimes he turned his back on it for a while. But his sense of responsibility always brought him back. And that's what we'd all like to think we'd do in his place. To paraphrase Walt Kelly's Pogo: We have met the Spider-Man and he is us.
