TIME Magazine’s ‘The Story of Spider-Man’ Shows How the Character Who Broke All the Rules Became American Folklore

GayNrd Editors December 3, 2021

It seems like Spider-Man has never been bigger. The next movie installment, No Way Home, that opens on December 18, may break box-office records beyond expectations.

Rumors around the movie are an entertainment source of itself and Time Magazine has dedicated a whole special issue dedicated to the famous wall crawler. The Story of Spider-Man is the story of a character who was not guaranteed to succeed and a comic book super hero unlike any other.

First off Peter Parker was a teenager. He was also a nerd. He was like essentially what if Jimmy Olsen was Superman. Even his costume’s red and blue colors certainly owe to the man of steel.

Rolling Stone: Nobody thought it would work. So, a kid gets bit by a radioactive spider — and it gives him superpowers? He swings around New York City on webs and fights crime? Superhero titles were starting to come back into fashion, but Marvel Comics owner Martin Goodman didn’t believe a superhero title with a high-schooler hero would sell; teenagers were generally relegated to humor comics, like Archie, or to sidekick roles, like Batman‘s Robin.

That was the response that writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko got when they first introduced Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy #15, in August,1962. You could already tell this do-gooder was different. The webslinging hero – or, more accurately, his alter ego, Peter Parker – was everything other superheroes were not: Nerdy, neurotic, picked on, and burdened with a whole host of real life problems. “I just wanted to do what I thought would be the first realistic superhero,” Lee once told author Tom DeFalco. “I wanted to write about a character that worried about money – just like I did. I liked the idea of him having a sick aunt. I also thought it would be interesting if he wasn’t popular in school.”

After that inaugural appearance, however, the character would be given his own title – The Amazing Spider-Man – in March 1963. Almost immediately, Spider-Man became a phenomenon. Peter Parker was an incredibly relatable character, and readers were as interested in his life as they were in Spider-Man’s crime-fighting antics. “Nowhere else in history had you seen the alter ego get that kind of face time,” says Blake Bell, author of Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko. “The alter egos of Batman and Superman were largely superfluous, focusing mostly on, ‘Will someone discover them some day?’ But with Peter Parker, fans could really imagine that they were that character.”

Perhaps even more importantly, Spider-Man wrestled with this identity crisis: Peter wasn’t just a front, it was his very real self. “The Spider-Man character speaks to the fact that we often don’t think people see our true best selves,” says Dr. Robin Rosenberg, the author and editor of numerous books on superheroes and psychology, including Superhero Origins: What Makes Superheroes Tick and Why We Care.

“Peter was made fun of and marginalized because of who he was. He also suffered from a lot of guilt: When his Uncle Ben is killed early on, it’s because of a specific choice Peter has made, not just a random criminal act. That guilt informs the whole character.” The tormented nature of Spider-Man, and its success with readers, would fuel other Marvel titles as well, such as the mutants of X-Men, who had to contend with their rejection from society.

Armed with a rich and complicated psychology, and a mandate for realism, Spider-Man would help expand the audience for the entire comic book form throughout the 1960s. Once thought of as being strictly for little kids, comics were now being read by teenagers and on college campuses. “Stan Lee was a frustrated novelist, and I’m sure he was really excited about the fact that he was getting all this newfound respect among college students and professors and intellectuals,” says Sean Howe, author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. “He really wanted to play to that as much as possible.” (Even the film director Alain Resnais came calling at one point, to work on some unproduced film projects with Lee.) And while Marvel courted a broader range of readers, they also expanded Spidey’s reach to TV, signing off on a Saturday morning cartoon show in 1967 and, later, letting the PBS kids’ show The Electric Company use the superhero’s likeness free of charge. Television gave Spidey a chance to reach a bigger underage crowd than a comic-book rack could. (When the cartoon was later syndicated to numerous foreign markets in the late Seventies, a whole new generation learned to love the webslinger as much as these guys.)

Spider-Man had broadened the comics audience beyond the braces-and-baseball caps set; keeping that audience meant keeping with — and being relevant to — the times as well, something that would allow the character and the comic to avoid being a Pop Art flash-in-the-pan. So, through the late Sixties and early Seventies, Lee and his team continued to not only reflect but purposefully refract the cultural issues of their day. Spider-Man introduced one of the first major African-American supporting characters in a comic book series (Joe Robertson, an editor at The Daily Bugle); subplots involved college protests, and even a famous three-issue arc about drug addiction that was refused approval by the Comics Code Authority. The world outside of the stapled pages kept barging in.”This was sort of the whole Marvel approach, these neurotic characters in real life settings,” says Howe.

And Spider-Man was the most neurotic of them all. In a 1965 article about Marvel in The Village Voice (an early sign that comics were entering the realm of truly hip), writer Sally Kempton had declared, “How can a character as hopelessly healthy as Superman compete with this living symbol of the modern dilemma, this neurotic’s neurotic, Spider-Man, the super-anti-hero of our time?” The answer, of course, was for the likes of Superman to become more like Spider-Man. So, over the years, practically all superheroes – even ones that existed for decades before the web-slinger – have become more and more like Spidey, tackling more real-life issues, attempting to become more relatable, and expanding their emotional lives. In the 1970s, Lois Lane transformed into a black woman for 24 hours and became aware of racism. In the 1980s, Superman was revamped to put the figure of Clark Kent more at the center of the tales. It seemed as if Spider-Man was suddenly omnipresent by proxy.

Even so, there was something truly unique about Spidey, and one could see that in the way he took off internationally. From January 1970 to September 1971, for example, Japan’s Monthly Shonen Magazine featured a Japanese-drawn Spider-Man, with a teenage alter-ego similar to Peter Parker named Yu Komori – proving that the concept had appeal beyond America’s borders. In 1973, he got his own British imprint, Spider-Man Comics Weekly, reprinting the original American tales. Years later, thinking on the webslinger’s popularity around the world, Lee observed to Comic Book Resources that, “the costume he wears covers him completely. You see no skin at all. Now, because of that, any youngster can imagine that he is Spider-Man. It could be a black kid, it could be an Asian kid, it could be anybody of any skin color. They could imagine they’re Spider-Man because he’s all covered up and he could be anybody. We didn’t do that purposely, but it’s certainly worked out that way.” (As if to bear out that observation, a 1978 Japanese TV series featured a totally different Spider-Man, whose alter-ego was that of a motorcycle racing champion who had made contact with aliens.)

Time Magazine: The ominously titled Spider-Man: No Way Home is proving to be the most anticipated Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movie since Avengers: Endgame. The first trailer has set the Internet aflame, thanks to some familiar faces from previous Spider-Man films.

No Way Home is likely the last time we’ll see Spider-Man in the MCU since Sony’s contract to lend the character to Marvel Studios for three solo films is coming to an end. But he’ll go out with a bang: the movie will throw Tom Holland‘s Spider-Man into the multiverse where he will meet characters from previous Spider-Man franchises—specifically the Sony versions starring Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, respectively.

While Maguire and Garfield aren’t technically confirmed cast members, we’re probably getting a live-action version of the Spider-Man pointing meme. We do know that Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus from Spider-Man 2, Jamie Foxx’s Electro from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Matt Murdoch from the Netflix TV show Daredevil will all appear in No Way Home. The first trailer also revealed for the first time that we’ll get to see versions of the Green Goblin, Sandman and Lizard. And there are a few hints that we may finally get a live-action rendering of a beloved version of Spidey from the comics, Miles Morales.

Every Single Detail of the Spider-Man: No Way Home Trailer, Explained

he ominously titled Spider-Man: No Way Home is proving to be the most anticipated Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movie since Avengers: Endgame. The first trailer has set the Internet aflame, thanks to some familiar faces from previous Spider-Man films.

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We do know that Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) will play a pivotal role in the film. When a Spidey villain reveals Spider-Man’s secret identity, Peter Parker pleads with Strange to use magic to reverse the revelation. Things go predictably awry from there.

Here’s everything you need to know about the first trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home and how it fits into the MCU’s growing multiverse.

The last time we saw Holland’s Spidey, he was in big trouble. At the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home, Jake Gyllenhaal’s villainous Mysterio created a fake video to make it seem as if Peter Parker murdered Mysterio in cold blood. (As an aside, Mysterio gained Peter’s trust by claiming that he was a superhero who arrived on earth from a parallel universe, and then joked with his henchmen about how gullible Peter was for believing the parallel universe nonsense. That past burn may mean that Peter is slow to accept the whole multiverse concept in No Way Home.)

In the final scene of Far From Home, the vindictive journalist J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons, reprising his role from the Sam Raimi movies—more on that later) publishes the Mysterio video and reveals that Peter Parker is Spider-Man.

Spider-Man: No Way Home looks to pick up the action seconds after the end of Far From Home. Peter tries to swing away from crowds with his love interest MJ (Zendaya) in his arms. Kids in school snap his photo. Protestors call Peter a “Devil in Disguise.” The police bring Peter, his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) in for questioning about Mysterio’s death.

We see the fallout from Spider-Man’s identity reveal in Spider-Man: Far From Home

Why We’ll Never Stop Getting New Spider-Man Movies

In a year so stuffed with comic-book characters that 26 superheroes jockeyed for the chance to punch one purple alien in Avengers: Infinity War, you might be forgiven for feeling a little superhero fatigue. Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man — who, despite his modest moniker, has starred in no fewer than eight live-action movies in 16 years — has become the most overexposed superhero of all.

This year alone, the webslinger starred in three huge projects: the aforementioned Infinity War, a Spider-Man video game and now an animated film called Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, out Dec. 14. And yet all three were met with widespread acclaim and commercial success (if early box-office predictions for Into the Spider-Verse are to be trusted, at least). That list excludes Venom, an offbeat film about Spider-Man’s villainous doppelgänger, but even that was a box-office smash. The character’s proliferation begs the question: Why aren’t audiences sick of Spidey?

Spider-Man: Miles Morales Could’ve Tackled Police Reform Head-On. Instead, the Cops Are Almost Entirely Gone

here was plenty to love about Marvel and Insomniac’s 2018 Spider-Man video game, from the mechanics of swinging through a hyper-realistic Manhattan to the story’s emotional gut-punches. But many critics had one major issue with the plot: Peter Parker’s fantasies about an alter-ego he dubbed “Spider-Cop,” a hard-boiled detective who had all the problematic markings of a Law & Order-style TV crime-fighter who refuses to play by the rules no matter the consequences.

The “Spider-Cop” storyline was cringe-worthy in 2018, five years after the Black Lives Matter movement began to coalesce. It has aged even worse in the past year, as fresh protests against police brutality have erupted across the world. This year’s follow-up game, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, whose hero is a Black-Puerto Rican teen, offered Insomniac an opportunity to address these criticisms. But while the game is a joy to play—with a wonderful cast of characters and a new set of thrilling Spidey powers—it also bends over backwards to avoid any nuanced conversation about criminal justice. In fact, the police have largely been removed from the game, skirting the issue entirely.

That’s a shame, because the game—a hotly-anticipated title that millions are likely to play—is uniquely positioned to respond to our current moment. Miles, who features in his own comics series and was the hero of 2018’s Oscar-winning film, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, is a native of New York City, where tensions between the police and communities of color have been escalating for years. Miles’ father also happened to be a cop killed during a terrorist attack in the 2018 game. At the beginning of this new game, Peter takes a well-earned vacation and leaves his protege, Miles, to protect New York on his own. The veteran Spidey’s only been gone a few hours when an evil corporation called Roxxon, run by an Elon Musk-type, threatens Miles’ diverse Harlem neighborhood.

Given his lived experience and his father’s job, Miles may have complicated feelings about law enforcement and criminal justice—feelings that could have evolved over the course of this game’s storyline in interesting, thought-provoking ways. Sadly, Insomniac balks at the chance to render the full complexity of Miles’ story.