VIBE
IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK (WEB ILLUSTRATION)The name? “You can’t call a hero Spider-Man,
Stan. People hate spiders!” (Did he think people
liked gigantic monsters who crunched cities
between their toes?)
The concept? “He’s a teenager? Teenagers can
only be sidekicks!” (Guess Goodman had never
noticed a DC comic called Superboy, which had
been around since 1949.)
The “personal problems” Stan wanted him to
have? “Heroes are too busy ghting evil to slow
down the stories with personal stuff.”
Still, Stan got a grudging okay to stick his new
hero in Amazing Adult Fantasy. Since its name
change from Amazing Adventures, that comic
had consisted of “all Lee and Ditko, all the time!”
— short fantasy tales with O. Henry-style twist
endings. Quality-wise, it was a minor gem. But
sales were tanking.
Back in the 1940s, [the industry] had been up
to its cape in characters named Superman,
Batman, Hawkman, Amazing-Man, Bulletman,
Dynamic Man, Fly Man, etc., — not to mention
a Spider Woman — and a Spider Widow — even a
Spider Queen.
Though never, ever, a Spider-Man. With or
without a hyphen.
Stan wanted the hero to be a teenager. And
not a football-hero type of teenager, either, but a
guy who could be described as a “bookworm” and
“Midtown High’s only professional wall ower”; a
youth who’d gain the proportionate strength and
other attributes of a spider, but who, when not in
costume, would be just another high school nerd.
Kirby, however, just naturally drew the kid to “look
like Captain America.” Well, no big deal. Stan gave
Steve Ditko a tryout on Spider-Man.
[Ditko] not only captured the right feel for the
teenager and his high school contemporaries,
but he designed a Spider-Man costume that was
perfection itself. When in action, his arachnid teen
had a look that was both heroic and at the same
time a bit ungainly (only natural when a guy is
crawling down a wall or across a ceiling).
The story was no slacker, either. In 11 packed
pages, as worked out by Stan and Ditko, it gave
the hero an origin that bordered on the ludicrous
(bitten by a radioactive spider, indeed!) yet
probably made as much sense as being bombarded
by cosmic rays — or coming from another planet
as an infant. It put Spider-Man through his paces,
showing off his new-found abilities.
And so Amazing Fantasy No. 15 was born.
The word Adult was dropped from the title,
because Stan and/or Goodman felt it looked
odd in the name of a comicbook that starred a
super hero called Spider-Man. After all, what
“adult” was liable to read a story about what
Stan called, on its very rst page, a “long
underwear character?”
An excerpt adapted from Taschen’s The Stan Lee StoryTom Holland and Jake Gyllenhaal in Jon
Watts’ Spider-Man: Far From Homeack in 1961, it took a while to
nd out how well a comicbook
had sold. It could take half a year
before a publisher knew just how
many people had actually bought
the blasted thing.
Martin Goodman must’ve had
a fairly early inkling, though —
and he didn’t count fan mail,
however enthusiastic Stan might
be about it — that their new bimonthly comic was
nding an audience. Because the company’s second
new super hero title was put into production so
soon that its debut came around the same time
as the fourth issue of FF (as Stan affectionately
nicknamed the comic), i.e., just six months after
Fantastic Four No. 1.
With the success of Fantastic Four, Goodman
wanted more than one new super hero comic in- He wanted several. But rather than introduce
them in brand-new comics titles that would have
to sink or swim, this next round of heroes would
be shoehorned into already existing mags like
Journey into Mystery, et al.
There’s no way to be sure which new hero
series was created third, after Fantastic Four and
Hulk, since three new characters would debut that
summer: Thor, Ant-Man, and Spider-Man. But
there’s a very good chance it was the wall-crawler.
In his youth, Stanley Martin Lieber had
loved the masked hero of a pulp magazine called
The Spider. There hadn’t really been anything
spiderlike about him besides his name, but Stanley
had loved that name. But when Stan Lee told
his boss his Spider-Man idea, Goodman loathed
everything about it!