Spider-Man

Spider-Man is a fictional comic book superhero published by Marvel Comics. Created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, since his first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15 (Aug. more...

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1962), Spider-Man has become one of the world's most popular, enduring and commercially successful superheroes and is arguably Marvel's most famous character.

When Spider-Man first saw print in the 1960s, teenage characters in superhero comic books were usually sidekicks. The Spider-Man series broke ground by featuring a hero who himself was an adolescent, to whose \"self-obsessions with rejection, inadequacy, and loneliness\" young readers could relate. Spider-Man has since appeared in various media including several animated and live-action television series, syndicated newspaper comic strips and a successful series of films.

Marvel has published several Spider-Man comic book series, the first being The Amazing Spider-Man. Over the years, the Peter Parker character has developed from shy high school student to troubled college student to a married teacher and a member of the superhero team the New Avengers. According to BusinessWeek, Spider-Man is listed as one of the top ten most intelligent fictional characters in American comics.

Publication history

By 1962, with the success of the Fantastic Four and other characters, Marvel editor and head writer Stan Lee was casting about for a new superhero idea. He said that the idea for Spider-Man arose from a surge in teenage demand for comic books, and the desire to create a character with whom teens could identify. In his autobiography, Lee cites the non-superhuman pulp magazine crime fighter The Spider as an influence and both there and in a multitude of print and video interviews said he was inspired by seeing a fly climb up a wall — adding in his autobiography that he has told that story so often he has become unsure of whether or not it is true. Artist Ditko, in a 1990 article by himself, gave a more prosaic origin story for the name:

Lee approached Marvel publisher Martin Goodman to seek approval for the character. In a 1986 interview, he described in detail his arguments to overcome Goodman's objections. Goodman agreed to let Lee try out Spider-Man in the upcoming final issue of the canceled science-fiction/supernatural anthology series Amazing Adult Fantasy, which was renamed Amazing Fantasy for that single issue, #15 (Aug. 1962).

Jack Kirby, in a 1982 interview, claimed Lee had minimal involvement in the character's creation, and that it had originated with Kirby and Joe Simon, who in the 1950s had proposed a character called The Silver Spider for the Crestwood comic Black Magic until the publisher went out of business.

Read more at Wikipedia.org