The Superhero as Avatar IV: Spider-Man and the 1960s

In a very pure way, Spider-Man reflects both the comics industry and the culture at large in the decade when he first saw print. The invention of a more realistic and human superhero model paralleled the shifting of paradigms that marked the sixties tendency of devolution from abstract principles to specific human need; and his role in allowing the new Marvel Comics to usurp the throne of the reigning DC Comics suggested the generational transition that fueled much of the discord that, after the fact, serves to define an exhausting decade.

Spider-Man belonged in the sixties and to them. He belonged not in the shallow political sense of someone who parakeets the tired slogans of another generation, as sanctified through the distortions of nostalgia, but as someone who played the very human drama that went on in those days, independent of ideology, while America frothed at the mouth through the adolescence of an entire generation.

Marvel and the New Hero

Spider-Man first appeared in Amazing Fantasy, a book not originally featuring superhero fare, in 1963. Across the aisle at DC Comics, one could predict what kind of story might appear in its main title, Superman; imagine a final panel where Luthor, from his prison cell, vows revenge and Superman waves and smirks so that Luthor can view him from between his prison bars. Failing that, perhaps the final panel would depict Clark Kent, winking in an aside to the reader, after having foiled Lois Lane's latest plan to entrap him into marriage or to reveal his secret identity.

DC in those days did a brisk trade in formula heroes and formula stories, a vice that would soon come back to bite them once Marvel's hot new properties began cutting into the once-guaranteed DC domination of the market share. Excepting Wonder Woman, DC's titles dealt centrally in avuncular alpha males with different powers and costumes but sometimes very little else to mark them as separate characters. Each of these characters confronted crime with a stoic manliness; many of them derided their defeated foes with wisecracks and atrocious puns; most of them ended his stories smiling.

Perhaps the DC hero demonstrated how a man should behave, but that did little to allow readers to relate to the characters on a personal level. The closest problem a normal man might have to the constant snooping Lois Lane engaged in to uncover Superman's secrets might mirror the life of a guilty husband whose wife seeks to expose in adultery; but such a man probably spent most of his energy in the concealment necessary to lead a double life, seldom bothering with juvenile pursuits like comic books (or, indeed, in anything that might divert resources from the business of seduction and deceit).

Into this situation we can now imagine the introduction of Spider-Man. He didn't live in a penthouse. He didn't even have a car. He lived at home with his aunt and guardian, a meddlesome and overprotective but compassionate woman whom Spider-Man had made into a widow by allowing a burglar to escape and, later, kill her husband. Already we leapfrog past the simple and carefree bachelor lifestyle represented by the DC superheroes. Furthermore, Spider-Man had to cope with adolescence, having come into superheroing at the age of sixteen. DC didn't seem to have characters between the ages of "thirteenish" and "thirtyish," leaving for someone else - like Marvel - such characters as currently enjoyed the exquisite burdens of adolescence.

Comics as Soap Opera

For Spider-Man, nothing worked the way it did at DC. DC superheroes had girlfriends as someone with whom to schedule a monthly rescue date; for Spider-Man, females represented a hopeless aspiration, a ruined opportunity, a moral crisis, or a perpetual fight. Again, to the likes of Green Lantern or the Flash, a job represented a convenient cover for their superheroing; for Spider-Man, work meant many of the things it does to real people, including food, utilities, and medical care. Superman had a charming curmudgeon for a boss. Spider-Man had a bona fide jerk of the highest caliber, a man so bad that he rapidly became implausible.

Spider-Man had real problems and real concerns that his powers couldn't touch. He concealed his secret identity from those close to him, but not out of the abstract dangers that Superman might recognize for Lois Lane, if entrusted with similar information. He faced a very real danger that the information might kill his aunt, and another, more social risk in the fact that everyone hated and feared Spider-Man. Given the logic of the first years of his book, and the marginal nature of all his social interaction, anyone who discovered his secret would have come to hate him twice as much: Once for his identity as Spider-Man, and again for the trail of deceit he had used to protect his secret.

DC Comics did not completely quarantine its characters from human interaction, but such content served peripheral, rather than central, storytelling purposes. A fight between Hal Jordan, Ray Palmer, or Barry Allen and the appropriate belle would possibly close a story as comic relief during the denouement of a tale that hadn't really involved the purported loved-one. Alternately, some supervillain might need a hostage for the hero to rescue. Nonetheless, DC's heroes worked in a problem-driven or plot-driven mode. Frequently personalities need not enter into it. The formula approach of Justice League of America, where that team would divide into teams of three superheroes and each team would encounter a different facet of the same problem until someone came up with a clever solution, could have worked with considerable substitution of theoretically dissimilar players. Personalities, where available, did not enter into the equation.

In the earliest days of Spider-Man, on the other hand, the beleaguered Peter Parker found himself amid an intertwining series of problems. His superheroing might get him a cracked rib and force him to miss work. He might have to cause himself real problems at home either by superheroing-related absences or by the various impromptu means he cobbled together to conceal evidence of his heroic identity. No clear demarcation separated Peter Parker from Spider-Man as separate people, even if the costume allowed him the confidence that he didn't feel in civilian clothing.

The Sixties and the Crisis of Adolescence

Ward Cleaver, the patient and serene father from "Leave it to Beaver," represented one key archetype of manhood that resonated in the culture of middle-class suburbia. DC's superheroes drew from the same well that produced this fictional and iconic father. Many of the same virtues remain recognizable: the calm, sane, Stoic front that concealed a calm, sane, Stoic inner man; the confidence spawned of considerable moral authority unsullied by hypocrisy; a singular lack of imagination that caused very minor deviations from predictable patterns to elicit considerable, even disproportionate shock; and the serenity that might attach to someone who can take for granted the well-wishes, respect, compassion, and benevolence of his peers.

Such characters moved in a world where nothing could continue to unsettle protagonists during the thirty days between magazines. A story would begin with things in order, reveal some deviation, send the hero to rectify the problem, and end with order restored.

Spider-Man couldn't play that way because he enjoyed none of the enviable gifts that DC superheroes took for granted. His youth foreclosed the possibility of the benefit of wisdom. Experience had not shown him that everything will turn out all right because everything always did turn out all right. In the present things didn't work that way and nothing suggested they ever might in the future.

Peter Parker lived in a pressure cooker fueled by the gap between what he knew he should do and what he could do. Blown up to a scale that becomes social rather than personal, where people strove to fight for or against social forces rather than specific human adversaries, that situation becomes the essence of the side of the 1960s that activists and combatants inhabited.

People could relate, particularly those who fellow-traveled for the politically active waves that seemed to spread across the landscape. When post-Ditko Spider-Man stories began to include episodes of political unrest on college campuses, Stan Lee may have intended such topical content as an attention-getting gimmick, but the gimmick did not deceive. In some ways, such scenes belonged in the book as a reflection of the inner Peter Parker projected onto the scenery he inhabited.

Departures in Design

Ignoring, for the moment, the ways in which Marvel rewrote the script for superheroes through Spider-Man, Spider-Man departed from formulaic superhero models in a number of elements of design.

DC's costume designs tended to resemble one another. For instance, if you took Superman, gave him a cowl and gloves, then changed the color scheme of his costume, you would have something that could pass for Batman's uniform. Typically the DC superhero covered everything but hands and head, with the option for gloves and mask sometimes making an appearance. Masks left the mouth and jaw exposed (Atom, Batman, Flash) or took the form of a domino (Robin, Green Lantern, Green Arrow). Rarely, someone might escape the brief-over leotards look (Atom did). Rarely, a hero might expose some arm (Green Arrow, Hawkman, and Robin did in costumes designed in the 1940s; Martian Manhunter did, but he exposed Martian, not human, anatomy).

Ditko's Spider-Man costume dispensed with the underwear-on-the-outside look that belonged even to many of Marvel's new superheroes (Thor, Giant-Man, the Wasp). The other elements displayed streamlining that suggested motion, including an angular belt-piece that avoided the bland rectilinear character of almost everyone else's outfit. The buggy eyes on the mask - a full-face piece that would not fit well with the unthreatening costumes of DC - gave the costume a spooky look and the ornate webbing pattern on all the red areas of the costume defied the simplified costume forms of old-time heroes who seemed to dress for the ease and convenience of artists.

Spider-Man's powers, furthermore, broke with long-standing patterns. Marvel at some point decided that weird powers held an inexplicable appeal. A formula character might fly, but walking on walls held more character. Spider-Man's strength and ability to jump great distances had a pedigree that went all the way back to Superman; but Spider-Man's "spider-sense," an awareness of danger, didn't really derive from the characteristics of spiders or from the stock abilities of previous superheroes. Spider-Man's web-shooters also had a weird quality to them, mainly from their alternate settings. Ditko's treatment of fluids and amorphous objects like web-fluid and ectoplasm gave a surreal quality to Spider-Man that hinted of Ditko's earlier work in fantasy comics. What DC character would allow someone to see him trapping a criminal by coating him in sticky gray goo?

Spider-Man fit none of the stock categories of sixties superhero. Indeed, DC must have seen in him a thoroughly weird combination of semifuturist costume design, strange powers, and completely undignified melodrama. The Legion of Super-Heroes stories provided the only place where similarly bizarre and idiosyncratic characters might appear in a DC book. Even then something with Spider-Man's odd combination of powers and visible feel belonged more to the stable of disposable one-shot villains that plagued various DC heroes.

Oedipus and the 1960s

Whether dealing with bosses, bullies, or the inevitable problems that arise when someone attempts to meet adult responsibilities with juvenile resources, Spider-Man depicted an adolescent crisis. This fit in perfectly with many strains of the 1960s, a culture-wide adolescent crisis in which one generation attempted to address adult problems with juvenile tools. Never mind that perhaps both parties in the cultural conflict between generations might have realized that playing the roles of Stern Parent and Rebellious Child neither addressed the problems of the day nor created the tools someone else might find useful in their solution.

Spider-Man reverberated for a new generation of readers. The content, still shaped by the decisions of the Comics Code Authority (on which body Stan Lee once served), kept clear of the lurid content that some call "adult." Concerned grownups could allow juveniles the indulgence of the book without having to fear the negative effects one could expect trashy tabloid fare to have on young minds. Nonetheless, Spider-Man spoke to a wider range of ages and circumstances than did the books DC began to notice losing ground to the upstart publications of Marvel Comics.

The intergenerational conflict played out on many levels. Peter Parker fought with his own generation and the previous; the readers' generation fought, seemingly to the death, with the generation of its parents; and even Marvel, the punk kid of comics (even considering its prior history in incarnations as TImely and Marvel) confronted DC, the old lion of the business.

If, unlike real human beings, Spider-Man never truly resolved his crisis of overthrowing the bad father - generally played to excess by Jonah Jameson - America itself never completely resolved the conflict of generations, either. The game went on both in Spider-Man's books and in an America that had replaced one aging father with another as it shifted from a culture led by middle-aged opinion shapers who spent their youth in the Depression to a culture led by middle-aged opinion shapers who spent their youth in the fifties and sixties.

A Spider-Man of His Times

So many pieces implicate Spider-Man as something in the sixties and, furthermore, something of it that much of the previous verbiage merely states the obvious and attempts to place it in a context. Put in brief, all of it boils down to this: Spider-Man, through his combination of innovative design, inclusion of themes of intergenerational conflict and adolescent anomie, and a general unmasking of the superhero as a man who rises to the task from whatever lurid crises drag him down, defines the sixties superhero so thoroughly and perfectly that the prospect of producing a plausible rival includes great difficulty.

Undeniably, he both fit into his own times and defined the times to follow by providing a model to inspire the creation of an entirely new approach to the superhero and an example whereby existing heroes could become something that might bridge the gap between the heroic role DC superheroes tended to play and the concerns of Everyman. In so doing, he forced new life and credibility into the superhero and gave it meaning for a much broader base of readers.