Spider-Man turns 60: the eternal youth of Spider-Man

1962. James Bond versus Dr. No goes out to the cinema. Ringo Starr joined the Beatles who record their first single. And a strange hero emerges from between the pages of an American comic strip. His name is Peter Parker. Difficult at first sight to take it very seriously. The young bespectacled student has neither the shoulders of steel nor the riches classic superheroes, before the bite of a radioactive spider grants extraordinary abilities to the puny kid. The bookworm becomes Spidermanthe spider-man, one of the most popular characters of the marvel editor. Sixty years later, the high-flying success of the superhero has still not been denied. A good fortune due in part to the eternal youth of the adolescent Spinner.

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This vigilante not quite like the others has never been so appreciated as today. Released last December the movie Spider-Man: No Way Home was propelled in extremis to the top of the international box office in 2021, a feat in line with previous Spider-Man films. But the cinema is not the only theater of his prodigies. The comic books to his name are among the best-selling Marvel comic books year after year. Nostalgia helping, the original booklets, flexible, crumpled and more than half a century old are now trading at gold prices. $3.6 million, for example, for an issue of the first Spider-Man adventure, hotly contested in September in an American sale.

A layman would be hard pressed to explain the reasons for such enthusiasm. Isn’t one masked hero worth another? Definitely not. Between his dreary family life, his student life, his hidden outings between New York skyscrapers and his job as a photographer at Daily Bugle, where he is lectured by his crisp boss, Peter Parker’s routine is not at all easy. It stands out, above all, by its similarity to the daily life of readers – minus the aerial stunts. Much more widespread today, this humanity of heroes is one of the most significant touches brought to American comics by Stan Lee, the screenwriter with the golden ideas of the Marvel house.

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Reinventing the figure of the hero

“In the early 1960s, Stan Lee was looking for new ways to write comics, new angles of attack. In 1961, with The Fantastic Four, he invents an atypical form of family, out of the ordinary. And the following year, he will offer something even more daring. explain to Figaro Aurélien Vives, editor and Community Manager at Panini Comics. The publisher released a ten-volume anniversary collection in the spring to celebrate Spider-Man’s 60th anniversary, capturing several key moments from its long publishing history. Such longevity has its reasons. You have to pick up the thread of its genesis to grasp the enthusiasm for the Weaver because, as surprising as it may seem, the child acrobat almost never saw the light of day.

Stan Lee has often told, with forceful jokes, the creation of his most famous character. “I had found what I wanted to do with my hero: I had his superpower, I had his name, but then I thought it would be funny to deck him out with a whole bunch of personal worries”recounted Stan Lee, during a speech given in 2017 at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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“Better still, I decided to make a teenager out of him!continued the editor enthusiastically. There were no teenage superheroes back then, at least not to my knowledge. Its publisher, Martin Goodman, however, had little taste for these innovations. “He was like, ‘Stan, those are the worst ideas I’ve ever heard. People hate spiders. Teenagers can only be sidekicks. And you want him to be anxious? But finally ! Superheroes don’t have that kind of problem!” The spider-man then grazes the trash can.

No matter: Stan Lee is stubborn, and slips his primitive Spider-Man on the cover of a then dying secondary publication, Amazing Fantasy. The issue appeared in August 1962. Stan Lee worked on it with the designer Steve Ditko to develop the visual identity of the hero, including the preposterous costume and fully masked face – a rarity at this time. “This collaboration is essentialemphasizes Aurélien Vives. Stan Lee is very progressive, while Steve Ditko is more misanthropic and objectivist, in line withAyn Rand. This tension between their respective vision of the world makes the character quite unique.

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Youth icon

The success of this first appearance of Spider-Man is overwhelming, and the hitherto reluctant director of Marvel Comics transforms the test into a series: thus the comic strip is born The Amazing Spider-Man. In addition to the action and a earthy gallery of enemies, readers are drawn to this wacky tale of a college student who overnight becomes an athletic superman while remaining a little corny. The metamorphosis recalls, in essence, puberty changesand the passage to the adult world.

“Spider-Man’s extraordinary innovation, when it comes out, is its teenage hero. The adventure is that of a somewhat bizarre youth, who does not feel in his place. summarizes Aurélien Vives. Another recipe for success: marivaudages, a feature accentuated from 1966, with the arrival of John Romita Sr. in drawing. Who of Gwen Stacy or of Mary-Jane will prevail in the tormented heart of the young hero? “Between the mystery of his secret identity and love triangles, it turns a bit like a soap opera at times, we’re not going to hide it”breathes Aurélien Vives.

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This overflow of life speaks, finally, to the American youth of the 1960s. The soil is propitious. The young baby boomers born the day after the Second World War form a considerable contingent, in love with the counter-culture and thirsty for new models, far from dad’s references. Peter Parker is the misunderstood whipping boy and scapegoat of the newspaper and the media. Many readers share this unease as countercultures flourish in America.

In an article published in September 1965 in the pages of the magazine Esquier, California students list Spider-Man this way – with Hulk – in the ranks of 28 revolutionary heroes, behind Bob Dylan and Che Guevara. “He’s one of us”would have summed up a student, relates the specialized media CBR. Half a century later, its popularity is still undeniable. Became last winter the sixth highest-grossing feature film in the history of the seventh artthe last movie Spiderman by Jon Watts once again demonstrated the renewed fascination inspired by this high-flying hero. And which sticks as well to the walls as to the skin of young people.