Spider-Man - The First Years

[jackolover]

Do you have any idea what he was like when he first came out? He wasn't like Green Lantern or Superman or Batman. He was a dark, scary, fear, totem. Everybody's initial reaction was "He's a sticky Mystery Man", because you couldn't see his mouth. Ignoring he was Peter Parker, an unobtrusive social outcast, Spider-Man sent chills up your spine, because the spiders connotation was to make you flee. Villains got the same effect as other people. He didn't swoop in like the flyers. He was sticking to a wall, with those big, menacing eyes, and staring you down. You didn't know how to take him, because you couldn't make eye contact. He was completely covered from head to foot in the colors of a poisonous, dangerous insect, spraying something out of his hands, so you couldn't move. You were immersed into the tiny insect world, with a giant sized spider patrolling the neighborhood, in the dark. It was the stuff of nightmares.

[Spidey_Legend]

Do you have any idea what he was like when he first came out? He wasn't like Green Lantern or Superman or Batman. He was a dark, scary, fear, totem. Everybody's initial reaction was "He's a sticky Mystery Man", because you couldn't see his mouth. Ignoring he was Peter Parker, an unobtrusive social outcast, Spider-Man sent chills up your spine, because the spiders connotation was to make you flee. Villains got the same effect as other people. He didn't swoop in like the flyers. He was sticking to a wall, with those big, menacing eyes, and staring you down. You didn't know how to take him, because you couldn't make eye contact. He was completely covered from head to foot in the colors of a poisonous, dangerous insect, spraying something out of his hands, so you couldn't move. You were immersed into the tiny insect world, with a giant sized spider patrolling the neighborhood, in the dark. It was the stuff of nightmares.

Well, that's the reason why Stan Lee put that idea in Amazing Fantasy and then got popular. it was a unique and original thing to take a superheroe.

[Mister Mets]

Do you have any idea what he was like when he first came out? He wasn't like Green Lantern or Superman or Batman. He was a dark, scary, fear, totem. Everybody's initial reaction was "He's a sticky Mystery Man", because you couldn't see his mouth. Ignoring he was Peter Parker, an unobtrusive social outcast, Spider-Man sent chills up your spine, because the spiders connotation was to make you flee. Villains got the same effect as other people. He didn't swoop in like the flyers. He was sticking to a wall, with those big, menacing eyes, and staring you down. You didn't know how to take him, because you couldn't make eye contact. He was completely covered from head to foot in the colors of a poisonous, dangerous insect, spraying something out of his hands, so you couldn't move. You were immersed into the tiny insect world, with a giant sized spider patrolling the neighborhood, in the dark. It was the stuff of nightmares.

That might be applicable for characters in the Marvel Universe, but I don't think that was the case with Spider-Man readers, who knew that he was just Peter Parker.

[Assassin Spider]

And not only that, Spidey was something of an a-hole back in those early days. Not so much of an a-hole that he'd let people get hurt if he could help it, but he was still full of resentment for how shoddily he'd been treated by his peers as Peter Parker and by the media as Spider-Man and he vented by generally being a sarcastic, irreverent dick when he wasn't intimidating and smacking around criminals and tangling with super-villains less intimidated by "a skinny kid in a unitard." He was already frightening enough as it was from the web-shooting and the creepy spidery movements he made and the costume that completely concealed his body and face, so slinging off-putting one-liners along with those webs didn't endear him any further to the general public.

[Last1oftheJedi]

When I first saw this title, I was kinda hoping it was going to be a comic series along the lines of Batman: Year One. But, ofcourse, Spidey feel. His trials and what-not "becoming" a hero that became a NYC icon. Before he was accepted and all that. If that's the current case in the comics, please don't bomb on me too much, I had to jump the Spider-man ship with the whole clone saga. Glad I did too, saved me one more day...heh.

[jackolover]

When I first came in contact with Spider-Man comics I was 12 years in 1963, and just starting puberty, getting my imagination twinged for the first time with the visual and written stimuli. The impact on a 12 year boy of something like Spider-Man is what I try to convey to you of how it struck that first time. The web pattern over his mouth made Spider-Man have this grim grin to his face, so the overall effect was of a spider in a human form, not a human wearing a spider costume. Of cause, that impact I got as a 12 year old isn't going to be the same impact an adult comes away with, at that time. You have to remember, if you picked up a Spider-Man comic for the first time in 1963, you didn't have the benefit of all the history we have now. There was nothing before Spider-Man, so all you get is the Saturday Matinee darkness and shadows that Steve Ditko put into the book. Superman and Green Lantern were bright and daylight imagery, and even Batman was drawn cartoony by one of the Kane brothers. But Ditko used the serials from the Theaters of the 1950's, where the good guy chased the villain in the darkness, and you could hardly see the action in that dark theater. This was what Ditko brought to a comic and had you imagining this thing, this person, as one of those fleeting characters in the shadows.