Stan Lee’s Original Spider-Man Stories Show How Marvel Can Overcome Superhero Fatigue

With interest in the MCU tapering off after a period of unparalleled global success, perhaps it’s time for Marvel to look to a familiar inspiration to reinvigorate its brand: the work of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in their most influential book of the 1960s, The Amazing Spider-Man. In the year 2024, superhero fatigue is a real thing, as two and a half decades of collective cultural celebration seem to be finally winding down for the flagship of superhero consumerism, Marvel Entertainment. Following a declaration of bankruptcy in 1996, Marvel was able to pull off one of the most remarkable rebounds of all time thanks in part to a slew of successful film adaptations. However, the company’s luck seems to finally be wearing off.

Though it may seem strange to think of now, Spider-Man was actually an innovation to the superhero concept when he arrived on the scene in 1962 with Amazing Fantasy #15. A starkly vulnerable hero, Peter Parker was constantly struggling to even meet the expectations of a teenaged high school student, much less a guardian of justice.

Though clearly products of their time, what the early Lee/Ditko Spider-Man stories deliver is more than just a decent template for building a new character from scratch. Their stories demonstrate how to keep that character dynamic and fresh. And perhaps, this formula might just be the key to unlocking the potential of the superhero genre once again.

How Lee & Ditko Built Spider-Man To Be An Icon

Lee and Ditko’s The Amazing Spider-Man first appeared on newsstands in 1963, following the character’s origin in Amazing Fantasy, and immediately set itself apart from its contemporaries with the protagonist Spider-Man standing in deliberate opposition to his fellow costumed heroes. An often lonely high school student whose battles against supervillains seemed to pale in comparison to his many personal problems, Spider-Man was able to embody a certain essence that none of his other fellow Marvel heroes seemed to quite be able to capture: that of a true everyman hero.

A street-level vigilante, gifted with amazing powers thanks to the bite of a radioactive spider, Peter Parker began his quest as an imperfect figure, having squandered his auspicious beginnings by failing to stop a burglar who would later murder his Uncle Ben. Though an important part of the character and his need for redemption, this underlying guilt would become only a small part of the hero’s complex psychological make-up. Lee and Ditko managed to craft a truly compelling saga for Parker, gradually building up his world, issue by issue.

Needing to earn money for his household to support his frail Aunt May, Parker makes the fateful decision early on of allying with the character who will turn out to be among his worst enemies, his boss J. Jonah Jameson, editor of The Daily Bugle, where Parker will sell pictures of himself as Spider-Man. This presents a deceptively complex dilemma behind Spider-Man’s choice to exploit his own fame for monetary reward: can Spider-Man still even be a hero given the need he clearly has to maintain a pattern of duplicity? And the answer is ultimately unclear, as Parker’s double life as Spider-Man only creates more problems for him.

How The Amazing Spider-Man Built A World Within A World

The narrative of Spider-Man opens up with Parker in the midst of a burgeoning world of heroes and villains, whom Spider-Man will become an indispensable part of as his story continues. Part of what makes Spider-Man such an interesting figure is how he ends up fitting into the then-smaller world of the Marvel Universe. Other heroes such as The Fantastic Four, The X-Men and The Avengers also exist as famous figures in this world, with members even occasionally crossing over to appear in Spider-Man’s own stories, but Spider-Man as a character presents a different perspective.

A lone hero without a team (though he did attempt to join The Fantastic Four in order to pay the bills), Spider-Man also becomes a world-famous celebrity for his costumed crime-fighting early on in his career, originally earning the ire of Jameson due to his attempts to earn extra cash by putting on public exhibitions. Parker’s fame eventually becomes an accelerating factor in the danger he ends up facing. Many of his early foes, including Electro and Kraven the Hunter, remark that they hope to meet Spider-Man in order to demonstrate their prowess with as much visibility as possible by defeating such a well-known public figure.

What Differentiates Lee & Ditko’s Amazing Spider-Man From Other Superhero Stories

This dynamic comes to a head in The Amazing Spider-Man #20, when Jameson hires private investigator Mac Gargan to undergo an experimental test that gives him superpowers capable of taking down Spider-Man. While Jameson privately admitted before this event that his hatred of Spidey is rooted in jealousy rather than an actual belief that Spider-Man presents a real menace to society, this issue represents a harrowing logical conclusion to the newspaperman’s obsession as he demonstrates the true lengths to which he will go in order to stop the Wall-Crawler. The brutal battle that follows between Spider-Man and Gargan, now transformed into the villainous Scorpion, is a turning point in the series. The power-mad Scorpion beats the hero to within an inch of his life and is only stopped from his goal of murdering Jameson by a last ditch effort on Spider-Man’s part.

The story of Spider-Man has always featured spectacular failures not commonly seen in superhero fare, with Spidey often meeting defeat at the hands of his overpowered enemies such as Doctor Octopus or The Green Goblin (at least before his eventual comebacks). Ditko’s unique visual sense, combined with Lee’s densely-packed writing style specifically tailored to that series, endowed seamless conductivity to the action sequencing of The Amazing Spider-Man. Many issues contain scenes that would still be difficult to translate effectively to a television series thanks to their scale, dynamicity and quickness.

Likewise, Lee’s pacing, in gradual slow-burn fashion, allowed for Spidey’s world to open up with proper footing, with new villains and incrementally increasing challenges allowing the series to avoid the kind of constant existential crises of extinction-level scale that are ubiquitous in superhero culture then and now. What The Amazing Spider-Man #20 offered was a development of this style that showed the potential of what this concept could be: a street-level hero, willing to fight against impossible odds, whose drama arose from the everyday criminals of his city.

How Lee & Ditko’s Spider-Man Can Save Superhero Culture

What ultimately allows Ditko and Lee’s work on The Amazing Spider-Man to stand the test of time isn’t necessarily its cultural commentaries. The Amazing Spider-Man doesn’t hold up to modern standards of social equity, including gender equality, notably in the somewhat hackneyed rivalry between Parker’s love interests Liz Allan and Betty Brant. However, what The Amazing Spider-Man does manage to do is quite heartening in its relatively quiet scale of superhero fiction: it manages to use the relatively smaller setting of New York City, and the street-level criminality Spider-Man must face as its protector, in such a way as to not become overwhelming.

This more subdued “20th Century” narrative style, more focused on its central characters and the psychological foils presented by their villains, enabled the character to continue growing without overburdening his journey with continuity obligations. Now an inherent criticism of “power creep,” the constant addition of cast members, superpowers, and universe-level threats, this more ground-level perspective employed in The Amazing Spider-Man is ultimately what allows it to be such a brilliant example of the time-honored superhero comic book even so many years later. The relatability this perspective grants Parker, despite his peculiar life, allows all the elements to flourish due to the naturalistic way Spidey’s story unfolds.

It is this discipline, this strange human core at the base of this superhero concept, that has allowed Spider-Man such longevity and staying power, in no small part due to his creators. With these elements in place, the excitement within these concepts that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko introduced in The Amazing Spider-Man might yet breathe anew, reinvigorating Marvel and a genre beleaguered by superhero fatigue.