One of the luckiest days of my life was when Steve was available—and willing—to tackle Spider-Man with me.
—Stan Lee, in his introduction to 2013’s The Art of Ditko
As Fantastic Four was finding its audience—and Lee and Kirby were finding their combined voice—Timely/Atlas/Marvel was still putting out its Western and humor and horror stories, while still trying to capitalize on the resurgent superhero trend in comics. This led to the creation of Lee and Kirby’s Incredible Hulk, who first appeared in an eponymous comic dated May 1962, which would have put it on sale sometime in February. Incredible Hulk replaced Teen-Age Romance in the limited Goodman lineup. The series—the saga of timid scientist Bruce Banner, transformed by gamma radiation into a raging engine of destruction—lasted a mere six bimonthly issues, with the treatment of the character changing from issue to issue. It would be a couple of years before the Hulk would catch on.
(Although Lee wouldn’t start calling the modern incarnation of the company Marvel Comics until the May 1962–dated comics, a small box with the letters MC started appearing on the company’s covers on a couple of comics dated June 1961, and then on all the rest of the line starting with comics dated July. But no one has ever been able to confirm whether those innocuous letters did indeed stand for Marvel Comics or had some other obscure meaning, perhaps something of note to distributors or retailers.)
A more successful character—although it took some time to realize his success—would be the amazing Spider-Man. Debuting in the final issue of Amazing Fantasy (losing the Adult for its swan song), dated August 1962, the character would disappear for seven months before reappearing in his own magazine when Lee and Goodman realized how popular that one appearance had been. The creation of Spider-Man, perhaps the most iconic character in the company’s history, had much in common with that of the other ’60s Marvel superheroes, including existing in the same shared universe. The other Marvel characters were mainly created by Lee and Kirby. Spider-Man, while sharing its writer and editor with the rest of the heroes, had as Lee’s cocreator and visualizer Steve Ditko, whose presence made Spider-Man, as was noted on the first page of his origin story, “just a bit … different!”
Spider-Man’s origin, as recounted in the character’s Amazing Fantasy #15 debut, has been related countless times in many media. It goes like this:
Peter Parker, an unpopular but brilliant teenager, is bitten by a radiation-saturated spider. The bite grants Peter spiderlike powers, which he decides to use to make a lot of money for his doting aunt and uncle, who raised the orphaned boy from an early age. But selfishly deciding to not stop a criminal he easily could have, Peter is devastated to find that the same thief has later murdered his beloved Uncle Ben. Capturing the criminal, Peter realizes that “with great power, there must also come great responsibility” and vows to dedicate his life to fighting crime and to making sure, as much as he is able, that no one else ever has to suffer a loss like his.
With Spider-Man’s origin, Lee’s and Ditko’s combined skills produced a pop culture milestone. To many, this is the perfect superhero origin, surpassing even the simple elegance of Superman’s and Batman’s traumatic beginnings, the former the lone survivor of a doomed planet, the latter the lone survivor of a doomed family.
From his first appearance in AF #15, Spider-Man’s milieu was high school, as both a metaphor for modern American life, and as a literal and figurative backdrop and battleground during adolescence. As Kurt Vonnegut observed: “High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.”1 And for his first few years, Spider-Man demonstrated just that.
While Lee and Kirby possessed different temperaments, they both came from a background common to many comic book creators of their era, both being children of poor New York Jewish families. Their common experiences and origins were as much a factor in their work as their contrasting personalities. As historian Mark Alexander observed, “Lee and Kirby both had proletarian Jewish backgrounds. They were both fast, indefatigable workers who could produce stories of remarkable quality and quantity without ever missing a deadline. Other than that, they were diametrically opposite in every possible way.”2
Steve Ditko, though also possessed of a very different temperament than Lee’s, was from a very different background than either Lee or Kirby. As critic Greg Rowland has observed:
While Stan Lee and Jack Kirby reflected aspects of the New York Jewish psyche, Ditko hailed from a small (Johnstown, PA) Czech-American community. In fact, Ditko’s work is suffused with the paranoia of a small Middle European nation forever bullied by Empires on all sides (J. Jonah Jameson’s toothbrush moustache is no coincidence.)3
Kirby’s worldview also seemed to be very much shaped by his experiences in combat and conflict, whether on the streets of the Lower East Side or in the battlefields of World War II Europe. Neither Lee nor Ditko seem to have had childhoods filled with street fights, and while they both served in the military, their experiences there, unlike Kirby’s, didn’t involve combat.
Indeed, it seems that, for all their differences, the common, formative experience that Lee and Ditko brought to the teenage superhero called Spider-Man was that of the American high school. Before exploring Spider-Man’s success, some information about his creators’ high school years, would seem to be in order.
Stanley M. Lieber’s 1939 DeWitt Clinton High School yearbook entry, accompanied by an affable, smiling photo of young Stanley, lists a dozen different clubs and committees he belonged to at the Bronx school, more than any other guy—it was an all-boys school—on the page. (At graduation, Lee was sixteen years old, having skipped a grade or two.)
Always energetic, it seems possible that Stanley might indeed have belonged to all those organizations, but perhaps some were wishful thinking. That he was the president of the Public Speakers Club seems plausible. Membership in the Chess Club would make sense. But was he really the editor of the DeWitt Clinton Law Journal? Did he really belong to the French Club? While he had spoken of having a fantasy of being a lawyer, Lee was not known for dropping Gallic phrases into casual conversation. By the same, token, he did recall: “I formed a lot of clubs [in high school]. I formed the Law Society … and I think I formed a debating society. But I never stayed with anything much.”4 So he does seem to have been socially active, if only in short bursts.
In many ways, what clubs Lee truly belonged to is beside the point. That he wanted people to believe he was active in these dozen organizations is as, or more, significant than if he actually was a member—or if all of them even existed! (Interestingly, though, in a school noted for its accomplished sports teams, Lee lists no athletic activities.) His stated goal, printed next to his picture is: “Reach the Top—And STAY There!” (Classmate Daniel Licker, by contrast, lists his goal as “Aeronautical Engineer.”) Each grad was apparently asked for a quote. Lee’s was “Join the navy, so the world can see me!”—a riff on the navy recruiting slogan, “Join the navy and see the world!” Stan Lieber’s nickname was, unsurprisingly, listed as “Gabby.”
Most of the other boys on the page list a college in their entry. It’s unclear if that’s where they hoped to go or where they were actually admitted. Stanley Lieber’s entry, though, does not list a college—a bit strange, perhaps, for the editor of the Law Journal and president of the Law Society?
The text accompanying seventeen-year-old Stephen J. Ditko’s 1945 Johnstown, Pennsylvania, high school yearbook photo—a pleasant, half-smiling shot—lists no clubs or witty sayings, although those of his classmates do. His nickname is given as: “Steve.” His plans for his future: “Undecided.”
In high school, Ditko “joined a club of teenagers who carved balsa wood into model planes to train airplane spotters in identifying enemy aircraft.” This certainly seems like something nerdy Peter Parker might have done. In addition, “the high school Ditko illustrated [in Spider-Man] was his from Johnstown, with the same little crenellated battlements at the top. The character of Flash Thompson existed in Ditko’s shop class—the bully, beating up other kids for their lunch money.”5
Clearly, high school made a big impression on Steve Ditko, too.
Ditko would go on to serve in the U.S. Army in postwar Germany, return home to pursue an art career, and eventually end up studying at New York’s Cartoonists and Illustrators School (today the School of Visual Arts) with Jerry Robinson—renowned for his work on early Batman comics, who would go on to an even more illustrious career in syndicated comic strips and much more. Robinson said of Ditko that he was “very dedicated, and always quiet and reserved.… He was in my class for two years, four or five days a week, five hours a night. It was very intense.” It was Robinson who introduced Ditko to Stan Lee, who was visiting the class in search of new artistic talent.6
His comics career interrupted by a bout of tuberculosis, which sent him back to Johnstown to recuperate, Ditko would return to New York to resume his career in 1955, continuing, like Lee, working until the end of his life. Ditko did his first work for Lee in ’56, drawing seventeen stories for him over a six-month period. These were mostly fantasy and science fiction stories, but he also drew a story in 2-Gun Western #4, dated May 1956, featuring his first collaboration with Lee as his writer, or at least the first one signed by both men.
While one shouldn’t read too much into a literal and figurative snapshot of someone from a formative period in his or her life such as high school, it does seem that there were certain signposts of personality at play in those respective yearbook entries of each man.
With Stanley Lieber—eager to let everyone know his accomplishments, not that concerned if there was an element of exaggeration in his entry—the essence of the adult is already there: a smart, witty, socially adept character, eager to please, probably a lot of fun, if sometimes a bit annoying, to be around. Conversely, Stephen Ditko’s photo tells you he’s someone who knows something you don’t and who doesn’t feel he needs to impress you with a list of his accomplishments. That he knows them is enough.
While Lee has always spoken proudly of DeWitt Clinton and its illustrious alumni, he has said, “I didn’t hate being in school, but I just kept wishing it was over and I could get into the real world, because I wasn’t studying anything that I was particularly interested in.”7 This is a not uncommon feeling, although he has also said that if he could have afforded to go to college, he would have, maybe studying “literature, journalism, writing—something like that.”8 He did briefly attend City College of New York because a girl he liked was a student there. But when they broke up, he dropped out.
For Lee, as for many other comics professionals whose formal education was relatively limited and whose need to enter the work world was urgent, high school served the role that college or art school might for future generations of comics makers. It’s where identities were discovered, explored, and discarded, where future selves were molded.
For those of Lee’s generation in the comic book business, there were the Harvard, Princeton, and Yale of comics—the Bronx’s DeWitt Clinton, Manhattan’s High School of Music & Art, and Cleveland’s Glenville High School—whose ghosts, good and bad, would haunt them forever. For these working-class kids, the fantasy world that for some—those with more means or perhaps a burning desire to pursue academics—was college would end up being their high school years. Not having really attended college, for Lee, the touchstones of his high school years loomed large as turning points, inspiration, story fodder, and more. Notable teachers, such as Leon B. Ginsberg (who taught him that humor often makes it easier to get points across), and memorable schoolmates, like John J. McKenna (a natural public speaker and salesman), regularly turned up in his recollections.9 Similarly, throughout much of twentieth-century American pop culture, the metaphor of high school—Andy Hardy, Archie Andrews, Ferris Bueller—looms large.
Most comic book superhero fantasies involve, at least in part, enabling a child or teen reading them to imagine being not merely an adult but an adult with astonishing powers and abilities, and possessing the wisdom to use those powers and abilities wisely. Perhaps the ultimate realization of that was the original 1940 Captain Marvel character (published by Fawcett), who literally transformed from being a kid named Billy Batson into an adult superhero.
Kid or teen superheroes like Batman’s Robin, the Boy Wonder, and Captain America’s Bucky Barnes were usually sidekicks. They catered to a fantasy of having a heroic big brother or father or cool adult friend that you could pal around with, who would mentor you in your imagined costumed adventurer career—and who you’d even get to save once in a while.
Stan Lee hated sidekicks.
As he said about Spider-Man: “I hated teenagers in comics because they were always sidekicks. And I always felt if I were a superhero, there’s no way I’d pal around with some teenager.”10
There were, over the years, solo kid superheroes—Superboy, Captain Marvel Jr., Kid Flash—who were child or teen versions of an adult hero, their identities dependent on those of their mentors. But in most cases, a superhero was understood to be a full-grown adult in both civilian and superhero identities, the idea being that no kid wants, deep down, to be a kid, subject to adult whims and orders. The superhero fantasy is about vicariously being an adult with the agency to make important decisions and powerfully affect situations. In addition, many superheroes were really dual fantasies for readers to latch onto. While the hero aspect was, of course, imbued with extraordinary powers and/or possessed incredible technology, the characters’ civilian identities were usually also accomplished and, if not wealthy, then well-to-do, respected professionals—doctors, lawyers, scientists, police officers, billionaire playboys, and so on. There were no prominent heroes who were unemployed or worked as janitors or busboys. Even timid, bumbling Clark Kent was a star reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper.
Which brings us to Spider-Man.
As Lee recalled about Spider-Man: “I thought it might be interesting to make the teenager the actual hero. What would happen if a teenage kid got a power? And then I thought it’d be even more interesting to make him a kid with the normal problems that so many teenagers have.”11
First assigned to Kirby to draw, a complicated path led to Ditko being assigned by Lee as Spider-Man’s artist. Spider-Man did not conform to any of the templates for adult or kid superheroes. Peter Parker did not have money or status.
Readers got this. One, Dan Fleming, said of Spider-Man, in a letter printed in Amazing Spider-Man #5:
It’s nice that you have a “poor” boy with powers, unlike all those crazy millionaires that have been floating around for years.
Peter Parker was a kid with a lot in common with the teenage Stan Lieber. Peter was on his way to becoming. His loving Aunt May and Uncle Ben had no extra money but doted on him, buying him a microscope he’d coveted even though they couldn’t afford it—reminiscent of Lee’s parents getting him a new bicycle when they couldn’t afford one without help from a relative. While Lee was an extrovert (which Peter would become after not too long), he was also, like Peter, a bookworm.
Peter Parker was the regular guy—typical teenager—who, like all “typical” people wasn’t—or hoped he wasn’t. Peter was an orphan, raised by loving relatives, but ones who weren’t, at the end of the day, his parents. There was a tragic element to his life before readers even met him. He was bright—brilliant, even—but self-conscious and unsure of himself. Often misunderstood, he alienated the peers he most wanted acceptance from.
It took a radioactive spider bite—and the loss of a third beloved parental figure, Uncle Ben—to give Peter the chance to change all that. But becoming Spider-Man created as many or more problems as it solved for Peter. In some ways, it magnified the adversity he felt life had thrown at him. Watching Peter deal with the changes in his life, his successes and failures as teenager, nephew, classmate, and superhero, became irresistible to readers. So did Peter’s sense of humor, unleashed when he put on the webbed mask, but which was also showing more and more when he wasn’t in costume. Becoming superpowered—though it regularly nearly cost him his life—gave him a confidence, or perhaps unleashed a confidence that might have been there all along. Suddenly, he developed a romantic life and a social life. Would it all have blossomed had he not gained superpowers? Do the powers make the man, or does the man make the powers?
Whatever the answers, Lee and Ditko together created—and kept creating as they went along—this character who was constantly becoming in both his costumed and civilian identities. Peter Parker behaved in, and reacted to, situations the way many young people thought they themselves would—or wished they would. He was far from perfect, but he never stopped trying. He complained and fretted but always ended up doing the right thing. His creators had discovered a unique combination that would become the template for a whole new style of superhero. He was the best “you,” but without losing your problems or deficiencies. He—and you—overcame (with much struggle) your problems and deficiencies. And, like you, he had to do it over and over.
In a 1975 interview with Steve Chapman for The Harvard Crimson, Lee spoke about his days with the WPA Federal Theatre Project. At one point, he mentioned why he’d left that very-low-paying organization. It would have been easy for him to say something about it being the Depression and him needing to kick in to the family pot. Rising from rags to riches is a perennial favorite narrative successful people tell, especially successful people who grew up impoverished during the Great Depression.
But Lee gave it a special, personal twist. What he said (in a casual, matter-of-fact manner, as he so often would embed revelatory insights) was:
You couldn’t make any money in those days … and I had a family to support, so I got all kinds of little writing jobs.12
Not to help his family. Not to assist his family. To support his family.
Lee was never hesitant to speak of his father’s regular state of unemployment, the older man spending angst-filled hours at the kitchen table reading help-wanted ads, going out to seek jobs he would never get, returning home depressed and defeated. And yet somehow, the idea of the family being beyond poor, beyond struggling, to the point where the eldest son’s duty was to go out and bring home money so that the family could survive, was a stunning statement.
“I had a family to support.”
And while he was supporting them (along with whatever help—seemingly unknown to him—other relatives may have been contributing), his mother died. Along with the emotional repercussions for himself, now, through his kid brother, Larry’s eyes, Stan would understand the effect of the traumatic death of a parent on a teenager. Perhaps their mother’s death was not as theatrically dramatic as the murder of Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, but, certainly for Larry—who has spoken of the trauma of their mother’s death—it was life-changing.13
Stan Lee knew all too early, if not about great power, then certainly about great responsibility.
The look and feel of Peter Parker’s Ditkonian world, despite being set in the present of the early 1960s, is something out of our collective mind’s-eye image of the Great Depression. With clothing styles that are more evocative of the ’30s than the ’60s, with New York streetscapes that might as well have been extrapolated from Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks painting—as well as from the ecstatically oppressive urban landscapes of Ditko’s artistic idols Will Eisner and Jerry Robinson—Ditko’s pages exuded a sense of angst and despair. Perhaps he hadn’t witnessed the ongoing, daily emotional torment that Lee did, but his life was not untouched by adversity. Spending much of 1955 fighting tuberculosis (with his mother taking care of him—shades of doting Aunt May), just as his career was beginning to take off—when TB was still a dreaded disease that crippled and killed—could not have been easy for Ditko.
Together, Lee and Ditko managed to, through Spider-Man, unleash the dirty little secret of adolescence: it is not all—or even nearly all—fun. There are, of course, moments of joy and triumph, but much of it is the confusing struggle of figuring out who one is (or might be) and then trying to devise some kind of strategy for becoming that person. Lee and Ditko together somehow told the truth about being a teenager, a truth enfolded into a tale of a gifted Depression-era kid, even if that kid was ostensibly living in the atomic age.
Spider-Man’s villains were also cast from the same Ditkonian metal, even if they were cocreated by Lee. Oddballs and kooks significantly more damaged than the merely neurotic Peter Parker, the Vulture, Dr. Octopus, the Sandman, and the Lizard are all physical freaks who could have been incubated in the pages of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, with added twists of horror stories from Frankenstein to The Twilight Zone.
There are, unsurprisingly, multiple stories surrounding the creation of Spider-Man. The closest to a truth we have, combining accounts from Lee, Ditko, Kirby, and even Joe Simon, seems to be that either before or after Lee had decided to come up with an insect-derived, teenage superhero, Kirby tried to sell Lee a Spider-Man that was actually a revamped version of the Fly, a character he and Simon had created for Archie Comics’ adventure line in 1959. Ditko saw the pages in the office and told Stan that they were very similar to the origin of the Fly, which Lee claimed to never have read. Lee then rejected the pages, still wanting to come up with a new take on his concept.14
But this creation tale has numerous versions. Lee wrote in Origins of Marvel Comics:
For quite a while I’d been toying with the idea of doing a strip that would … actually feature a teenager as the star, instead of making him an (ugh!) adult hero’s sidekick!… A strip in which nothing would progress according to formula—the situations, the cast of characters, and their relationship to each other would all be unusual and unexpected!15
Lee went on, noting that he gave Kirby a plot for a new Spider-Man origin.
But … when I saw the first few pages that Jack had drawn, I realized we had a problem.… Try as he might, he had apparently been unable to deglamorize Spidey enough.16
An alternative view to the change in artists could be that Kirby figured, if he couldn’t sell the pitch he came in with, he’d just drop it. After all, Jack had drawn plenty of scrawny characters in his time, such as the pre-heroic Captain America, Steve Rogers. In either scenario, Kirby was still the workhorse and main artist of the Goodman comics line. Next week, there’d be another character to develop, as well as working on the ones he’d already committed to.
But Lee didn’t want to let go of the idea of a spider-powered, teen superhero. He gave it to Ditko, who—in addition to the fantasy stories he was drawing for Lee—was also drawing a superhero that he’d cocreated, Captain Atom, for Charlton Comics. Ditko could do superheroes, he could do weird, and he could portray prosaic, everyday life in a highly charged, dramatic way. And that was what Lee somehow knew he needed. As Raphael and Spurgeon noted: “Ditko’s strength was the emotional authenticity he invested in the character, the tortured quality he gave to Spider-Man’s existence.” The title, they observed, became “an emotionally brutal and funny examination of the frustrations of being a teenager that was as far from Archie Andrews and the gang at Riverdale High as Dustin Hoffman’s star turn in The Graduate was from Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy.”17
Ditko recalled things differently, though his and Lee’s recollections seemed to start off converging. Ditko wrote that Lee described to him the five-page “Spider-Man” story done by Kirby, and he told Lee that it seemed exactly like Simon and Kirby’s Archie Comics character, the Fly. At that point, he recounts, Lee took Kirby off the new series and assigned it to Ditko.18
Over the years, many journalists have, if only for the sake of brevity, credited Lee as sole creator of Spider-Man. About this, in the installment of his ongoing “Tsk! Tsk!” feature in July 1999’s The Comics!, Ditko wrote:
On what factual grounds do some people talk, write and claim that Spider-Man is a one-man creation?
Beneath that, under the heading “Stan Lee’s Spider-Man ‘Creation,’” there is a vertical rectangle with the words:
SPIDER-MAN
A 1 OR 2 PAGE SYNOPSIS FOR THE ARTIST WHO MUST DRAW 21-24 PAGES OF STORY/ART PANELS.
(DIALOGUE MUST THEN BE ADDED WORKING FROM THE ARTIST’S ROUGH PANEL SCRIPT.)
Next to this is an equal-sized rectangle under the words “Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man ‘Creation.’” Inside this second rectangle is a wordless drawing of Spider-Man as we know him, shooting webs, shining his spider-signal, his head surrounded by squiggly “spider-sense” lines, his face divided into half Parker, half Spider-Man, a look Ditko had invented.
Underneath the artwork, Ditko wrote:
IS MARVEL’S SPIDER-MAN COMIC BOOK CHARACTER A ONE-MAN CREATION? OR A COCREATION?19
Are we to infer from this that Ditko felt, that, while he and Stan might have cocreated the character, that Steve deserved the lion’s share of the credit? That seems to be a likely reading but doesn’t specifically say it.
In another article, Ditko wrote:
Stan wanted me to take Peter Parker/Spider-man off the wire, ceiling, etc., to change the spider-like poses, action.
Why? Stan was afraid The Comics Code “judges” might or would reject Spider-Man because Peter Parker … would be seen by young buyers as something non-human … causing all kinds of mental health and behavioral problems.…
I said … that we should wait until The Code complains.…
The Code didn’t complain.
Ditko concluded the article (one in a series), saying:
No one mind and hand created the Marvel-published S-m “creation.”20
In his own attempt to set the record straight, Lee regularly and publicly credited Ditko as cocreator. In 1999, in response to Ditko’s seeming anger, Lee wrote an open letter, saying in it that
I have always considered Steve Ditko to be Spider-Man’s cocreator.
Far from grateful, Ditko was irritated with what he saw as the qualified endorsement implied by the phrase I have always considered. He felt that it diluted the fact of cocreation.21
In an attempt to be conciliatory, Lee has several times expanded on his statement in the 1999 letter, but not in ways that would seem likely to satisfy Ditko’s ire. For instance, in 2004, Lee told Tom DeFalco:
I’m willing to say he’s the co-creator.… Even though Spider-Man was my idea, Steve believes that an idea is just that, an idea. It’s nothing until it becomes fully fleshed out. Spider-Man needed Steve to transform him from an idea into artwork on paper.… I actually have no problem with saying that he and I co-created Spider-Man together.… Although in my heart of hearts, I still feel that the guy who comes up with the original idea for something is the guy who created it, especially if he’s the guy who develops the name and the personality and the gimmicks behind the character.22
And in Jonathan Ross’s 2007 documentary, In Search of Steve Ditko, Lee and Ross had the following exchange:
ROSS: Do you yourself believe that he cocreated it [Spider-Man]?
LEE: I’m willing to say so.
ROSS: That’s not what I’m asking you, Stan.
LEE: No, and that’s the best answer I can give you.
ROSS: So it’s a “no” then, really?
LEE: I really think the guy who dreams the thing up created it. You dream it up and then you give it to anybody to draw it.
ROSS: But if it had been drawn differently, then it might not have been successful or a hit.
LEE: Then I would have created something that didn’t succeed.
So, although Lee was willing to cede cocreator status to Ditko, it seemed that he really did consider himself the creator of Spider-Man, by his own personal definition, because he’s “the guy who came up with the idea.” This concept seemed to hold true for, say, George Lucas being considered the creator of Star Wars and its characters or Gene Roddenberry the creator of the characters in Star Trek. It didn’t seem unreasonable for Lee to feel that, according to the rules that, at least, Hollywood plays by, he was indeed the creator of Spider-Man.
Kirby biographer Mark Evanier, who worked, at different times, for and with Kirby and Lee, and is himself a Hollywood veteran, has said of that argument:
Stan used to say, and I think he was dead wrong about this, “If I were to say, ‘Let’s do a TV show called The A-Team,’ then I created it, no matter what else anybody can say.” And I’d say, “No, Stan, that’s not how it works. You don’t get a creator credit on television unless you wrote the pilot.” And he says, “Is that so?” And then he goes on and says the same thing again. It’s like he didn’t hear me.23
Ditko wrote, in a 2008 essay entitled “Roislecxe” (Excelsior spelled backward):
Lee created and executed his idea [for Spider-Man] in a synopsis. That synopsis is Lee’s creation. His S-M creation ends there, a creation of words.… Lee can make the valid claim to be the creator of the S-M synopsis. That is his creation … A synopsis of a writer’s ideas is not like an architect’s blueprint with all the necessary details … needed to fully erect the properly desired structure.24
Interestingly, and mostly unnoticed by the general public, in his introduction to 2013’s The Art of Ditko (edited by Craig Yoe), Lee wrote:
So, what makes me qualified to write this intro…? It’s because Steve Ditko and I co-created one of the world’s most popular superheroes.… One of the luckiest days of my life was when Steve was available—and willing—to tackle Spider-Man with me.
No hesitation. No qualifying phraseology.
“Steve Ditko and I co-created.”
Ditko’s response to these words of Stan’s, if any, is unknown.
Reading Ditko’s writings in his 2008 anthology, The Avenging Mind, it becomes clear that the disagreement between the two men was as much philosophical as it was about interpretations or recollections of history. Ditko seemed to simply believe that Lee was not credible, apparently because he did not share Ditko’s philosophical principles. The belief was so powerful that, while acknowledging Lee as Spider-Man’s cocreator, he seemed to feel Stan’s role in the birth of the character was minimal. A contempt for Lee comes through clearly, and Ditko gave little, if any, weight to Stan’s contributions as scripter, editor, art director, and, yes, co-plotter for many of the Spider-Man stories they did together, before Lee agreed to give Ditko full plotting credit.25
In many ways, Lee and Ditko’s disagreement can be boiled down to what Lee said he “feels” and what Ditko claimed he “proves” in his essays. As with Kirby and Lee and their cocreations, the life experience, talents, interests, and obsessions of the cocreators of Spider-Man combined to come up with a unique pop culture phenomenon. As with Kirby and Lee, outside observers will forever argue, as the creators themselves did, over who did what. And, of course, apart from those disagreements, corporate officials and courts of law will determine who receives what official credit and what financial reward.
Regarding the latter, Lee has been well compensated far beyond the initial writing and editing fees he received. Ditko’s actual part of the Spider-Man financial jackpot has never been revealed and is the subject of rumor and speculation.
While the later issues of Ditko’s Spider-Man run (and probably the entire run from at least issue #18 on) were fully plotted by Ditko—and still scripted, and hence “interpreted” by Lee—the early issues were most likely true collaborations, perhaps with some of the same push-pull interaction that informed the early Fantastic Four. But it’s pretty much impossible to not see Lee’s sensibilities echoed in Peter Parker and his alter ego, no matter what parts of the Lee-Ditko/Ditko-Lee run is considered.
As Raphael and Spurgeon have noted, Spider-Man’s early adventures became a way “to explore the nature of growing up, the need to become more reliable, and the spectacular ways in which a young person might be expected to fail.” Further, they observed that Lee and Ditko’s Spider-Man “largely lived in his own world, an unpleasant place full of rotten people with personal grudges and ungrateful peers who couldn’t see past Peter Parker’s glasses.”26
Peter Parker had to navigate an adult world, a world that, in many ways, life had not prepared him for. Like Stanley M. Lieber, Peter Parker became the de facto head of his household. No wonder this teen character chose not to call himself Spider-Kid or Spider-Boy but Spider-Man—and chose to keep his entire face covered to maintain the illusion that he was an adult. (Ditko credited himself with inventing this visual aspect, which seems reasonable.) Even if he looked and sounded much like an adolescent, the world he was inhabiting—a world full of forces trying to destroy him—had to be made to believe that he was not a boy. If he was burdened with an adult’s responsibilities, then he would be as much of an adult hero as he could pretend.
But all this angst was not unleavened. Despite the gloominess of the art and writing, there was a sense of it somehow being fun to be Spider-Man. In that regard, it was a lot like the reality of being a teenager. True, Spider-Man’s victories were laced with drama and tragedy, but they were indeed victories—and sometimes they were even enjoyable! And while the origin story does make Peter out to be a friendless outcast, by the first issue of his eponymous comic (published seven months after his debut in Amazing Fantasy #15, but by all evidence originally planned to appear shortly after the origin), Peter seems to be the oddball in a group of classmates, but definitely part of the group—which is different from having no friends. He’s regularly ridiculed and belittled by his cohorts, but they do seem to feel that he is, somehow, connected to them.
And while Peter’s pretty and popular classmate, Liz Allen, generally seems to prefer überjock Flash Thompson to Peter, she does agree to go on a date with Parker (which he then breaks because of his superhero obligations). And J. Jonah Jameson’s secretary Betty Brant (who is Peter’s age—she dropped out of school for, yes, financial reasons and went to work for Jameson) also seems to have a thing for Peter. She is essentially his peer, and it is with Betty—who knows Peter not as a weirdo nerd but as a daredevil freelance photographer, always taking risks to get “impossible” shots of Spider-Man and his deadly foes—that Peter blossoms into his own, as a pseudo-adult who carries his own weight in an adult workplace dominated by the mean-spirited Jameson. And it is with Jameson that Peter asserts his own place in the world, making Jonah pay for his mean-spiritedness—and having his ongoing joke on Jonah—by making the Spider-Man-loathing publisher have to pay Spider-Man for pictures of Spider-Man.
It’s here that Lee’s life story really assumes a key part in the Spider-Man mythos, despite Ditko’s part-to-full role in plotting. Perhaps this is because the two creators were not as dissimilar as they might each have thought.
While it’s unclear which dull, menial jobs Lee had while he was still in school and which he had in the period between graduation and his start at Timely, he did seem to repeatedly find himself (aside from a few freelance writing gigs) in jobs where he was treated like a kid or an idiot. These jobs, working for people, especially at the garment center job, who were capricious and abusive, sound exactly like the relationship Parker has with Jameson—with the exception of the wish-fulfillment parts when Parker outsmarts Jameson, even plays pranks like webbing Jonah to the ceiling. (Although Lee’s story about overturning the container of cutting tickets does come close.) It’s every wage slave’s revenge fantasy—which may slightly adjust the power equation, but, in the end, it’s Jameson who has the money and the power and the influence. Even then, though—more wish-fulfillment vengeance—Lee gets to show just how shallow Jameson is by having him admit, in a classic soliloquy in Amazing Spider-Man #11, why he is so obsessed with Spider-Man. Even if it was Ditko who invented the scene, it was Lee who put the words in Jameson’s mouth: “Spider-Man represents everything I’m not! He’s brave, powerful, and unselfish! The truth is, I envy him!… But I can never climb to his level! So all that remains is for me is to tear him down, because, heaven help me—I’m jealous of him!”
(And, of course, giving Peter a nemesis who is a periodical publisher, one who is egotistical and manipulative and changes his mind on a dime, was perfect fodder for Lee to satirize publishing in general, Martin Goodman in particular, and even himself as a boss.)
One way or another, the adolescent at the core of Peter Parker—and of Stan Lee—wasn’t ever forgotten. The saga of Spider-Man is the story of a young man living in a bubble of love that is shattered suddenly and traumatically, who must then deal with the simultaneous multiple repercussions of such an all-too-real event. Peter must deal with his uncle’s death (for which he blames himself—the way the child of an unemployable father might blame himself for the family’s woes) and the financial needs of his elderly aunt, as well as her ongoing medical crises, echoing, arguably, Lee’s mother’s battle with the cancer that ultimately took her life. Peter Parker’s life is trauma upon trauma, an echo of Stan’s (and Larry’s) own difficult journey.
But paradoxically, preserved through strength of character—albeit character shrouded in neuroses—is the Peter Parker who loves life, who devises the way to make best use of the unexpected gift of his superhuman powers. The trauma of Uncle Ben’s murder shifts Peter away from a showbiz career—which Lee himself had always coveted—into a career as a costumed superhero, albeit one who is, nonetheless, more than a bit of a showboat. Peter becomes a costumed vigilante who flamboyantly fights crime, making sure everyone knows he was there—up to and including inventing a glowing spider-signal that emits from his belt. How much different is that from climbing on a ladder and painting “Stan Lieber is God” on a ceiling?
And yet, like Peter Parker, Stan Lee was also prone to occasionally making morose observations about his life. “I think I should have gotten out of this business twenty years ago,” he told reporter Ira Wolfman in 1978. “I would have liked to make movies, to be a director or a screenwriter.”27
Similarly, Peter Parker, at the end of many of his Lee-scripted adventures, wonders whether the personal losses he suffers as a result of being Spider-Man are worth it. As early as 1963’s Amazing Spider-Man #4, he asked himself:
Am I really some sort of a crack-pot, wasting my time seeking fame and glory?? Am I more interested in the adventure of being Spider-Man than I am in helping people?? Why do I do it? Why don’t I give up the whole thing?
Spider-Man, at the character’s best, experiences great highs and lows that the reader experiences along with him. And more, despite his serious intent, “Spidey” often does engage in actions and behaviors that have nothing to do with his famous power-and-responsibility equation. He’s Spider-Man for all sorts of other reasons. He does need to make money for his aunt. But he also enjoys being Spider-Man because it’s fun to web-swing around the city and clobber bad guys. Further, he enjoys selling pictures of himself to the unsuspecting Jameson. Longtime Spider-Man writer and editor Tom DeFalco has observed that, like a real person, Peter Parker has numerous motivations and rationalizations for why he does what he does.28 Indeed, as described by the narrator (Lee!) in the final panel of issue #9, Spider-Man is “the superhero who could be you!”
Ditko’s writings, as confusing as they can be, do make clear that, as much as Lee or Kirby, the Spider-Man artist and cocreator had a need to think about and get inside the minds of the characters he was working on. Somehow, the mix of the needs, obsessions, neuroses, and creative talent of Lee and Ditko invested Spider-Man with a sensibility that was simultaneously “theirs,” and yet also identifiably Marvel—though radically different from the larger section of the shared Marvel Universe that was built upon the Lee-Kirby collaborations.
While in his later, more Randian writings, Ditko would rage against what he saw as weak-willed or ethically compromised thinking (especially when he perceived such thinking coming from Stan Lee, which was frequently), the images (if not always the ideas) he provided in their collaborations gave Lee the foundation he needed to imbue Spider-Man with greater capacity for nuanced, even self-contradictory, behavior—for doubt—than the artist had probably ever intended he possess. Peter Parker, as published, was a character of contradictions. Proud and ashamed. Powerful and weak. Focused and scattered.
It is hard, though, to not, at least in part, read Ditko’s angry writings about Lee as having their source in some kind of personal disappointment in Stan as a friend and colleague, somehow a feeling of personal betrayal or disappointment, as much as in creative or philosophical or even financial disagreements the two might have had. Similarly, as with his feelings about Kirby, Lee’s confusion and disappointment about the difficulties in his relationship with Ditko seem to be related to regret and anger over losing a friend as much as any conflict in their attitudes or opinions about the work they did together.
While Spider-Man can be said to have been an idiosyncratic, combined autobiographical work of his creators, the character also—perhaps because of that combining—resonated powerfully with readers. In some fans, Spider-Man’s persona seemed to bring out Peter Parker–like contradictions. A letter in Amazing Spider-Man #8 from Doug Storer of Butte, Montana, started out in a highly complimentary manner:
Your latest and greatest creation, AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, has surpassed anything I’ve ever seen hit the stands.… Everything about Spider-Man can and must be discussed in the superlative.
But the letter then took a different path:
However, there is one thing that bothers me about Spider-Man. He may, in due season, become “just another hero.” You may call me a pessimist, but I’ve seen it happen before and it can happen again.… You see, I’m very worried about what will happen to my now favorite mag.
Storer didn’t just like or even empathize with Spider-Man. Like Aunt May, he worried about the guy. Lee and Ditko had come up with something—someone—who really touched people.
For another example, in issue #12’s letters page, Jodene Green Acciavatti of Brookline, Massachusetts, pleaded:
Please don’t change Spider-Man. He seems so human right now. I know that people can be as aggravating as his schoolmates are to him.… He is too busy to conform to their personal code, so as he is different, they scorn him. Don’t they have anything better to do? I have the same problem, so I feel akin to Spider-Man.… What makes Spider-Man different is that he must battle alone through life.
The passive-aggressive tug-of-war between Lee and Ditko over the content of the stories they collaborated on continued over time, with readers none the wiser, until, for many months before Ditko’s 1966 departure from Marvel, he and Lee had stopped speaking to each other (Sol Brodsky usually acted as intermediary), each, in later years, blaming the other for that turn of events.
Whether Spider-Man’s lone battle was as a Randian avatar or as, perhaps, a superpowered, traumatized version of flaky ’60s TV teenager Dobie Gillis, all depended on your point of view. But because he was the one who got to put the words in the captions and balloons, it ultimately depended on Stan Lee’s point of view.
Meanwhile, Marvel’s popularity kept growing, and readers—and Martin Goodman—were demanding more superheroes in the style of the FF and Spider-Man. There was still plenty of room in this nascent fictional universe for other types of heroes, other audiences—and other aspects of the existing audience—to be tapped into and cultivated. Stan Lee was determined to do exactly that.
Things were just beginning to get interesting.