Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider as a teenager, granting him spider-like powers. After the death of his Uncle Ben, Peter learned that "with great power, comes great responsibility." Swearing to always protect the innocent from harm, Peter Parker became Spider-Man.
1. Best origin story. I believe the most detailed version of his origin story is in the Ultimate comics. Check it out.
2. He's relatable because he's just a regular person with regular problems. He isn't like Superman, an alien from another world who's one of a kind, nor is he like Batman where he's a freaking billionaire.
3 He has the best rogue gallery. Sure, most would argue that Batman has the better rogue gallery but in my opinion The Joker is his best but the rest isn't as good as Spider-Man's. Spider-Man has The Lizard, Venom, Carnage, The Green Goblin, The Rhino, Doc Ock, all the best stuff. Also, they're the most memorable.
What do you guys think? Why do YOU guys think Spidey is the best Superhero?
for the sake of this thread, I am going to assume it's a matter of opinion for like minded people lol. I assume there will be mass amounts of people coming in saying why he's not.
What I like about him is no matter the situation he always pulls through. He is likeable and funny. I really like avenging spider-man for that reason. He needs to learn how to balance his life better though.
I primarily like him for reasons 1 and 2. He's pretty funny as well, without being over the top. He's one of the few characters where I'm always routing for him, I really want him to succeed.
hmmm..always controversial to say someone is the "best super-hero", when "my favourite super-hero" is probably a better summary.
For me Spidey is up there with Bats and Supes. You cant say one is better than the other, just that you prefer one to the other. He has a better rogues gallery than Superman and he IS relatable, or at least he was until recent stories, when he was a struggling student/photographer/teacher with girlfriend issues.
For me, Spiderman is one of my very favourites because
1. He is funny, his comics can be dark, but they are often just fun to read.
2. He has super-powers but is not invulnerable. He has to work hard for his victories.
3. He is both a street leveller and someone who can mix it with meta humans.
4. He has a great rogues gallery, the best in Marvel IMO.
He used to be, now he's just money making property fodder compared to an actual compelling protagonist and a great superhero who's character makes him worthy as one of the greatest iconic superheroes in the world. Spidey could be so much more, just so much more.
@symbioticspider-man: Spider-Man in terms of power is the perfect superhero. He's damn formidable but gets his ass kicked all the time by his enemies, instead of winning all the time always forever like superman. In terms of personality, Peter Parker is as good and pure a superhero as you can find.
@symbioticspider-man: Spider-Man in terms of power is the perfect superhero. He's damn formidable but gets his ass kicked all the time by his enemies, instead of winning all the time always forever like superman. In terms of personality, Peter Parker is as good and pure a superhero as you can find.
Now a days theres more of his type in comic book world that makes him not as unique as he once was. Theres, Doreen Green, Kitty Prye, Shulkie, Nightcrawler, groot. Molly Hayes and Dazzler.
Because he takes on every challange both personally and as a hero. He's fought against baddies much bigger and scarier than himself such as Thanos, Phoenix Colossus and Magik, The Juggernaught & Red Hulk no matter what the situation. Lost his kid, Lost his uncle, Lost his girlfriend but never stops because he knows it'll never be enough to make it up to him. Best hero by far.
Because he takes on every challange both personally and as a hero. He's fought against baddies much bigger and scarier than himself such as Thanos, Phoenix Colossus and Magik, The Juggernaught & Red Hulk no matter what the situation. Lost his kid, Lost his uncle, Lost his girlfriend but never stops because he knows it'll never be enough to make it up to him. Best hero by far.
To bad he's never be as respected and a example towards millions like Cap and the Avengers. I'm talking in universe.
2. He's relatable because he's just a regular person with regular problems. He isn't like Superman, an alien from another world who's one of a kind, nor is he like Batman where he's a freaking billionaire.
I have to disagree fairly strongly with item #2 on your list.
I agree that Spidey is a wonderful character, but in all honesty, I can identify with classic Superman a lot more easily than I can with Spider-Man.
My life isn't one bad thing after the other, like Spidey's. I have never had to live in the poverty Peter Parker lives in as a teen and especially as a young adult, I have never had the constant job insecurity he puts up with, and I have never had to betray myself on a daily basis just to make a living. I certainly can't identify with feeling personally responsible for the death of a father-figure, then later the death of a girlfriend. (And, of course, my problems have never included a radioactive spider-bite and consequent superpowers.)
On the other hand, like pre-New52 Superman, I know what it's like to try to see the best in everyone I come across. Like pre-New52 Superman, I know what it's like to work hard at a dream and then succeed at that dream (although my particular dreams never involved joining a Great Metropolitan Newspaper). Like this Superman, I know what it's like to have to put up with nonsense at work sometimes, but neither Superman nor I have ever betrayed ourselves like Peter does with his Spidey pics. I can't relate to Superman's courtship of Lois any better than I can relate to Spider-Man's guilt over Gwen Stacey's death, but I can relate to the stability of Clark's marriage to Lois (while it was in continuity) far better than I can relate to the constant instability of Peter's marriage to M.J., and I can relate to Clark's willingness to knuckle under to Luthor rather than risk losing Lois far better than I can relate to Peter's willingness to sell his marriage with M.J. to the devil for the sake of denying his aunt eternal rest -- all the while knowing full well that Aunt May would be horrified if she found out he has made a bargain with the devil just to prolong her life a handful of years.
I'm not saying I'm not a great fan of Spider-Man, and I'm not saying there's no connection at all -- I admire and can relate to his refusal to give up no matter how difficult life gets, and I can identify with the compassion that characterizes both him and Superman.
But any claim that Peter Parker is a "regular person" contradicts the Spider-Man stories themselves, and to claim that someone who sells his marriage to the devil and who feels personal responsibility for the death of both a close relative and a girlfriend is just a "regular person" with "regular problems" is absurd.
Even ignoring the drama, Peter Parker lives a sad, anxious, difficult, unstable, tragic life, and I would hope that no one I care about ever has reason to relate to that.
Spider-man was the first super-hero I aspired to be when I was young. After 2 months in the hospital due to brain tissue damage from meningitis, my father bought me my first comic book (ASM 353) Along with Silver Surfer, I devoured their television series, alway looking forward to that hour ever Saturday morning. My first graphic novels were the first essential spider-men books and the Ultimate Spider-man , and I firmly maintain that issues Amaazing Spider-man 1-130 our are some of the best comics of all time. Actually, most of his comics were incredible up until the mid 90s (he was THE marvel comic to work on/highest selling/etc...)
I like(d) him because he was relatable. He made mistakes, he was kind, nerdy (even in the Romita era when he pulled bitçhes), and constantly learning from his mistakes, he was humble
He was powerful, I mean, read the early comics, he was clearly one of the most powerful marvel characters. any early stuff constantly refers to him being stronger/faster/more durable than most every superhero in marvel barring namor/thing/thor/hulk
his rogues gallery is right behind Batmans (ahead in my opinion, actually) in recognizability. Ask anyone on the street who doc ock is, who green goblin is, who venom is. they'll probably know you're talking about spider-man. also, their interesting power-sets and personalities make them all diverse
he is no longer relatable, however. he has become a pathetic, perpetual man child
There's actually a really great article about this here
that article was awesome, i am posting it down below
from comicalliance.com
Q: When rating heroes you put Spider-Man above Batman but you write way more about Batman. Doesn’t Spider-Man have as much depth?
A: Don’t get me wrong: Batman is my favorite character. As the last 95 installments of this column will attest, I probably spend more time thinking about Batman and how he works and what he means than anything else. Just going off of personal preference, I love Batman more than… well, more than most other things in the world, period.
Spider-Man just happens to objectively be the single greatest comic book character ever created.They actually make a pretty good contrast to each other, and it all starts with the idea that Batman is very much a child’s fantasy. That’s not a bad thing, either.
Every now and then someone will ask me just why it is that I like Batman so much, and the best way I can put it is that there’s this pure, beautiful idea at the center of his character. Bruce Wayne has this perfect life until crime takes it away from him, so he decides right there that he’s going to end Crime by himself. The fact that he’s a child when this happens is a crucial part of the story, because if he was older, he’d realize the inherent flaw in that plan. He’d understand that the world isn’t a fair place, and that sometimes bad things happen to good people for no reason, and that there’s not much anyone can do about it. Only a child would think it was possible for one man to end crime, but because he’s a child, that’s exactly what he decides to do.
And the best thing is, he does it! A lot of people show Gotham as this crime-ridden urban nightmare, but as far as I’m concerned, there’s no one getting mugged in Gotham City. There’s no carjacking or guys robbing banks with shotguns. Why? Because Batman showed up and ended that. It’s the reason that scene in Year One where he tells the gangsters that they’re done is such a great moment, because he’s right. There’s no more room for them in Gotham City, because what you and I know as Crime here in the real world can’t stand up against Batman.
If Crime’s going to survive against Batman — and it does, because if it doesn’t, we don’t have any more Batman stories — it has to become something else, which is exactly what happens. People don’t get mugged in Gotham City, they get mind-controlled by the Mad Hatter or dosed with Joker Venom or thrown into an elaborate deathtrap. Nobody robs a gas station, because they’re too busy going after the priceless Egyptian Twin Cat statues at the museum. Crime in Gotham City operates on a whole other level than anything we’d recognize.
And it’s like that because one child had the determination to forge himself into a weapon against evil. It’s a beautiful, beautiful idea, and I will never not love that. But it’s also a childish one, largely because he conveniently had everything he’d need to accomplish it, like being naturally athletic and handsome and having a photographic memory and a billion dollars and a mansion full of secret passageways and a butler.
Alfred might actually be the single best example of how much of a child’s fantasy Batman really is. He’s a parental figure who specializes in patching up his scrapes and bruises and making his favorite dinner, but Batman’s actually his boss, which means that he can stay up as late as he wants and he doesn’t have to wash behind his ears if he doesn’t want to, so there. The only thing that even comes close to that is Captain MarvelShazam Captain Marvel, a little kid who can turn himself into the kind of all-powerful being that every kid imagines grown-ups are, and then does all the stuff that kids want to do. He flies around, thumps a sneering bully on the head, and then makes friends with a talking tiger.
And again, that’s not a flaw in those concepts. You can still use them as the core of very, very sophisticated and entertaining stories, for an audience of any age. That adaptability is one of Batman’s greatest strengths as a character, but at their heart, Batman and Captain Marvel and Superman are what kids imagine adults to be, and the kind of adults kids want to be.
Spider-Man is different.
If Batman is a child’s fantasy, then Spider-Man is very much rooted in being a teenager. When we’re first introduced to Peter Parker in Amazing Fantasy #15, he’s an outsider who feels isolated from everyone around him. He’s miserable and resentful, but not because of some sort of defining tragedy, but because that’s how you feel when you’re a teenager. When he gets the one thing he wants — the power that makes him stronger, faster and more popular than anyone else — he promptly screws up and loses one of the only people that truly cared about him.
It doesn’t really read like a super-hero origin, or at least, not one that you would’ve expected in 1962. There’s no triumph, no Batman posing on the rooftop, no Superman performing herculean feats, not even a vow to use his powers to benefit mankind like you got with the Fantastic Four. Instead, the last panel of Spider-Man’s first appearance is a teenager walking alone down a dark street, crying because his uncle died and it’s all his fault.
It’s actually structured less like a super-hero story and more like a horror comic, right down to the ironic twist ending and the fact that it has a moral. The only thing that really separates it from the kind of story you would’ve found ten years earlier in Tales From the Crypt is that Peter Parker comes back for more stories.
But he never really loses that edge of tragedy, and a big piece of that comes from the fact that Spider-Man’s story doesn’t romanticize the death of his parents in the ways that other heroes’ stories do. Superman, for example, is an orphan, but the death of Jor-El and Lara doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things; he even gets a second set. The death of Batman’s parents is a tragedy, and it has to be horrible in order to be the catalyst for what sends him on the path to spending his entire life fighting crime, but it’s also something that frees him. It’s what gives him his fortune, and gets him out of school so that he can travel the world learning to be awesome. It frees him from family responsibilities, at least until he’s ready to start building his own family as an adult.
Batman’s family dies, but he bounces back. There was nothing he could’ve done to stop them from being killed — again, because he was a kid — so he makes himself into someone that could, and does it for others instead.
Spider-Man never gets over it. He never goes back to life as it was before Uncle Ben died. There was something he could’ve done to stop it, but he chose not to. Now, he does anything and everything he can to keep it from happening to anyone else. It’s an atonement, but no matter what he does, it’ll never be enough. He’s not determined, he’s driven.
No matter what happens, no matter what it costs him, Peter Parker’s going to help people to the best of his abilities, because he knows the price of not doing it. I’m not one of the extremely vocal fans of Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz’s Spider-Girl series, but there’s one aspect of it that they nailed: Peter Parker gets his leg blown off and can’t be Spider-Man anymore, so he becomes a police scientist instead. He never stops helping people and protecting them, because he can’t. There’s no quit in him. Action is his reward.
It’s also another aspect of Spider-Man as a teenage fantasy, too. Peter Parker can never get over that death, because when you’re a teenager, nothing ever feels like you’ll get over it. Everything is important, everything’s the end of the world. And those ideas come together particularly well in the character of Aunt May.
You’d think Spider-Man would be lucky to still have one of his parental figures, and on one level, he is. But on another level, he’s burdened by it. He’s not only the reason that Aunt May was left alone when Uncle Ben died, he’s also suffering from the fear that he’ll lose her, too. I once wrote that the genius of Batman’s parents dying was that it was a fear that almost everyone can relate to on a primal level, but Spider-Man goes one step beyond because for him, it could happen all over again.
And just like before, it could be his fault. That gimmick in the early days where Aunt May would die of fright if she ever found out Peter was Spider-Man might seem a little heavy-handed, but it’s brilliant in that it sets up an impossible choice. If he keeps being Spider-Man, he could lose Aunt May just by the act of existing, but if he doesn’t keep being Spider-Man, people get hurt that he could’ve saved.
So he has to be Spider-Man, because he knows for a fact that he can help people, and that fact makes the decision for him. It’s another piece of that sacrifice, that atonement, but it’s also an incredible illustration of the pressure that he’s under, and how he just has to carry on, dealing with the things that he can control.
And how does he do it? By creating a better version of himself.
Batman’s essentially Batman from the moment his parents die, he just needs to go learn kung fu and how to be a detective. But at the start of Peter Parker’s story, he’s not a hero — he’s not even close. He’s shy and he’s an outcast, and while those things aren’t really his fault, they lead him to become pretty vindictive:
He’s arrogant, too. When he builds his web-shooters, his boasting is downright super-villainous:
He’s vain. He’s shallow. He only wants to benefit himself, so he uses these phenomenal abilities he’s gotten to go on TV and do tricks for an audience.
When Uncle Ben dies, he pays for all that and sets off on a mission to do better — and part of that is that he basically starts pretending to be this quick-witted, fast-talking hero who was the complete opposite of his own personality. It’s worth noting that one of the very first plot points in the series was that Flash Thompson, the bully who hated Peter Parker, was literally the president of Spider-Man’s fan club. Even today, there’s a recurring idea among Peter’s friends that you can’t rely on him for anything, but Spider-Man’s always there to save someone who needs it.
Peter Parker has too much guilt, too much responsibility, too much to worry about with Aunt May’s health, no money and a scholarship that he’s hanging onto by a thread. Peter couldn’t handle the pressure that he was under, so he created someone who could. He creates the kind of person who would’ve stopped that robber before he killed Uncle Ben. The kind of person who can crack jokes under pressure, because he’s so confident that he can conquer his problems that they’re just something to make fun of. He creates Spider-Man to be the person he wants to be.
Even the name points to that idea. Peter’s young when he gets his powers, but he gives himself an adult’s name. He’s a boy pretending to be a man, but over the years, we watch as he becomes that better person for real. Because that’s what you do when you’re a teenager — you start figuring out who it is that you want to be, and you start to become that person.
But at the same time, you don’t really relate to adults. There’s this sort of mutual mistrust between the generations, and Spider-Man reflects that beautifully. Adults aren’t aspirational figures for Spider-Man, they’re adversaries. They’re the teachers who can turn on you and make your life miserable with a bad grade.
They’re the scientists who created atomic weapons and led you to spend the next 50 years getting taught how to duck and cover in the event of a nuclear war.
They’re your friends’ parents, who seem nice but end up hating your guts for reasons you’ll never really understand.
They’re the adults that seem to just hate you for no other reason than you’re young, even when you try to do the right thing.
Those first 200 issues of Amazing Spider-Man — a run that’s downright shocking in how good it is — are essentially teenager problems on a super-heroic scale, both literally and translated into the metaphor of the super-hero adventure story. It was done so well that it was a blueprint for virtually everything that came after, in the same way that Fantastic Four #50 was a blueprint for the Big Event. If you’ve read Invincible, or Nova, or Blue Beetle or Darkhawk, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or any of a hundred others, then you’ve seen that blueprint dusted off and adapted. Those things exist because of Spider-Man.
That said, there’s nothing that’s inherently better about a “teenage fantasy” as opposed to a “childish” fantasy. They’re both great in their own ways, and they can both be bad in their own ways, too. What it really comes down to, though, is the message. The kind of fantasy that you get with Spider-Man allows you to deal with a message that’s a little more complex, and over the past 50 years, that’s exactly what the people who work on those books have done.
I’m a firm believer in the idea that super-heroes teach you things, and it’s usually a pretty simple lesson. Superman teaches you to be nice and to be a good person, because that’s the way you make things better for everyone. Batman teaches you that if you’re determined enough, and if you try your hardest, one man can change the world. Those are great guidelines, not just for storytelling, but for life.
But Spider-Man’s lesson is a little less sugar-coated, and a little more human.
Spider-Man teaches you that you’re going to screw up. It’s going to happen, and it’s going to be bad. You’re going to make bad decisions and it’s going to feel like they’re going to crush you. It’s going to hurt.
But Spider-Man also teaches you that the only way to get through it is that you never, ever quit. It’s not easy, but even if it seems impossible, you can beat anything that stands in your way. You can become the person you want to be.
Man, I'm sorry you feel that bad about current Spidey!!
Who is the greatest comic book character ever invented? Well sales of comics and popularity currently suggest Batman. Spiderman is the greatest hero in comics, probably for reasons like this.
Batman doesn't really need the public's help, Superman saves them and is all powerful, but Spiderman, well he has never forgotten his roots...
Man, I'm sorry you feel that bad about current Spidey!!
Who is the greatest comic book character ever invented? Well sales of comics and popularity currently suggest Batman. Spiderman is the greatest hero in comics, probably for reasons like this.
Batman doesn't really need the public's help, Superman saves them and is all powerful, but Spiderman, well he has never forgotten his roots...
You don't read much supes and batman comics the this isn't new to them not is spidey the guy who invented looking out for the kids and the fans of his being e face of the people.
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