June 5, 1962: Amazing Fantasy #15 is published. It was already set to be the last issue for the magazine, so there was nothing left for its publisher, Marvel Comics, to lose. So they chose to debut a new character: Spider-Man.
Created by Marvel boss and main writer Stan Lee, and artist Steve Ditko, "Spidey" was designed to be a hero that teenagers could relate to without being a child version of an adult hero like Superboy, or a sidekick to an adult hero like Batman's Robin.
Peter Parker was a nerdy, scrawny New York teenager with genius intellect and a love for science. While attending a science fair and seeing an experiment in radioactivity, a spider becomes irradiated, and bites him. The radioactivity gives Peter the proportionate strength and agility of a spider, and a "spider-sense" that acts as a warning system. He designs a substance that acts as a "spider's web," and wrist gadgets that allow him to shoot them and trap criminals.
His parents dead, Peter was raised by his Aunt May and his Uncle Ben. One day, early in his career, Spider-Man is interviewed for a local talk show. As he's leaving a man runs past, and a security guard tells Spidey he should have stopped the man, saying he'd robbed the box office. Spidey said it wasn't his problem.
When Peter gets home, he find out Uncle Ben has been murdered, and the police have the killer surrounded in a building. He goes after him in his Spidey costume, and discovers it's the robber: f Peter had stopped him, Uncle Ben would still be alive. At the end of the issue, Lee wrote, "With great power, there must also come great responsibility!" This was later retconned as advice from Uncle Ben.
Spidey was a hit immediately. It didn't save Amazing Fantasy, but it did lead to his own comic line. The Amazing Spider-Man #1 showed him auditioning to join Marvel's original superhero team, the Fantastic Four. Despite having had many adventures with them, the Avengers, and the X-Men over the decades, Spidey works best alone.
While still in high school, Peter gets a job as a photographer for a New York newspaper, the Daily Bugle. Their publisher, J. Jonah Jameson, is... complicated. On the one hand, he's a crusader to make the City better, having made his name exposing organized crime. On the other hand, he's a nasty boss, bullies his employees, including Peter, and when the city sees Spidey as a hero, "JJJ" prints editorials claiming Spidey is actually a menace who must be stopped, as giving "real heroes" a bad name -- real heroes like his son, John Jameson, an astronaut (who later becomes the unwilling villain Man-Wolf).
Peter's best friend is Harry Osborn, whose father Norman is a brilliant scientist. When an experiment goes wrong, it drives Norman insane, but it also gives him super-strength, and he becomes Spidey's greatest enemy, the Green Goblin. They fight, and the Goblin discovers Peter's dual identity. In their next fight, Peter knocks Norman out, and when Norman recovers, he has no memory of his Goblin identity.
Peter's first girlfriend is a blonde named Gwen Stacy, daughter of a hero cop. Eventually, he starts dating a redheaded aspiring actress named Mary Jane Watson, In 1971, while Peter was dating Mary Jane, daughter of Aunt May's best friend, Stan Lee agreed to work with the federal government to print an anti-drug message in The Amazing Spider-Man #s 96, 97 and 98. The Goblin returns, but, again, loses his memory after Spidey beats him.
By 1973, Spidey was back with Gwen, but in The Amazing Spider-Man #121, the Goblin came back, and killed her. The title of the issue was not revealed until the last page: "The Night Gwen Stacy Died!" Still, despite his vow to kill the Goblin over this, Peter remembered his great responsibility, and didn't do it. Eventually, the Goblin died without his "help." He got back with Mary Jane, but never forgot Gwen.
In 1967, Paul Frees became the voice of Spider-Man in a cartoon series. In 1974, Danny Seagren began playing Spidey on the PBS kids series The Electric Company. From 1977 to 1979, concurrent with their series The Incredible Hulk and 2 movies featuring Captain America, CBS aired The Amazing Spider-Man, with Nicholas Hammond. Despite being good as both Peter and Spidey, he was too old to play a teenage science prodigy, and so played Peter as an adult photographer, and it didn't really work.
In 2002, Tobey Maguire was cast in the 1st of 3 Spider-Man movies, making the character more popular than ever. In 2012 and 2014, Andrew Garfield starred in 2 The Amazing Spider-Man movies. In 2016, with legal issues having been resolved, allowing the character to appear in "The Marvel Cinematic Universe," Tom Holland played Spidey in Captain America: Civil War, leading to his appearances in 3 standalone movies and the Avengers films Infinity War and Endgame.
While DC Comics had explored the idea of a "multiverse" since 1961, Spider-Man was the 1st Marvel hero to have the idea explored. Marvel began its What If series in 1977, starting with "What If Spider-Man Had Joined the Fantastic Four?" It also explored:
* What if someone else besides Spider-Man had been bitten by the radioactive spider?
* What if a spider had been bitten by a radioactive human? (Ew.)
* What if Spider-Man had stopped the burglar who killed his uncle? (As it turned out, not as advantageous as you might have guessed. Marvel later flipped the story, and had Aunt May be the one killed, while a widowed Uncle Ben became "Alfred" to Peter's "Batman.")
* What if Spider-Man had rescued Gwen Stacy?
* What if Spider-Man's clone lived? ("The Clone Saga" was a storyline that most Spidey fans hated.)
* What if the alien costume had possessed Spider-Man? (In other words, what if Spidey had totally given in to the Venom symbiote.)
* What if Kraven The Hunter had killed Spider-Man?
* What if Spider-Man had not married Mary Jane Watson? With a B-story: What if Spider-Man had a son? (Peter had married Mary Jane by this point, but their daughter May died at birth.) Corollary: What if Spider-Man married the Black Cat?
* What if Spider-Man had not lost his cosmic powers? (I don't remember this one at all, so I can't explain it.)
* What if Spider-Man had kept his six arms? (In The Amazing Spider-Man #100, he grew four new arms. This didn't last. But in a later issue, he grew them back, and kept going, until he became more spider than man, and had to be stopped, though not killed, by a merciful Kraven.)
* What if Spider-Man killed the Lizard?
* What if the Punisher had killed Spider-Man?
* What if Spider-Man's parents destroyed his family?
* What if Spider-Man became a murderer?
* What if Peter Parker had to destroy Spider-Man?
* What if J. Jonah Jameson adopted Spider-Man? (In other words, if, after Uncle Ben's death, Jameson, not yet knowing of Peter's dual identity, adopted him.)
* What if Scarlet Spider had killed Spider-Man?
This led to, among other things, Marvel's "MC2" universe, in which the newborn May Parker survived, and inherited her father's abilities, eventually becoming Spider-Girl. Another universe had the radioactive spider biting Gwen Stacy, and she became Spider-Girl -- or, to fans of the character, "Spider-Gwen" -- when Peter was murdered.
And another had the radioactive spider surviving years after Peter had become Spider-Man, long enough to bite another kid, a black Puerto Rican teenager named Miles Morales, who, after Peter was killed in action, became the new Spider-Man. This led to the Spider-Verse cartoon series, in which Miles meets many versions of Spider-Man, including the one from the main "Marvel Universe," and Spider-Gwen.
It also led to the 2021 live-action MCU film Spider-Man: No Way Home, in which the multiverse begins a dangerous overlap, leading to Holland's Peter having to fight the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus and the Sandman from the Tobey Maguire Spidey's Earth; and Electro and the Lizard from the Andrew Garfield's Spidey's Earth. These were villains that he had never faced before, and may not even have existed on his Earth. This leads to the Goblin killing Holland's Aunt May (played by Marisa Tomei, way too young to play a character always depicted in the comics as elderly), and his friends bringing the Maguire and Garfield versions of Peter to their Earth, to stop the villains.
Although Bill Bixby's David Banner and Lou Ferrigno's Hulk would interact with versions of Daredevil and Thor in TV-movies in the 1980s, they never interacted with Nicholas Hammond's Spidey. And, despite still being alive at the time, neither Seagren nor Hammond were included in No Way Home. Nor were they included in the Spider-Verse cartoons. And Paul Frees died in 1986, so he was not included in any of those.
On a 1996 episode of Friends, the fact comes up that, unlike most superheroes with the "man" suffix, Spidey's name is hyphenated. Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow) asks why his name isn't pronounced "SPIGH-der-mun." Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry) explains that it's not his last name, "Spiderman": "He's a Spider... Man. There's Goldman, but there's no Gold-Man."
Phoebe says there should be a Gold-Man. Chandler asks what his powers would be. Phoebe says, "He turns things to gold." Clearly, she'd never heard of the Greek myth of King Midas, whose lust for gold led to the gods giving him that power, which betrays him when he touched his food, and eventually his daughter.
More than Captain America, the Hulk, or anyone else, Spider-Man remains Marvel's most popular hero, rivaling DC's Superman and Batman as the most popular superhero of all.
UPDATE: Danny Seagren died in 2025.
*
June 5, 1962 was a Tuesday. These baseball games were played:
* The Baltimore Orioles beat the Washington Senators, 6-5 at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. Brooks Robinson went 1-for-4. Hitting a home run for the Orioles was Whitey Herzog, whose 1st managing job would be in 1973, with the Senators franchise, after they moved to become the Texas Rangers.
* The Los Angeles Dodgers swept a doubleheader from the Pittsburgh Pirates, 3-2 and 8-3 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Don Drysdale won the nightcap, with Sandy Koufax pitching the 9th inning for a save. Over the 2 games, Roberto Clemente went 1-for-8.
* The San Francisco Giants beat the Chicago Cubs, 11-4 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Willie Mays went 1-for-4 with a walk and an RBI. Ernie Banks went 0-for-4.
* The Kansas City Athletics beat the Minnesota Twins, 4-3 at Metropolitan Stadium in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. Harmon Killebrew went 0-for-3 with a walk.
* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Cincinnati Reds, 10-9 at Busch Stadium (formerly Sportsman's Park) in St. Louis. At age 41, Stan Musial was, again, Stan the Man, hitting a home run in the bottom of the 11th inning. Frank Robinson and Reds starting pitcher Bob Purkey both hit home runs, to no avail.
* The Houston Colt .45s beat the Milwaukee Braves, 7-1 at Colt Stadium in Houston. Hank Aaron went 0-for-4. The Colts were renamed the Houston Astros in 1965.
* The Los Angeles Angels beat the Chicago White Sox, 9-5 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. The Angels groundshared there until 1966, when their Anaheim stadium opened.
* The Boston Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers were rained out at Fenway Park in Boston. The game was made up as part of a doubleheader the next day. The Red Sox won the 1st game, 2-1. Frank Malzone won it with a home run in the bottom of the 9th. Carl Yastrzemski went 0-for-4.
The Tigers won the 2nd game, 3-2. In the top of the 11th inning, Norm Cash scored on a suicide squeeze bunt by Dick Brown. Cash had homered earlier in the game. Jim Bunning went the distance for the win. Yaz went 1-for-5 with an RBI. Al Kaline did not play in either game.
* The New York Mets and the Philadelphia Phillies were rained out at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. The game was made up as part of a doubleheader on August 28. The Mets won the 1st game, 2-0. Al Jackson pitched a 3-hit shutout. The Phils won the 2nd game, 10-1.
* And the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Indians were rained out at Yankee Stadium. This game was made up as part of a doubleheader on August 29. The Indians swept, 3-2 and 9-5. Roger Maris hit home runs in both games. Mickey Mantle went 2-for-4 with an RBI in the 1st game, but sat out the 2nd. Yogi Berra did not start either game, but pinch-hit in each, hitting a single in the 1st game.
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