Who Created Spider-Man? / Randall Hugh Crawford

Randall Hugh Crawford

Recently, at a Facebook group for Steve Ditko fans, that tedious old question about who created Spider-Man and who got more or not enough credit than he deserved for what contribution and so on came up yet again. And one of those Internet types who are locked onto a distinct idea that they can not be dissuaded from in a paragraph or two of common sense made the claim, “Jack Kirby created S-M”.

Seeing an opportunity for a bit of levity I quipped, “No, the Marquis De Sade and Baron von Sacher-Masoch invented S-M”.

Oh Lord, I really should have left it there, but I figured since the topic arises as regular as clockwork in the various Ditko and Kirby groups I would just jot down my personal opinion on the topic and save it to repost every time the subject comes up. And I did. And expanded it by a few more paragraphs in the comment section in reply to other comments.

And then I was invited to expand further on the subject and submit it to a comic-fan web site in exchange for no pay. How could I resist such an opportunity?

Hello, I am Randall Hugh Crawford. I began collecting comics shortly after I learned to read, around age five. (I got an early start by asking my mother to explain the words in the balloons in the Nancy comic strip; then I began acquiring comic books, and I usually state that Bugs, Daffy, Porky, The Road Runner, Superman and Batman taught me to read.) I continued buying and reading comics into my mid fifties, when I stopped collecting (and buying new music, and canceled cable TV) in an attempt to stave off encroaching poverty. I am certainly NOT a comic-book scholar or historian; merely a fan. I worked as a clerk at the Wyoming Michigan Book Stop comic-book shop for eight years, during which I accumulated several large bookcases of graphic novels, trade paperback collections of comics, comic-strip volumes and at least a couple feet of text books about comics. I created and published the Between The Covers comics-shop monthly newsletter for over six years. I subscribed to CBG, Amazing Heroes and The Comics Journal during the time I was laboring on behalf of the industry. I have drawn and written my own small press publications under the name Nice Day Comix (and until the mid ’90s as Randy H. Crawford) since 1979, though not recently, for financial reasons. As an internet presence, I was a participant at the Jump The Shark media discussion Yahoo! group for over a decade, and the assistant moderator there for the last half of that period — where I got a reputation for TMI, verbosity, opinionatedness and a quirky sense of humor, as you will discover if you will be so kind as to continue reading.

I had commented in my addendum to the original post that if Stan Lee credited Harry Steeger’s pulp character The Spider as an inspiration, then some credit must be shared with Walter Gibson, since the Spider was an imitation of Gibson’s The Shadow — of pulps, radio drama and Alec Baldwin film fame. Therefore, if Spider-Man could not have been created without Gibson’s creation, Lee should get, say, a fraction of one percent of the credit for creating Spider-Man even if he had no direct contribution.

This, then, is the premise of this expanded version of “Who Created Spider-Man” — who and what would Spider-Man not be possible without? Here we go.

There are those who will tell you everything starts with God and the creation of light. There is a popular book on the topic. In the first chapter the human race is created totally capable of speech and language and given the task of creating names for all living things. This story does seem to skip over a number of key points.

The alternative begins with a big bang and the creation of planets, stars, light, heat and so on.

We skip ahead quite some time to find a primordial stew of fluids filled with chemical and mineral elements simmering away over subterranean volcanic heat and struck by electrifying lighting. A match is struck, things start moving and we have the beginning of life, as a swirling miasma of color, shape and motion.

Moving along, we have the earliest amoeba, Lumpy; basically a dab of protoplasm in a skin sac — a being consisting entirely of inside and outside.

Skipping ahead several millennia, all fossil remains of animals, birds, fish and reptiles seem to have two eyes; so we have to assume that there was a one-eyed missing link that died out quickly due to its lack of binocular vision and ability to see in three dimensions.

Moving swiftly along, we arrive at the early bi-laterally symmetrical bi-pedal simians with opposable thumbs moving down from the trees and into the caves. One of the most important things they learned from their predecessors is to recognize things that are edible, nutritious and life-sustaining. Learning the things that cause upset stomachs and should be avoided was a bit more challenging, as poisons do not often offer a second chance.

At first, recognition is literal: when thinking “peach” the primitive mind visualized the image of a peach, connecting it with the taste and aroma and the pleasure of consumption. No real abstraction involved.

However, as the earliest forms of tribal social networking were introduced, it became essential to communicate certain ideas such as, “Do you have any peaches? Do you know where I can find a peach?”. Thus verbal noises were assigned specific meanings. There are still some aboriginal people who communicate with grunts, clicks, whistles and pops, but for the most part, words seemed to have caught on. It certainly would have been convenient if the words for Peach — or Peace — had spread worldwide; but that is a very large area, so different tribes of people created different languages. Thousands of them. Many of which have fallen into disuse. Those people who think it’s novel to suggest if you want to live in the United States you should learn to speak and read the language tend to forget that there are over a hundred aboriginal Native American languages, and English is not one of them.

Historically, we’re getting somewhere here. By having a verbal language (or many of them), humankind developed an oral history — a way of telling a person what happened when they were not present, or yesterday or last year or long before they were born.

Oh, and either before or after or around the same time, a cave artist made a line to represent a stem and a cluster of loops to depict petals and drew the first picture of a daisy. This was meant to represent the idea of a real flower, however — not to visually represent the word “flower”.

Some time later, a more accomplished cave artist drew a sort of rough abstract representation of a mammoth surrounded by stick figures waving arrows to represent hunters with spears. Not having studied things like perspective, he put all his figures side by side on a flat plane. The one figure he drew larger than the rest, therefore, was not meant to appear closer to the viewer. Rather, the largeness of the figure represented an enhanced importance. Perhaps he was sucking up to the tribal chieftain by suggesting he was a larger, stronger man with a longer ‘spear’. Others think the largest figure is intended to portray whoever actually managed to deliver the coup de grace on the mammoth.

But here’s the important thing: he did a ‘sequel’ drawing — a series of two pictures, with the second showing the dead mammoth on its back, feet raised, stuck with spears. These two pictures, representing two different periods of time during the same activity — a before and an after, so to speak — are considered to be a prototype of the comic-strip form.

Here’s another important turning point: The oral history method of passing tales from one listener and one generation to another had certain flaws: an aged tale-teller would forget details and then have to fill in the missing parts of a story from his imagination. This was the creation of Fiction, which led to the entire entertainment industry: literature, film, television, comics and so on. And some speakers realized that details of a story could be changed or improved to change the meaning or make the teller seem more important — if he was a character in the tale who expanded upon his own involvement. Sometimes these changes did not adhere to the truth, and thus Lying was invented. This led to deception, cheating, swindling, the sin of “bearing false witness”, journalism and politics.

Preventing stories from being changed was not the only reason for the development of the written word, but it was a key element.

In the Asian parts of the world a different abstract design or ideogram was assigned to each word. In the western traditions a smaller number of symbols were assigned to various audible sounds. The Wuh of W, the round lipped O, the urr sound of R and the sudden-stop D sound combine to make “word”.

A written language guaranteed stories would not alter. Except by expurgation, censorship or transcription errors. Or vanish completely — except through book burnings or the wholesale destruction of entire libraries.

We now leap ahead to the invention of the moveable-type printing press by Guttenberg, a development that helped popularize The Bible.

As I said, I am no historian, so I do not know who hit on the idea of taking a long story or “book” and serializing the chapters in periodical publications, though it is known that that was how Charles Dickens was able to survive while writing his novels and plays.

I believe it was Charles Olcault’s Yellow Kid who was credited as being the first newspaper comic, though it was a single panel rather than a strip; more like what we now call an editorial cartoon, and the main character’s thoughts and dialog were printed on the front of his yellow-tinted nightshirt rather than in separate word and thought balloons.

When Elzie Segar’s Thimble Theatre introduced a new character, a squinty-eyed sailor who temporarily was capable of prodigious feats of strength after consuming spinach, Popeye became the first comic-book super-hero. A claim also sometimes credited to Lee Falk’s crime-fighting family legacy of heroes known as The Phantom. Other characters of remarkable ability were features in the pulps, in novels and on the radio — in the case of Gibson’s The Shadow, all three.

Of key importance here is Lester Dent’s pulp magazine hero Doc Savage — Clark Savage, the Man of Bronze, who hung out with his team of crime-fighting underlings in a secret headquarters known as his Fortress of Solitude.

Obviously a pair of Jewish science-fiction fans from Cleveland, Ohio were familiar with this metallic man named Clark and his Fortress — all elements they eventually borrowed. They had already ambitiously self-published a science fiction fanzine and featured a story they’d created and illustrated called “The Rise of the Superman” — perhaps inspired by Frederick Nietzsche’s Uber-Mensch, and unrelated except by name to Clark “Superman’ Kent, the Man of Steel. It was this later character — Clark Kent, Kal-L, Superman — which they developed into a universally rejected and unsold comic strip. You could argue that a non-joke-a-day comic action and drama strip in the sci-fi genre was a difficult sale — or could if not for the popularity of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.

What we do know is that a few years earlier a printing press owner, Max Gaines, observed an over-printed stack of color comic-strip newspaper tabloids, and regretting letting the expensive ink and cheap pulp paper go to waste, devised a way to refold and trim the pages, stapled them together, slapped a ten-cent price tag on them, and dropped stacks off at neighborhood newsstands. Returning a few days later to pick them up, he found they had all sold out and the stand owners wanted more.

Thus the comic book was created, as he learned to recut and reformat the material to make it easier to print them in pamphlet form. Oh, and at some point it occurred to him to actually acquire the legal rights to reprint the copyrighted material.

News of the success and popularity of these “comic books” quickly spread to other New York printing shop owners, all of whom began turning out their own comic books. Soon, the right to all but the very worst and least interesting comic strips and animated cartoon characters and radio heroes had been bought up, and the next step was taken: the creation of new content.

One of these companies (actually two interlocked companies known as National and American), the publisher of New Fun and other titles such as Detective, were approached by the Cleveland boys, writer Jerry Siegel and cartoonist Joe Shuster. Not in the market for a comic strip, the editors there determined the strip samples could be cut to pieces and laid out onto fifteen comic-book-sized pages. The boys were thus paid ten dollars a page. Receiving $150.00 for the rights to Superman, a character still in print some 77 years later and star of a motion picture currently in the works. Appearing in Action Comics #1, Superman is sometimes (mis)identified as the “first superhero”, although obviously predated by Popeye, The Phantom, The Shadow, Doc Savage and even National/American’s own relatively unknown Scarlet Avenger.

Across town, Martin Goodman owned a company known as Timely/Atlas comics. One of his employees, an assistant editor, was his nephew, Stanley Leiber.

In order to qualify for second-class postage rates, a comic book was required to contain at least a couple pages of text material, and frequently this took the form of a short story. Facing a deadline on one issue, young Stanley was asked to hack out a quick tale, which he did, earning his first comic-book credit.

Hoping to one day be a serious writer, the young man signed his comic-book work, “Stan Lee”.

Now concurrent with these Golden Age (early 1940s) comic-book publishers were artist studios — teams of creators who wrote and drew comic-book material, sometimes packaging it into book form and then selling it to the publishers without the investment or risk of publishing it themselves.

Jack Kirby, a former “in-betweener” at the Max Fleischer animation studios, and his friend Joe Simon, worked and studied for a time at the Eisner Igor studios under the legendary innovative comics creator Will Eisner. Soon Simon and Kirby had branched out and formed their own studio. They created Captain America and sold it to Martin Goodman’s Timely Publications.

Following the end of World War Two, sales of super-hero comic books declined, though the industry clung on by diversifying into the crime, western, horror and romance genres.

In the early 1950s, the creation of The Comics Code Authority as a safety measure in reaction to a senate inquiry (concerning alleged connections between comic books and juvenile delinquency) largely emasculated an entire art form for most of the following decade. It is also often suggested that the companies behind the creation of the Code Authority managed to successfully drive their principle competitors, horror and crime comics, out of business.

In this child-safe environment, publishers considered reviving a sterilized version of the super-hero genre. Harvey, a company best known for transplanting oddly horrorific characters (ghosts, devils, witches, etc) into a child-safe format, also had a sexy and somewhat violent heroine called The Black Cat.

Over at Fawcett, CC Beck’s Captain Marvel had been successfully sued by National for being too similar to their Superman character. In 1953, Beck approached Harvey Comics with an idea for a new hero called The Silver Spider. I have been told that Joe Simon was involved in the creation of that character, but I have been unable to verify that claim. Anyway, the character was rejected.

Seven years later, the company at various times knows as MLJ, Archie, Red Circle and Mighty Comics tried to move back into the superhero trade. Joe Simon approached them and enlisted his old studio partner Jack Kirby to create sample sketches for a character called... Spiderman.

Once again the spider concept was rejected, and the concept was reworked with the web gun repurposed and the bug-like goggles retained for a character called The Fly, which was published for a while by Red Circle, then revived in the mid-sixties as Fly-man, a member of Mighty Comics’ Mighty Crusaders.

By this time, National Periodical Publications — now informally known as DC Comics — had begun the Silver Age of comics with the introduction of The Martian Manhunter in Detective and, soon after that, by creating new versions of such Golden Age heroes as The Flash and Green Lantern.

Meanwhile, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and back-up characters such as Aquaman and Green Arrow had managed to stay in print continuously since their debuts in the late ’30s and early ’40s. In the Golden Age a number of the National and American heroes had worked together as the Justice Society of America, so that concept too was reborn as the Justice League of America.

Now over at Martin Goodman’s Atlas Comics, nephew Stan Lee and such artists as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were turning out seven-page short stories featuring bizarre giant monsters and aliens — the safer alternative to the once popular horror comics.

An editor from DC was playing golf with Goodman and bragged about how sales for the JLA were through the roof. This gave Goodman an idea: imitate! He passed that idea down to his editor, nephew Stan. Stan Lee had become tied of laboring away in the thankless comic-book industry and was preparing to quit, and almost turned down the assignment when his wife Joan urged him to “do it your way and write a comic you’d want to read”. He created — well, co-created — an innovative team superhero comic with a family group dynamic — heroes with insecurities, tempers and financial woes.

In terms of originality, well, bear in mind that the JLA was a team of already pre-existing characters, and the Lee-Kirby team had been asked to create something similar; therefore the Fantastic Four consisted of new revised versions of Carl Burgos’s Human Torch, a renamed take on Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, a gender-swapped take on HG Wells’s The Invisible Man and, well, another of Kirby’s legions of lumpy rock monsters. Though, in time, that Thing took on his more familiar jagged stony texture.