There’s a scene in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 (2004) in which the superhero’s aunt forces him to take a $20 bill as a gift for his birthday. She has just received a notice foreclosing her home. It’s a quiet, powerful scene, amid all the superhero shenanigans, and one that sets the teen hero apart from his counterparts.
In fact, one of the significant criticisms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) Spider-Man has been that turning him into the protege of a billionaire industrialist such as Tony Stark undercuts one of his defining characteristics: his financial struggle.
Spider-Man was possibly the first superhero whose emotional life was front and centre, a calculated move by his creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Teen superheroes had existed before him. Robin made his first appearance alongside DC Comics’s Batman in 1940, just eight years old. At Marvel, Bucky Barnes was introduced as Captain America’s 15-year-old sidekick, also in 1940. Others followed — Speedy with Green Arrow, Kid Flash, Aqualad, Wonder Girl; every superhero worth their circulation had to have a young sidekick or teen version.
Spidey was the first truly successful teen superhero in his own right, and the focus on the turmoil of the teenage years and his struggle for money were deliberate decisions that were instrumental in cementing his relatability and popularity, even though Lee’s then publisher Martin Goodman thought the whole thing a terrible idea.
In an interview with the New York Daily News in 2012, Lee recalled Goodman saying, “First of all, you can’t call a hero ‘Spider-Man’. People hate spiders. Next, you can’t make him a teenager — teenagers can only be sidekicks. And you say you want him to have problems? Stan, he’s a superhero. Superheroes don’t have problems.”
The opposition from the publishers meant that Lee and Ditko had to introduce their new superhero in the final issue of an anthology series titled Amazing Fantasy (August 15, 1962) that was already scheduled for cancellation.
The boy was an instant hit. Months later, the same Goodman insisted that Spider-Man get his own series, and on March 16, 1963, The Amazing Spider-Man debuted on news stands across the US.
“I think one of the reasons for Spidey’s popularity is that there has always been something, for every generation,” says Jatin Varma, founder of Comic Con India and formerly a comic-books publisher. He remembers watching the 1967 animated Spider-Man TV show as a child, when it was shown on cable TV in India in the 1990s. The show that was the source of the iconic “Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can” (covered by the Ramones, no less). “There were the three Sam Raimi films with Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man that were released between 2002 and 2007. Then there were the Amazing Spider-Man films in 2012 and 2014. And now you have the MCU Spider-Man. And other very successful Spider-Man properties… animated films, video games and so on. So, for the past two decades, there’s always been a current version.”
There’s also the rogues’ gallery. Spider-Man is up there with Batman, in terms of colourful antagonists: Doc Ock, the Green Goblins, the Hobgoblin, Venom, a menagerie of animal-themed villains (Vulture, Jackal, Rhino, Lizard, Scorpion, Chameleon), the vampiric Morlun and Morbius, Kraven the Hunter and Kingpin, have all played a significant role in enriching the webslinger’s world.
While the reasons for Spider-Man’s popularity may be universal, India has embraced the webslinger quite wholly. In 2017, Rob Cain wrote a story for Forbes headlined India Is The One Country That Loves Spider-Man Even More Than America Does. “In India,” he said, “they have showered Spidey’s movies with so much box office love that his films account for three of the top ten highest grossing Hollywood movies in the country’s history, with Spider-Man 3 at number 7, The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) at number 9, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) at number 10. No other movie superhero has even a single solo film in the top 10. It took a whole host of superheroes teaming up in one movie, Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, to outdo Spidey in India (the 2015 film ranks 6th among Hollywood movies there).”
Since then, new Spidey films have gone on to challenge Indian films at home. Spider-Man: No Way Home was one of the biggest grossers of 2021.
“From the beginning, Spider-Man and Batman have been the most popular American superheroes here,” says Varma. “They’re also the most popular targets of cosplayers here. Spider-Man costumes have gone from very basic to really sophisticated, and parents bringing children in fantastic Spider-Man costumes are a common sight at Comic Cons.”
Now, the Indian Spider-Man, Pavitr Prabhakar, is making his screen debut, voiced by 23-year-old cricketer Shubman Gill, in the animated film …Across the Spider-Verse. Prabhakar was the brainchild of Sharad Devarajan, Suresh Seetharaman, and Jeevan J Kang, and made his first appearance in a comic-book series called Spider-Man: India, created in association with Marvel, in 2004.
“Pavitr Prabhakar is an Indian boy growing up in Mumbai and dealing with local problems and challenges. Unlike the original origin, which is deeply rooted in science, our Indian version was more rooted in spirituality. Indian readers were able to see, for the first time, Spider-Man bouncing off rickshaws, climbing the Gateway of India and celebrating Diwali with his Aunt Maya,” says Devarajan, who had a long association with Marvel Comics as their local publishing licensee, and had a close personal relationship with Lee.(Click herefor more on this, and on how Prabhakar came to be.)
If past trends are any indication, …Across the Spider-Verse will be a smash hit, though it may be a while before we see a live-action Indian Spider-Man. For Indian audiences, that doesn’t seem to matter. To them, as the song goes, “Ispider-Man, Ispider-Man, tune churaya mere dil ka chain (Spider-Man, Spider-Man, you have stolen all my heart)”.
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