When I First Fell In Love With Spider-Man As A Child It Was Because He Was Funny.

When I first fell in love with Spider-Man as a child it was because he was funny.

Whilst Superman and Batman might have cracked the odd joke, they were mostly pretty sober and straight arrow about their business.

Spidey though, he was the guy who you could guarantee would throw out a snarky quip to mock his enemies or sardonically reflect upon his lot in life.

That was what hooked me into him and made me then see all the other wonderful things about him and his world. Although I couldn’t lift a bus or swing from a web, I could crack a joke or two.

Although a sense of humour wasn’t devoid in other Marvel heroes, it was much more pronounced Spider-Man to the point where it was a genuine ingrained character trait. It is as iconic a part of what makes Spider-Man Spider-Man as the webs or the spider bite or anything.

And the thing is…that was all Stan Lee.

No. I do not just mean he was the guy responsible for most if not all of the dialogue so he gets the credit for that.

I mean…that was literally Stan’s personality.

Stan put a part of himself into all his characters but it’s unofficially agreed upon he put more into Peter Parker than his other creations.

Peter was in part Stan’s author avatar playing out a superhero melodrama of life experiences Stan himself dealt with or had witnessed. Even his intended wife, Gwen Stacy, was based upon Stan’s own life Joan (who ironically if you read up on her sounds more like Mary Jane who wound up being Spider-Man’s actual wife).

This especially applied to his sense of humour. A greater sense of humour flavoured the Marvel heroes in a very different way to the DC ones, but in Spider-Man’s case it went beyond that. As I said it was an ingrained trait within him because it was an ingrained trait within Stan himself.

Read or watch any given interview or statement by Stan and 99% of the time you will find more than a few jokes, wisecracks or bits of snark.

Compare if you will Spider-Man’s jokes…

To Stan Lee’s rapid quips in any given interview.

They are so similar because Peter was Stan and Stan was Peter.