{"id":570,"date":"2012-08-10T10:09:20","date_gmt":"2012-08-10T16:09:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/?p=570"},"modified":"2012-08-10T10:09:20","modified_gmt":"2012-08-10T16:09:20","slug":"on-this-date-aug-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/on-this-date-aug-10\/","title":{"rendered":"On This Date (Aug 10)…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\n

On this date (Aug 10) in 1962, a legend was born. In the Marvel<\/strong> comic, Amazing Fantasy<\/em>, issue #15, we were introduced to The Amazing Spider-Man<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

You read that right… Spider-Man is 50 years old!<\/p>\n

In the early 60s, Stan Lee was trying to differentiate Marvel comics from the superhero archetypes that DC Comics had been developing – supremely powerful beings with virtually no serious flaws. The DC heroes were unattainable ideals… sure, Superman was vulnerable to kryptonite, but that wasn’t a bad trade-off for being basically a demigod. Yeah, Batman was an orphan with no real powers, but he more than made up for it by being a gazillionaire genius martial artist with a flair for the dramatic.<\/p>\n

Stan Lee didn’t want heroes that were ideals to which kids would aspire, he wanted heroes with which kids could actually identify. A typical nerdy high-schooler, Peter Parker was just the type of kid that would resonate with the average comic book reader.<\/p>\n

I’d like to think that I wasn’t an average<\/em> comic book reader, but I loved this idea. Regardless of my wildest dreams, there was literally no way that it would suddenly be revealed that I was from another planet, with fantastic superpowers resulting from Earth’s yellow sun… But there was a chance – however microscopic – that I, too, could be bitten by a radioactive spider, acquiring amazing abilities. After all, that wasn’t science fiction – that was science!!<\/em><\/p>\n

It was a formula for success. Now we had a hero who could do wondrous things, but that also worried about maintaining his grade point average while keeping up with his part-time job, and not looking too dumb in front of the girls.<\/p>\n

And, in case I didn’t emphasize this point, he was a teenager<\/em>… At this point, teens in comics were the sidekicks. Captain America had Bucky. Batman had Robin. But Spidey wasn’t a sidekick. He was<\/em> the hero.<\/p>\n

Add in his snarky sense of humor, colorful costume, and constant insecurity, and you have the perfect superhero for teenagers.<\/p>\n

It’s no surprise that Spider-Man is Marvel’s flagship character, or that he made #3 on IGN’s Top 100 Comic Book Heroes of All Time<\/em> last year.<\/p>\n

Comics, animated and live-action TV shows, newspaper comic strips, video games, movies, and even a Broadway musical… I think it’s safe to say that Spidey has made it.<\/p>\n

Happy birthday, Webhead. You definitely make turning 50 look pretty good!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On this date (Aug 10) in 1962, a legend was born. In the Marvel comic, Amazing Fantasy, issue #15, we were introduced to The Amazing Spider-Man. You read that right… Spider-Man is 50 years old! In the early 60s, Stan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mikeypedia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":577,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570\/revisions\/577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}