The Sexual Subtext of Spider-Man
How soft-core pornography shaped everyone’s favorite webslinger
Speaking about the new movie Spider-Man: No Way Home, Tom Holland, who plays the superhero, said, "No one wants to see Peter Parker having sex! That would be horrible." I think Holland is being reasonable. While there are “superheroes for adults” (like Watchmen), the Spider-Man franchise is definitely all ages. The earlier films have done a good job of balancing suggestiveness with tact: it's clear that Peter Parker does have an active romantic life but there is nothing to scare off younger viewers.
But Holland’s comments remind me that there’s a sexual subtext to Spider-Man that is worth considering.
From 1958 to 1968, Steve Ditko, the main creator of Spider-Man, shared a studio with Eric Stanton, a fellow cartoonist who specialized in soft-core pornography with a sadomasochistic bent. The proto-Spider-Man was created by Jack Kirby sometime in the late 1950s, working with his then partner Joe Simon. Kirby had a tropism towards insect-themed heroes, having co-created in this period The Fly (for Archie comics) and Ant-Man (for Marvel). In 1962, Kirby took the ur-Spider-Man idea to Stan Lee, his editor at Marvel. Lee liked the idea and gave it to artist Steve Ditko (Kirby at that time was already working on a slew of other Marvel projects and over committed). Ditko thought Kirby’s pitch was too similar to other characters and stories, so made some major changes, designing a new costume and origin.
Under the Marvel method of production, the artist would first draw out the story, with minimal input from Lee in editorial. The artist would give Lee a plotted story with dialogue notes, which Lee would flesh out. Of the various figures involved in creating Spider-Man, Ditko made the greatest contribution.
But along the way, Ditko might have been influenced by his friendship with Stanton. As studio mates, Ditko and Stanton would help each other out on projects. Consider this panel from "Black Widow Sorority" included in Diabolique Magazine #3 (1960), drawn by Stanton and Ditko two years before the creation of Spider-Man. One of the scantily clad women is wearing a costume that is clearly a proto-Spider-Man suit.
More broadly, many of the costumes in Spider-Man (and Ditko’s other work Dr. Strange) are strongly suggestive of the queer culture of 1960s New York, which Ditko would likely have encountered through his friendship with Stanton. Kraven the Hunter, for example, would have been completely at home in the East Village.
Ditko and Stanton were hardly alone in creating both outre sexual art and mainstream superheroes. The creators of Wonder Woman (William Moulton Marston, Elizabeth Hollway Marston and Olive Byrne) were a polyamorous throuple, at least two of whom (Moulton Marston and Byrne) were into bondage. Superman co-creator Jerry Shuster, after he had been stripped of ownership of his creation, made a living doing fetish art. All of this suggests an affinity between superheroes and fetish culture, a theme Alan Moore explored in the graphic novel Watchmen.
Ditko was an intensely private figure and not much is known about his personal life. But certainly there’s a strong sexual subtext that runs through his work. Whether or not Spider-Man is shown making love on screen is almost immaterial. Sexuality is part of the character Ditko created.
If you are interested in learning more about Ditko and the creation of Spider-Man, I’ve recorded a podcast with Joe McCulloch, one of the editors of The Comics Journal. Joe and I particularly take up Ditko’s libertarianism as displayed in both his early Spider-Man comics and in his auteur creator-owned work. That podcast will be posted on Sunday morning.
H/t: Ferran Delgado for the Stanton/Ditko art.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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Your description of how these comics were made has absolutely nothing to do with reality.
Since I read about Ditko's collaboration with Stanton in Blake Bell's biography, I've seen Clea's spike-heeled boot-pants costume in Dr Strange as a kind of fetish outfit.