Working-class (super)hero

Like Spider-Man himself -- the first superhero to use a laundromat -- longtime Spidey artists John Romita Sr. and Jr. are regular New Yorkers who dreamed big.

By Ros Davidson

May 3, 2002 | A few months short of his 40th birthday, Spider-Man, the first flawed and fallible comic-book superhero, is finally ready for his close-up. If Columbia Pictures' "Spider-Man," starring Tobey Maguire in the title role and directed by cult favorite Sam Raimi, is the smash hit everyone expects, it may outstrip the current box-office record-holder among comics-to-movie superheroes. That was 1989's "Batman," currently the 39th-biggest-grossing film in cinema history with receipts of $251 million. Columbia is so confident in Spidey, or so keen to appear that way, that it has already announced specifics of the sequel -- again directed by Raimi and again starring Maguire and Kirsten Dunst -- before the film's opening weekend.

No one understands the arachnid hero's appeal better than John Romita Sr. and John Romita Jr., the father-and-son team of comic-book artists most closely associated with Spidey. John Sr. drew the superhero in monthly books for seven years straight in the comic-book heyday of the late '60s and '70s. When Marvel Comics creative genius Stan Lee launched the daily Spider-Man newspaper strip in 1977, Romita Sr. drew it for the first several years.

Romita Jr., or J.R., as he is universally known, currently draws Marvel's classic Spidey title, the Amazing Spider-Man, as well as the Incredible Hulk. He did last November's Spider-Man book reflecting the World Trade Center disaster and four of the movie-themed covers that appeared on last week's issue of TV Guide. (As is standard in comic books, they were inked by other artists, one of them his father.)

Spidey's appeal is that he has always been more ordinary than other superheroes, contends J.R., who grew up in Queens, N.Y., with the web-casting superhero almost as a family member. By day, Spidey's alter ego, Peter Parker, is a pimply teenager who also lives in Queens, the semisuburban homeland of New York's working and middle classes. Introverted, awkward and -- at least at first -- a dud with the girls, Parker is nothing like Clark Kent, that clean-cut native of the planet Krypton by way of small-town Kansas.

Spidey, perhaps Lee's most famous creation, was the first superhero to be an ordinary guy. His is the story, J.R. says, of "the little guy making great, the average kid who becomes a superhero. He gets colds, he gets the snot beaten out of him, his uniform gets dirty and it shrinks when he washes it."

It's crucial to Spidey's particular popularity that he works his heroism in the real New York City, not Batman's Gotham City or the Metropolis of Superman, says Romita Sr., 72, who still makes his home in New York but is visiting J.R. outside San Diego when I talk with them. Spidey, he points out, is a typical wiseass New Yorker driven to heroism by greed and ego -- at first he uses his special powers to become a TV star -- and then by guilt after his selfishness inadvertently leads to his uncle's death.

Spidey's complex personal life has also been central to the character's longevity, which is only matched by a handful of other fantasy superheroes. "It's like a constantly changing melodrama based on real people that readers knew," says Romita Sr.

Father and son are sitting in J.R.'s California studio -- with a tiled patio and elephant palms outside -- surrounded by dozens of drawings of Spidey, who was launched in August 1962. Lee foresaw that a more complex, skeptical America was ready for a new type of hero and that icons such as Superman, the flagship character of rival DC Comics, were remote from the experience of many readers.

The origin of Spidey's superhuman capabilities was especially apt. Shortly after his first appearance, in a comic book called Amazing Fantasy drawn by Steve Ditko, the Cuban missile crisis brought America to the brink of nuclear war. As all Marvel fans know, an irradiated spider at a local science exhibit bit the geeky Peter Parker; from then on, he could morph into a creepy-crawly that scaled walls and ceilings and squirted his own webs from his wrists.

Next page: After the "Batman" boom, Spidey had to weather the comics industry's crash (and his own marriage)