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Once bitten, forever smitten: that’s how it was for Peter Parker, whose life-changing super powers stemmed from a radioactive spider’s playful nip. That’s also how it was for legions of Spider-Man fans: just one glimpse of that striking, blue-and-red-clad figure, that noble, wall-crawling, web-slinging, wise-cracking, crime-fighting hero, and there was no turning back. They’d been bitten by the bug, and the bug just happened to be a spider.

Confession: I’m one of them. I have a Spider-Man T-shirt. And a Spider-Man keyring. I have two Spider-Man watches – they’re both broken, but I can’t bring myself to throw them away. I have a Spider-Man Lego figure, a calendar, a mousemat and calculator. Oh, and I have a big red plastic Spider-Man head for a book-end in my bedroom.

I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not the case. I wash my hair, I read proper books, I have a job and a girlfriend and a social life. But whenever I think about my aspirations or responsibilities, whenever I’m looking for a role-model, I can’t help it: my thoughts always swing back round to Spidey.

Spider-Man: The Icon, Steve Saffel’s lavishly illustrated study of Spider-Man through the decades, is aptly named. All superheroes are, by their nature, icons, but Spider-Man is such a potent symbol because what he stands for is real. He is an expression of genuine teen angst: something that we think we grow out of but never really do. As his co-creator Stan Lee writes in the foreword to the book: “I wanted [Peter Parker] to be frail and nerdy-looking, inhibited and shy, scorned by the high-school jocks and ignored by his female classmates . . . I gave him money worries, family responsibilities and a king-size guilt complex because he felt responsible for his uncle’s death.”

Parker’s super powers give him an opportunity to escape his adolescent powerlessness, to transform weakness into strength, to re-write his failures as victories. You know when three hours after a bungled argument you suddenly, infuriatingly think of the perfect riposte? Symbolically, Spider-Man offers the ability to go back and re-live that moment, delivering your knock-out blow to audience applause. But Parker must also remember that “with great power there must also come responsibility”.

The real-life roots of Spider-Man were particularly striking in 1962, when he made his debut, as comics then were dominated by “gunfighters, space cowboys, war heroes, detectives, romantic heroines” and endless monsters. Readers immediately wrote in, expressing their approval (“Your Spider-Man shows great promise”) and it was not long before fan-clubs were springing up across the world, creating a demand for merchandising (some of the most delightful photographs in the book are of the plastic knick-knacks that parents forked out for in the Sixties and Seventies) and new media (a crude cartoon and an even cruder live-action TV series predate the box-office-obliterating “event movie” of 2002). Critics began to analyze an emerging trend: in 1966 Nat Freedland of The New York Herald Tribune wrote an article headlined “Super Heroes with Super Problems”, singling out Spider-Man as “the Raskolnikov of the funnies, a worthy rival to Bellow’s Herzog for the Neurotic Hipster Championship of our time”.

Wisely, however, Saffel resists the urge to perform a post-structuralist reading of his favourite superhero, reminding us of a more straightforward – but equally valid – explanation of Spidey’s popularity: swinging on those webs, wearing that suit and catching those criminals, Saffel contends, is “just plain cool”. And, remarkably, 45 years down the line, he is still cool, for kids as well as ageing comics buffs.

Fashions change and heroes come and go, but Spider-Man – the underdog who became an icon – is here to stay.

Spider-Man: The Icon by Steve Saffel
Titan Books, £29.99, 316pp

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