Pop culture is filled with great ideas originally met with derision.
Stephen King's Carrie was rejected 30 times and his wife had to literally retrieve the manuscript out of a rubbish bin, American band REM was told Losing My Religion would never be a hit because it had mandolin on it, and E.T. The Extra Terrestrial was dumped by Columbia Pictures prior to becoming the highest grossing movie ever at the time of its release.
And then there's Spider-Man, who swung onto news stands and into the public consciousness 60 years ago.
The superhero's true origin story is fuelled by rejection, but the very reasons for that rejection are why Spidey has become Marvel's most iconic and relatable superhero.
'Does whatever a spider can …'
In 1961, Marvel writer-editor Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby created The Fantastic Four — a new team of superheroes that, unlike previous caped crusaders, had flaws and foibles, raising the bar for the medium.
The FF's debut sold like hotcakes, and Marvel head honcho Martin Goodman wanted Lee to come up with more superheroes.
But Lee's next big pitch went down like a villain copping a right hook from The Thing.
The idea was for a character called Spider-Man, who would be a regular teen from Queens, New York, that gets imbued with superpowers thanks to a bite from a radioactive spider.
As Lee would famously recall many times, Goodman hated the pitch.
"[Goodman] said three things that I will never forget," he recounted in a 1998 interview for Comic Book Artist magazine.
"He said people hate spiders, so you can't call a hero 'Spider-Man'; then when I told him I wanted the hero to be a teenager…, Martin said that a teenager can't be a hero, but only be a sidekick; and then… I said I wanted him not to be too popular with girls, and not great-looking or a strong, macho-looking guy, but just a thin, pimply high school student.
"Martin said, 'Don't you understand what a hero is?'.
"[He] just wouldn't let me do the book."
But Lee wouldn't give up on Spider-Man, recalling that "I must have felt that he was important somehow, or I wouldn't have bothered".
Without permission to do a full stand-alone comic, Lee instead snuck the character into one of Marvel's regular anthologies, Amazing Fantasy — a title that was due to wind up after one final issue.
'Spins a web, any size ...'
Lee teamed with artist Steve Ditko to bring the character to life in Amazing Fantasy #15, which hit newsstands in late 1962.
Jack Kirby provided the now iconic cover art of Spider-Man swinging over a New York street, holding someone he's just rescued under one arm, and the final line of the comic featured a variation of the now-famous adage, "With great power comes great responsibility".
The comic was a massive success, sending Amazing Fantasy #15 to the top of Marvel's best-seller list (and if you held on to a copy, well done — a near-mint condition issue sold for US$3.6m last year).
Goodman immediately ordered an ongoing Spider-Man series from Lee and Ditko, which began in March 1963 and hasn't stopped since.
Ironically, it was the very reasons that Goodman rejected Spider-Man that made the character such a hit with comic book fans.
Arts and culture writer Cassie Tongue said Spidey's alter-ego Peter Parker connected with readers because unlike other superheroes that existed at the time, he wasn't a billionaire or an astronaut or an alien.
"[Peter Parker] was a regular guy who was like the readers of comics," Tongue said.
"He was a teenager, he was struggling, he had love dramas, he was bullied at school.
"He was a young guy from a working-class family.
"He could feasibly be you, right?"
Tongue said that while the Spidey comics still had "the big swings of adventure and action and superhero business", they also honed in on the human side of superhero life.
"It explored what it would be like to live in these two different worlds, where you can beat up a villain and you can stop a robbery, but you can't ask a girl out or you can't figure out your friendships," she said.
"It blended the world that we know with this fantastical world really well, and it made it really accessible."
Former comic book store owner Garry Fay agreed, noting that the key to Spidey's success was his relatability.
"From the time he came into being, he was young, he was dorky, he lived with his aunt, he had to pay rent, he wasn't rich, he wasn't great with girls, he was a bit of a nerd — he was kind of all the readership, wrapped into one," Fay said.
"And I think that was the secret that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko cottoned on to really early."
Lee himself said Spider-Man was his favourite Marvel character for those very reasons.
"He's the one who's most like me," he told the Chicago Tribune in 1996.
"Nothing ever turns out 100-per-cent OK. He's got a lot of problems and he does things wrong, and I can relate to that."
'Wealth and fame, he's ignored'
Stan Lee co-created the character during a phenomenal burst of creativity. In the two years that followed the debut of his first superhero hit The Fantastic Four, he helped bring to life Ant-Man, The Hulk, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Nick Fury, The Wasp, Dr Strange, The X-Men, and Marvel's version of the Norse god Thor, not to mention Spider-Man's incredible rogues gallery of villains.
Many of the new heroes languished in anthology comics for a while before getting their own ongoing series, or, like The Incredible Hulk, had their own titles cancelled relatively quickly, with the characters only surviving in team-up titles such as The Avengers.
But Spider-Man was an instant and enduring hit, his popularity growing to the point that a second simultaneous series was added in 1972, then a third in 1976, and a fourth in 1990.
But with great money comes great arguments.
Much like with the 60-year battle to get Bill Finger listed as co-creator of Batman alongside Bob Kane, Spider-Man's genesis has been at the centre of an argument over who did what when creating the character — was it Lee, Ditko, or Kirby?
Over the years, Lee regarded himself largely as the sole creator of Spider-Man, though on occasion he would throw a bone to Ditko's claims that the artist did as much to create Spider-Man as Lee did.
"If Steve [Ditko] wants to be called co-creator, I think he deserves [it]," Lee once said in an interview.
Cover artist Kirby further complicated matters, claiming the character was largely his own idea, and based on a previous character he'd created called The Silver Spider.
These days, Spider-Man is attributed to Lee and Ditko, though whether that translated to royalty cheques for Ditko while both men were alive is another matter.
'Here comes the Spider-Man...'
Royalty cheques became particularly relevant in the '90s, when the idea of a big-budget Spider-Man movie kicked into gear.
Peter Parker had already been the subject of a live-action TV series in the '70s starring The Sound Of Music's Nicholas Hammond, and a number of animated series, dating back to the first in 1967, but a big screen version had proven elusive.
The rights for a Spidey-film had been bouncing around Hollywood for some time, but finally landed at Columbia Pictures (now owned by Sony), with former horror director Sam Raimi at the helm, and Tobey Maguire in the red-and-blue suit.
The film, released in 2002, was a success by any measure. It was the first film to gross $100m in a single weekend in the US, and at the time of its release it was the ninth-highest grossing film of all time worldwide.
Spider-Man knocked Tim Burton's Batman off its perch as the highest grossing superhero film of all time, helping to kickstart the modern wave of superhero movies.
Two sequels followed, making even more money, before Sony made the controversial decision to abandon a fourth film and plough ahead with a 2012 reboot directed by Marc Webb and starring Andrew Garfield.
Some industry figures suggested the reboot was only made to ensure Sony didn't lose the character's film rights back to Marvel, which had become a movie behemoth of its own by this stage thanks to the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
A sequel starring Garfield followed, but the $708m worldwide box office was seen as underwhelming by Sony, leading to Peter Parker's debut in the MCU, with Tom Holland in the role.
Sony and Marvel/Disney have had their quibbles over the character, but the appetite for Spidey-films hasn't abated — last year's Spider-Man: No Way Home fell just short of becoming only the sixth film to take $2b at the worldwide box office, despite being released during a pandemic.
"I think every time they've brought Spider-Man into another film universe, it's been with a different approach, highlighting a different aspect of who Spider-Man is," Tongue said.
"I think [2018 animated film] Into The Spider-Verse is probably one of the best superhero films we've ever had, let alone a Spider-Man film.
"I love the way that it really digs into those ideas of what it means to be not just the Peter Parker Spider-Man, but Spider-Man as a whole, and what that looks like in different people."
Behind the mask
Stan Lee loved to point out that Spider-Man's mask played a key role in the character, beyond protecting Peter Parker's identity.
"What I like about the costume is that anybody reading Spider-Man in any part of the world can imagine that they themselves are under the costume, and that's a good thing," he told Newsarama in 2015.
This has been taken literally by Marvel's comic writers, who have created an entire multiverse of different Spider-people, with the best known versions being Miles Morales and Gwen Stacey AKA Ghost-Spider, who both appear in Into The Spider-Verse.
But across all the different iterations, Spider-Man has remained Marvel's most human character, Fay said.
"I think it's the core idea — [that Spider-Man] could be anyone," he said.
"Who hasn't wanted to be bitten by a radioactive spider?"
