Stan Lee talks about the origins of Spider Man

TRANSCRIPT

Stan Lee:  I Had Spider Man.  Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider: That's easy. You can say that in one sentence. He became Spider-Man.  When you want to do a superhero the most important thing you have to do is figure out what is his or her super power, and I had already written about the strongest guy in the world and a fellow who could burst into flame and fly and a girl who was invisible and on and on. And I was thinking what else is there? But I had to come up with something or I might have lost my job and I saw a fly or a bug or something on the wall and I thought hey, what about somebody with the power of an insect who can stick to walls and climb up and down a wall and be on a ceiling? So that sounded cool to me.

Okay. So now I needed a name, so I went down the list. Fly-Man didn't sound that good. Mosquito-Man, I don't know. Bug-Man, Insect-Man, and I got to Spider-Man and somehow Spider-Man -- and also when I was a kid there was a pulp magazine called The Spider, Master of Men, had absolutely nothing to do with spiders but he was a guy who wore a mask sort of like the Spirit -- if you remember that -- and a hat and a coat and he went out and fought crooks, but they called him the Spider. And I read those things when I was about eight years old and I thought it was so dramatic. So everything fell in place and I thought I'll call him Spider-Man, and the rest, as we say in the NEA, is history