1. Stan Lee on how he created Spider-Man – BBC News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boFoF1sv2aA

Background: Stan Lee was one of the co creators of Spider-Man and shares his story of the time he saw a fly crawling on a wall and decided that his new creation should be able to stick to walls. He also goes into depth on the idea that he wanted Peter to be a teenager, yet a hero in his own right. Lee also gave Peter some undesirable traits like poor looks, unsuccessful with girls, and poor to name a few.

How I used it: Hearing from the creator himself and his intentions for the character helped me a lot. Hearing how he wanted to make him empathetic to young viewers that maybe weren’t so super themselves hammered the point of his relatability home for me. My thesis is that he is relatable and having Stan use such words and having such a human way of describing how he came up with the name and background really humanized it for me.

2. On Grief and Grieving: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross & David Kessler https://grief.com/images/pdf/5%20Stages%20of%20Grief.pdf

Background: While I chose to select a smaller more condensed version of the full text, I feel this best describes short and to the point of what I wanted from this. The five stages of grief are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. This is a condensed version so any long in depth discussions on each stage can be found in the main book. Ross and Kessler describe each stage as a feeling in a certain time and how it fits into a series of events in someone’s grieving period.

How I used it: Peter Parker is a character built on loss and the feelings that come with the stages of grief. For instance, I go into depth on how Peter goes through the stages of grief in his first theatrical film Spider-Man (2002). I could have used it for his other film incarnations like The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) or Tom Holland’s Spider-Man trilogy but I thought that Tobey Maguire’s first film was the best option.

3. Dick Grayson: Relatability, Catharsis, and the Positive Development of a Superhero https://www.proquest.com/docview/2514668455?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true

Background: This is a final thesis from a student. This paper goes into the relationship of Batman and the first Robin, Dick Grayson. It views his capacity in the Batman stories and puts him into context along side the rest of the wider DC universe. It analyzes his motives, inception, and the type of stories he is a part of.

How I used it: This was more of a rebuttal for my thesis. While there aren’t any sources that say Spider-Man isn’t relatable, but they say and make claims that other heroes are relatable without taking into consideration how their “relatability” makes them seen throughout the landscape of other fictional characters. I chose this because I thought Nightwing is the obvious choice considering his humor and ease juxtaposed with Batman’s brooding and dark tone make him a vessel into the world of Gotham City. I pointed out how Grayson only serves as a contrast to Batman and that Parker is strong enough to stand on his own like he has since 1962.

4. Peter Parker, a.k.a. Spider-Man, should be straight and white, says co-creator Stan Lee https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/25/peter-parker-aka-spider-man-should-be-straight-and-white-says-co-creator-stan-lee/

Background: In a time where Sony Pictures was in a rough spot with the critical flop of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, many emails were suddenly leaked. Plans of future ideas for movies and other types of projects that were in the works got leaked. A few emails with Stan Lee were surfaced online and seemed to match some comments made by the story teller. Stan Lee thought that race swapping, gender swapping, or any type of foundational change to characters like Spider-Man was not healthy. Lee thinks that these foundational traits make the characters who they are. “Black Panther shouldn’t be Swiss”.

How I used it: I contended that just because someone may not share your race, gender, or religion doesn’t mean that you can’t relate to them. Some experiences are unique to certain groups, but I was mainly arguing things like class, insecurities, and loss. These things are not unique to only certain groups. Everyone can go through such problems.

5. Stan Lee Discusses his Career, Movie Cameos & Bonding with Marvel Actors https://youtu.be/u_29DHdH_ig

Background: Stan Lee sits down with Larry King to talk everything from X-Men to actors and other his influences as a creator. Lee puts into perspective how his stories fit into literature as a whole. Lee compares his work to the likes of Shakespeare. This interview over twenty seven minutes long is a look inside the mind of Spider-Man’s main creator.

How I used It: I actually saw this interview a few years ago and it put into perspective how Stan thinks and why. Hearing him talk about is conception of the X-Men and how he wanted it to reflect the time of the sixties racial justice movements just shows that he thought of his characters in a social sense. Not every hero and villain was meant to reflect members of society like X-Men or Spider-Man, for instance the Hulk was only there to give us an insight into a dual identity of Bruce Banner and the gamma giant. Hearing Lee talk of his characters like they could fit into our world just hammered home the point of their ability to be just like us. X-Men were more specific to the minority classes in America, but Spider-Man was more of a reflection of the disenfranchised youth of the times and adapts to that group as the years have come and gone.

6. The Hero with a Thousand Faces By Joseph Campbell

Background: Campbell takes a look at an overarching theme from stories of old and finds common themes, characters, and plots. This shows the structure of the Hero’s journey in which a hero becomes more than what they are, goes into a new world, and vanquishes evil. While stories may not stick to exactly every single thread Campbell mentions, most are pretty close to the threads.

How I used it: As a fan of most fiction, I look to this book as an essential piece for the action adventure genre. The way I see it, while this doesn’t make a character relatable, it does make them a more compelling protagonist. I talk of hero’s like Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter going through similar journeys but only in the sense that it makes them more compelling than most characters. Where the characters differ from Peter Parker is where they see themselves at the end of the journey. They all go into different paths like Luke Skywalker and Potter becoming their franchises’ chosen ones and how Peter becomes a hero fighting for everyone, even the little man. Without completing the Hero’s Journey, Peter wouldn’t be as compelling and therefore not relatable.

7. Harry Potter, Ruby Slippers, and Merlin: telling the client’s story using the characters and paradigm of the archetypal hero’s journey- Ruth Anne Robbins https://scholarship.libraries.rutgers.edu/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/Harry-Potter-Ruby-Slippers-and-Merlin-telling-the-clients-story-using-the-characters-and-paradigm-of-the-archetypal-heros-journey/991031550247604646

Background: Ruth Anne Roberts writes a paper in which she goes into the more technical side of the hero’s journey. She also examines how some legal cases and the participants reflect a hero’s journey. While not a paper about strictly fiction, she does assign roles to people in cases reflecting of those in the hero’s journey. She describes lawyers as sort of a “shapeshifter” type in some cases. Comparisons like that are what she uses to put real life cases into a fictional context.

How I used it: While doing research the preview of the paper in the Google Scholar engine put a quote saying, “We place ourselves into the story and walk with the characters. In terms of persuasion, we walk in the shoes of the protagonist. If we can marry the concepts of storytelling to the ‘collective conscious’ in our statements of the case, we will potentially create powerfully persuasive undercurrents in the case that should help persuade in a more subtle way.” and that stuck out to me so much. This is the purpose for the hero’s journey and what makes a character relatable. Projection. She clearly gets the point that without the journey, there’s no shot to make someone relate to a fictional character in this genre.

8. How to Develop a Fictional Character: 6 Tips for Writing Great Characters- Masterclass https://www.masterclass.com/articles/writing-tips-for-character-development#what-is-character-development

Background: Masterclass is a service supported by celebrities of many different occupations. The article I chose was about the keys to make a good character in writing. The Masterclass staff talks the importance of character development, the types of characters needed to tell a story, and offers tips on how to write better characters.

How I used It: I chose to focus on the section about the impacts of character development. They define character development as creating a three dimensional character with multiple aspects to a personality to make them compelling. I saw the aspects they laid out and applied them to Parker. “In fiction writing, character development is the process of building a unique, three-dimensional character with depth, personality, and clear motivations.” Over the course of my paper I discuss the motivations, personality, and complexity of the character in many different iterations. “Your job is to establish what’s important to your character (ideally, it’s something that your audience can relate to), and help the reader imagine what might happen if they lose that important thing.”

9. Jack Kirby quote https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1421442

Background: The other creative behind Peter Parker said, “I feel my characters are valid, my characters are people, my characters have hope. Hope is the thing that’ll take us through.” This accompanied with Stan Lee’s thoughts and writings show just where their heads were at when writing Amazing Fantasy #15.

How I used It: Yet another source of thoughts from the creatives is probably one of the most helpful for making the case of what a character is supposed to be in the context of their stories. This only helped reaffirm my choice and make refuting claims of one character being more relatable in the genre even more easy and satisfying.

10. The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #50 -Published: July 01, 1967 By Stan Lee and John Romita Sr.

10.1 Spider-Man 2 (2004)

Background: The original comic book inspired the theatrical adaptation about a story of choice versus responsibility. Peter Parker has to weigh the option of giving up his responsibility of being Spider-Man for a chance of being successful in his personal life. The stories chose a more personal tale opposed to a wider spectacle like other comics of the time.

How I used it: The choice by Lee and later Sam Raimi to tell a more human story with human problems just adds to Peter’s ever growing relatability in media. I chose to talk on the topics of choosing the “sexualized” path of satisfaction, while having your conscience keep you grounded in your beliefs. These are choices we can all relate to in our day to day lives. Making the right choices comes from making the wrong ones or seeing others make them. It’s a human look at a comical genre.

11. Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe- Matt Yockey

Background: This is the story of how Marvel created or reinvented its brand. Introducing characters like Iron Man, Fantastic 4, The Hulk, or Spider-Man paved the way for decades of critical and financial success for the company which would lead to the film juggernaut that Marvel has become today.

How I used It: Coming off of my own personal bookshelf, I was reading it looking for something to use when I got to the tenth chapter where it discusses the role that Spider-Man has played in pop culture. While not really adding to the relatability aspect, it does touch on where he fit into in regards to heroes from the Marvel universe and more. It added much needed context for the ways that Marvel wanted to capitalize off of his success in each era of the company’s history. It helped me also see why and how the character made its leap to the big screen which ultimately helped reaffirm that the character was very profitable.

12. THE DUALITY OF IDENTITY IN THE SUPERHERO FILM https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/zk51vj64z?locale=en

Background: This is a thesis on duality. Duality is a part of identities that often impact most people. Living and acting one way with some people and another way with other people. The paper focuses on Spider-Man, Batman, and the Hulk. Each of these characters has a very conflicting set of personalities. Bruce Banner’s the hulk, Bruce Wayne’s Batman, and Spider-Man’s Peter Parker. They look at film adaptations and examine exactly how different characters have their personalities represented by different creatives.

How I used it: The author talks about Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and how a regular teen gifted extraordinary powers would react. The author also examines the sequel’s choice to take on the fact that living a double life can take a toll. While a regular person most likely isn’t a superhero in secret, we do often struggle with conflicting feelings like those in Spider-Man 2. I looked at the analysis as another piece of added context in my paper and it helped me talk of the Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man: No More story lines as previously mentioned in number ten.