There's no denying that Jack Kirby was an enormous talent. During his lifetime he had a hand in creating some of the most popular and enduring characters and concepts in comic books including, but by no means limited to, The Fantastic Four, Captain America, the Hulk, and Darkseid. Kirby's style is one of the most easily definable in comics, with his blocky style, shimmering inks and signature "Kirby Krackle". He was one of the best the industry ever knew. But Christ we're glad he didn't have a hand in creating Spider-Man. The creation of Peter Parker and his wall crawling alter ego have passed into pop culture legend at this point, but it could have been very different. Stan Lee had his initial inspiration either from pulp hero the Spider or from actually seeing an eight-legged insect crawling up his apartment wall, depending on when you ask him, but that was just the kernel of an idea. When it came to developing this new superhero further, he called upon his trusted collaborator Kirby for ideas. Part of the appeal of Spidey, above all other Marvel heroes, is that he's a common shmuck. He's like us. He's a street-level hero who has as much trouble dealing with supervillains as he does paying the rent on his pokey apartment. He's a regular guy. He fails as much as he triumphs, which makes those triumphs all the sweeter. Jack Kirby's Spider-Man would have been very, very different. Instead of the tragic origin story, with the death of Uncle Ben and all, to teach him the lesson of "with great power comes great responsibility", Kirby's concept saw the Silver Spider (the name he'd developed the character under with Joe Simon in the fifties) as an orphaned child who discovered a magic ring that gave him superhuman abilities. His costume looked, according to Simon, like "Captain America with cobwebs". Lee hated it. He looked too much like a generic superhero, the sort he wanted to get away from with the character. Steve Ditko came onboard instead, and helped create one of the most iconic characters in comics history. If Kirby had stayed on, he would've been just another footnote. This article would probably never exist, you'd never been reading it, and we wouldn't have written in whilst wearing Spider-Man pyjama bottoms.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
