Originally Posted by
Revolutionary_Jack
This belongs on a Spider-Man thread, I should think.
Stan Lee didn't really care a great deal about comics, personally. In his private utterances and recorded exchanges he was constantly trying to get out of comics into more respectable lines of work (fiction, movies, media personality).
So I don't know how much Stan Lee really liked any of the Marvel characters on a personal level. If he liked Spider-Man it was because he was popular and Stan Lee wanted to be associated with that popularity.
Well he didn't do much or any major lifting in creating the character or concept you know. So I'd say he put as much effort in creating Spider-Man as he did other characters, lol.
-- The concept of Spiderman and even the name pre-existed Lee, it was developed in the 1950s by the Simon and Kirby studios, with Simon even designing a Spiderman logo (sans hyphen).
-- Per Tom Brevoort, a Lee defender, it was Kirby who pitched the idea of Spiderman as a teenage hero with spider-abilities to Stan when he was presenting concepts.
-- Kirby developed a first concept which had the hero staying with his Aunt and Uncle. Then Kirby claims that the workload was too much so he gave it to Steve Ditko who expressed an interest.
-- Ditko says that he chanced on the concept at Lee's office and felt it was too much like The Fly (an Archie comics hero that was a repurposed concept from the failed Spiderman of Simon and Kirby idea) and it seems like Lee cottoned to his interest and asked him to give it a whirl.
-- Ditko came up with the costume design, gadget design, action movement, character designs, and the basic plot i.e. -- boy gets bitten by a radioactive spider, lets go a burglar who kills his Uncle.
-- The names of the characters, seem to have been cobbled from earlier stuff, Jack Kirby did a Golf comic in the late'50s called "On the Green with Peter Parr" and Ditko and Lee did a Timely/Atlas era comic about a mermaid who stayed with Aunt May and Uncle Ben (let's see how Al Ewing finds a way to work that into continuity).
-- Stan Lee's big innovation was the hyphen. That was definitely him.
So basically, the only original stuff in the first Spider-Man comic was by Steve Ditko. The interesting question is if Ditko liked Spider-Man because it seems like Ditko valued Doctor Strange as a more personal creation, being that it originated and generated almost entirely from him whereas with Spider-Man he was salvaging a Kirby-Simon pitch that went nowhere in circles for a decade or so.