This is a pet suspicion of mine: did Stan Lee & Steve Ditko have Sam Wood's brilliant 1942 melodrama on their minds, while they were constructing the web-head's little world and cast of characters?
One of the reasons that I felt let down by Tom Spurgeon & Jordan Raphael's Stan Lee: And the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book was that, as far as I can recall, they completely neglected to look at the influence that films of the studio age might (must?) have had on Stan the Man. I mean, maybe it's unfair of me to want this (and maybe there just wasn't any evidence they could point to)--but I do. I've read lots of stuff, over the years, about how strongly Citizen Kane affected various artists (Errol Flynn movies too), but if, as everyone seems to agree, one of Marvel's biggest contributions to the super-hero comic book was the introduction of "soap opera elements" into the adventure narrative, doesn't it make sense to explore Lee's debt to the great melodramas of his youth and early adulthood?
At some point in their discussion of the creation of Spider-Man, S & R describe Peter Parker's world as (I'm paraphrasing, I don't have the book with me, unfortunately) a bleak place, which the adolescent Peter has very little power to affect, and which is devoid of any viable adult role-models. I remember gripping the page a little more tightly, hoping to see them make the leap to Kings Row, but it didn't happen!
A lot of you may never have heard of this film, or know it only as the site of Ronald Reagan's greatest performance and his prophetic utterance of the line: "Where's the rest of me?" (in the movie he's referring to his legs--amputated unneccessarily; but a critic of Reagan's latter-day politics might well pose the same question in reference to the social conscience young "Dutch" possessed in the thirties and forties). So, I'll just provide a little summary of the film's plot:
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