Is Spider-Man a Mutant? Radioactive Origins of Marvel's Silver Age Heroes

Spider-Man was born in a comic that was being cancelled. Amazing Fantasy #15, dated August 1962, was the last issue of an anthology Stan Lee's publisher had given up on, which is why Lee was allowed to try a teenage hero with problems; Steve Ditko drew eleven pages in which Peter Parker, a bookish high-school student, attends a demonstration of radioactivity, is bitten by a spider that has wandered into the beam, discovers he can climb walls and lift a car, uses the powers to earn money, lets a burglar run past him, and finds that the burglar has killed his uncle. The issue sold so well that the character had his own title within seven months. The radiation was Ditko's and Lee's shorthand for "something happened," and no one in 1962 asked what the spider had been exposed to.

The origin has been retold in three film series and never much changed. Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2002) made the spider a genetically engineered escapee from a Columbia laboratory, which was the decade's new shorthand; Marc Webb's 2012 film returned it to Oscorp's cross-species research; the Marvel Studios films skipped the bite altogether, on the theory that everyone knew it. The comics have kept the radioactive spider, which is a point of pride and a period detail.

Marvel's heroes were the atomic age's children in a way its rivals' were not. DC's Superman came from Krypton and its Batman from a trust fund; the Marvel line Lee and Jack Kirby launched in November 1961 with The Fantastic Four began with four people bombarded by cosmic rays on an unauthorized spaceflight, and every hero for the next three years came the same way. Bruce Banner, caught in his own gamma bomb's test blast in the New Mexico desert in May 1962, became the Hulk; Peter Parker was bitten three months later; Matt Murdock, blinded by a radioactive canister that fell off a truck in 1964, became Daredevil; the X-Men of 1963 were born to irradiated parents. Lee's ant-sized Hank Pym and his god of thunder were the exceptions.

Radiation was chosen because it was the one science every reader knew was real and no reader could check. Fallout shelters, duck-and-cover drills and the test-ban treaty of 1963 had put the words in every newspaper; the actual effects, cancers and cataracts and the deaths of the Lucky Dragon 5 crew after the 1954 Castle Bravo test, were known and not the point. The fad ended as the decade did. By 1970 Marvel's new heroes were being made by magic, technology and alien intervention, and the radiation origins remained as monuments to the years in which a cosmic ray could give you a family.

The question has been asked in print since the 1960s and the answer has been no every time. Marvel's own definition, hammered out in letter columns and later in the handbooks, is that mutants are born with the X-gene and mutates are made, and Spider-Man, made by a spider at fifteen, is the founding mutate; the distinction has kept him out of every mutant registration, camp and island in the X-Men's history and has let the comics pair him with the X-Men as an ally rather than a member. Attempts to complicate it have been retconned back. The "spider-totem" stories of 2001 to 2006, in which the bite was revealed as the vessel of a mystical spider-spirit and Peter died and was reborn with organic web-spinners and fangs, were reversed within a few years.

The films have tried the other direction. The 2002 film's genetically engineered spider and the 2012 film's cross-species genetics research at Oscorp both made the origin a product of laboratory work rather than an accident of physics, and the Ultimate Spider-Man comics of 2000 did the same, with the spider a stray from an Oscorp experiment in super-soldier research; in those versions Peter is closer to the Hulk than to the X-Men, a man changed by someone else's science. The comics' answer to all of them has been to keep the beam and the exhibit and the boy who was in the wrong place, because a random accident is what the character is about.

Radiation breaks things. Ionizing radiation, the kind a gamma bomb or a cosmic ray delivers, knocks electrons off atoms as it passes through tissue, and the damage lands on DNA at random: a strand broken here, a base altered there. Cells repair most of it, die of the rest, or survive with an error that may, years later, become a cancer; a large dose kills the cells that divide fastest, in the gut and the bone marrow, and a person who receives one dies of infection and bleeding in weeks. No dose has ever conferred an ability. The Hulk entry walks through what a gamma bomb would actually have done to Bruce Banner, and the X-Men entry covers what heritable mutation really is.

The one effect that resembles the comics is a light show. Apollo 11's Buzz Aldrin reported seeing faint flashes and streaks with his eyes closed on the way to the Moon, and the crews that followed confirmed them: cosmic rays passing through the eye or the visual cortex produce phosphenes, brief flashes the brain interprets as light, at a rate of one every few minutes outside Earth's magnetic field. The astronauts who reported UFOs article covers what the crews actually saw and said; the flashes are the only cosmic rays any human has directly experienced, and they gave no one the power to stretch. The sci-fi predictions article lists what the genre got right; the radioactive spider is on the other list.