By Samantha English and Olivia Funderburg
Content warning: implication of anxiety and claustrophobia
Disclaimer: If you haven’t seen Spider-Man: Homecoming or Captain America: Civil War, read with caution.
The original Spider-Man was created in 1962 by Stan Lee, who had noticed a rise in teen comic book readers and a lack of teen comic book characters. Most Marvel characters were adults at the time—take, for instance, Iron Man and Captain America, who both have origin stories linked to war even if their comics were written with a young audience in mind. Lee wanted a teen character that young people could identify with. He created Peter Parker, a fifteen-year-old New Yorker who loved science, was the victim of high school bullying, and, because of a radioactive spider-bite, spent his after-school hours protecting people on the streets of Queens in a mask and spandex.
When Marvel decided to incorporate the character of Spider-Man into the complex, multi-character, multimillion-dollar Cinematic Universe, the company finally took Peter Parker back to his roots
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