You remind me of a secondary problem with the mechanical web-shooters: he has a band of web fluid cartridges encircling each wrist, and round his waist is a utility belt carrying spare cartridges, a small supply of spider-tracers, a high-powered spotlight and a small automatic/remote controlled camera. None of which creates any visible bulge in his skin-tight costume.
Now, obviously, this is a comic book art convention, but it does cause a problem for a live-action adaptation: is it more important to remain faithful to the established lore of the comic, or the character’s iconic appearance?
The organic webshooters originated with James Cameron’s treatment for a Spider-Man film that went around Hollywood and the internet in the late 90s. He never got around to making it, of course, he was too busy messing about in submarines, but that concept remained in Sam Raimi’s version as a direct follow up to Cameron’s treatment’s ideas, including the discomfort Peter Parker had in having to deal with this ability publicly.
Or robs us of plot hooks, like the time Petey had to cobble up web fluid in an unfamiliar lab (in France, iirc) and ended up with a nasty acidic (or maybe caustic) mix that would do damage to things he stuck it too.
Because such a long term solution to Parker’s money problems would ruin one of the book’s longest running traditions: Everytime Parker uses his gifts for personal benefit something goes wrong. I’m not sure if the idea of selling his formula has ever come up in the book, but if it did, some unforseen consequence would have resulted ( “Hey! We built a bridge out of that goop you sold us and it desolved in two hours and almost killed a bunch of people”) to remind Spidey that with great responsibility…etc. And in the Marvel Universe there is no DuPont, just fronts for AIM and Hydra and Norman Osborn. His formula would inevitably end up in the hands of his enemies.
I prefer the organic webshooters. There’s a logical throughline from “bitten by a radioactive/mutant spider” to “grew spinnarets” that doesn’t exist for “somehow came up with the idea of using super-webs to fly around and then built devices capable of shooting them out of his wrists.” And I’m a biologist, so you’d think the whole “growing organs in his wrists” things would strain my suspension of disbelief, but it doesn’t - at least, no more than the idea that a spider bite can lead to SUPER HEARING and SUPER REFLEXES (because those wouldn’t require impossible physiological changes, amirite?).
It always seemed silly to me that, absent naturally-occurring webshooters, that Peter Parker would feel compelled to make every aspect of his superheroism spider-related. AFAIK Parker had no great affinity for spiders before he was bitten. Hell, his other “biological” powers aren’t even that spiderly: spiders aren’t actually known for having ludicrous reflexes and super senses. Walking up walls is pretty much it (and in that case, why not call yourself “Gecko Man”?). It just doesn’t make character sense to me that Parker would be like “Oh, well I was bitten by a radioactive spider, guess I better turn myself into one!!!”
Compare this with other “techy” superheroes. It sorta makes sense for Batman to have bat-themed gadgets since he’s effectively an ethical psychopath that you could see becoming bizarrely obsessed with an animal he feared as a kid. Iron Man is so named because his “superhero” stuff is all engineering and technology-based - it’s not like he has some weird compulsion to make everything out of iron. But Peter Parker is a normal guy. Admittedly, a brilliant and socially outcast guy. But a normal guy.
No, I much prefer organic webshooters. It actually gives Peter Parker a reason to become Spider-Man, versus Miscellaneous Super Dude.
IIRC, he didn’t whip 'em up for his superheroing; he figured it’d be a great hook to add for his performance on live television, back in his “I’m a paid entertainer, not a guy who easily slows down some crook running away” days before things didn’t work out so well for Ben Parker.
One fanwank I’ve heard for why he was able to make web fluid with the properties of spider silk(ridiculous strength, selective adhesion, various levels of rigidity, natural decomposition) is because after being bitten he was granted insight into how spiders make their silk. An instinct, if you will, for putting together the raw materials into spider silk. He may have converted that instinct into hard science, or he may still mix the fluid by hand and let his spider sense guide him. In which case there isn’t really a formula, just the combination of his spider-powers and his scientific mind. The extruders are a neat bit of tech, but not beyond the capabilities of real world engineers. It’s the fluid itself that is the real trick. If you think about it, real spiders make it out of very basic raw materials.
Another vote for artificial here. Him being a genius doesn’t bother me – he was bitten because he was in a lab for some field trip or science exhibit or some other intellectual outing. Radioactive spiders hang out in labs and smart people hang out in labs therefore most people bitten by radioactive spiders will be smart people
The organic thing immediately trips me up on the wrists being the point of origin as well as the sheer body mass lost to constantly producing webbing. It didn’t hurt the films for me but, if given a choice, I’d pick mechanical.
Comics!Peter, while on the run from the police for the zillionth time, once devised four separate hero identities while working to clear Spidey’s name, and none of them were spider, arachnid, or insect-themed, did well as all of them, and stupidly went back to Spider-Man afterwards. Honestly, he’d be much better off waiting for a natural opportunity to fake Spidey’s death (he gets caught in enough deathtraps; he’d just need to escape and then leave a bit of the costume behind) and, if he simply must be a hero, adopt a new nom de guerre, or even be a public hero.
It’s not the genius bit that bothers me; it’s the time/money element involved in inventing the web formula & shooters in the first place. The Parkers were poor when he got his powers; I just never bought that he had the resources to do the research and innovation.
Obviously the organic webs come from the sameHoyle/Gold space as the Hulk’s extra mass.
IIRC, one issue had Peter speculating that he had a number of abilities or applications for his abilities that he had never discovered or explored in the first place, because his teenage self started getting freaked out at the thought of turning into a spider. At that point I started thinking about the organic webshooters, figuring that he had always had that ability but subconsciously rejected it, preferring to find a mechanically based alternative that would do the same thing but that he could dismiss as not being an actual change in his own body. He later discovered the organic shooters when he was older and more able to handle his own powers.
Looked at this way, I quite like the organic webshooters. They make sense in conjunction with everything else we know about Spidey.
I don’t think he engineered it for that purpose; that was a useful glitch he hadn’t thought (or been able) to eliminate. Also, if he’d engineered the time limit, he could easily have gotten rid of it.
The story was mostly a joke, of course, as the reason doesn’t make sense. The predictable time limit would make the webbing more useful, not yes.
Remember, though, at first he DID try to take this path, albeit as a professional wrestler – his deceptively wimpy-looking body and super-strength, coupled with his spider-sense, made him a natural… but he discovered that it’s a little hard to cash a check made out to The Amazing Spider-Man.
On the one hand, the mechanical web-shooters clutter up the origin story too much: As others have said, it’s too much of a stretch that he has superhero-level intelligence and also just happens to get bit by the radioactive spider. On the other hand, it also bugs me that biological webbing would come out in the vicinity of his hands. So I favor a hybrid approach.
Basically, I see him as extruding a proto-web-like substance from somewhere embarrassing, which he then does some simple processing on to make web fluid, and puts it into mechanical launchers. He still needs to be a science nerd to do the processing he does, but there’s no way he could reproduce the process from scratch, without whatever it is his body’s making as a raw material. It brings the technology into a plausible range for a bright-but-mundane high schooler, keeps the origin tied together, keeps the biology consistent, and also brings in opportunities for social awkwardness (and hence, plotlines).
Heh. In the scene where he realizes he has the ability to shoot webs, Peter definitely gives the impression of a teenage boy who’s just discovered, alone in his room, that spit and urine aren’t the only liquids his body can produce.
He’s not a psychopath, he’s a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research!
