There were two reasons for that. The first is that the Comic Code Authority revised its rules in '71 to allow depictions of vampires, werewolves, and zombies, which had previously been banned. The second was that Dracula and Frankenstein were in the public domain, so they didn’t have to pay royalties to anyone. DC did the same, although arguably less enthusiastically.
(Fun comic trivia: the first time Dracula appeared in a DC comic was in Beowulf, an adaptation of the epic poem, that included not just Dracula, but a lost tribe of Israel, “Chariots of the Gods”-style space aliens masquerading as Sumerian deities, the Greek hero Ulysses, and the continent of Atlantis.)
Anyway Spider-Man doesn’t shoot a thread of web, he shoots a dense ball made of webbing material attached to a thread. The thread is so light it doesn’t appreciably affect the velocity of the web ball, which of course explodes on impact to create a sturdy anchor. His web shooters are effectively grappling hooks that generate a new anchor and rope every time he pushes the button.
Was there ever a comic book version (answer, always yes, I suppose) that had Spider-Man naturally shooting webs, without web shooters, like the Tobey Maguire movies did?
I don’t know if ever medium has ever done my preferred version of the webslinging: His body produces the substance organically, but not in a usable form. It oozes out, it doesn’t shoot, and it comes from an anatomically awkward place. He has to harvest it and put it in mechanical shooters, maybe with an alcohol solvent or something like that. This keeps all of his thematic powers tied to the spider bite, and lets him be high-school-honors-student-level smart, without being a one-trick metatechnologist.
I always figured that the first thing out the nozzle was some sort of weight like a steel ball to pull the web along. Like a sailor would attach a monkeys paw knot to the end of a rope for throwing to another ship or pier.
Have you ever noticed in the comics there’s usually a ball shaped blob on the lead end of the web?
If Peter had been bitten by a radioactive transgenic goat (genetically modified to produce spider silk in its milk), maybe he would excrete the spider silk from his nipples…
I’m not sure if a Spider-Man origin story where he has to wear diapers would have had the same fan appeal (I’m assuming it’s coming out of his rear end, spider-like).
I always took it that murants were compared to normal people, therefore the prejudice. It never made sense to me why they would be in the same world as regular superheroes for the very reason that regular superheroes were not hated. As far as I know, the regular public is not privy to the origins of most SHs so why would they draw distinctions between them? Oh, I like you because you acquired your powers but hate him because he was born with them. Makes no sense, especially when they have no idea either scenario. So it worked in the movie universes them being separate. Movie Marvel heroes might not be popular in their respective universe, but it’s more because of the collateral damage caused by them rather than being skeeved out by them like in the X universe.
For mutants to work as a metaphor for bigotry, it needs to make no sense. There’s no “sense” behind the idea that how much melanin you have in your skin determines your voting rights, and yet that was a thing we did. If you have a bunch of normal people, and a bunch of people who can shoot lasers out their eyes and control your mind and reverse the magnetic field of the Earth, it absolutely makes sense to be scared of them and to want some sort of protection against one of them deciding to blow up a city. Mutants are absolutely, objectively more dangerous than non-Mutants, but some of them are good people, so you shouldn’t be jerks to them as a class. You try to map that on to real world groups, and you get “Black people are absolutely, objectively more dangerous than white people, but some of them are good, so you shouldn’t be jerks to them as a class.” Which, for an anti-racism message, is implicitly pretty racist itself.
For mutants to work as a metaphor for bigotry, there needs to be another group they’re contrasted with that are effectively their equal, but are still treated better for arbitrary reasons. If the world is, more or less, okay with Thor, but hates and distrusts Storm, that’s a much stronger metaphor for bigotry, without accidentally validating racist assumptions by casting the victimized group as a legitimate public threat.
The other way to work this, which Grant Morrison leaned into on his run, is that the vast majority of mutants have no actual “powers,” they just look really weird. Folks with useful mutations, like the X-Men, are relatively rare, about on par to how many non-mutants end up with superpowers, and the real genus of mutant hate is the fear that you might have a kid, and it’s born with a fly head, or tentacle arms, or some shit like that. So anti-mutant prejudice isn’t about superpowers, but just another version of “lookism.” Again, mutants can coexist alongside other heroes without damaging the metaphor here, because the prejudice isn’t against the super powers, its against the fact that most mutants look gross. The problem is this idea isn’t really consistently applied throughout the franchise, from the original books, where mutants were all conventionally attractive white people, to post-Morrison books like House of M, which drastically reduced the number of mutants in the world, eliminating almost all of the background mutants, but maintaining the ones that could headline comic books - which, again, are mostly the conventionally attractive, not-quite-as-white-as-they-used-to-be mutants.
Also, its probably worth noting that the public probably does know a fair amount about the personal lives and origins of most heroes of note in the Marvel universe. With a small number of exceptions, Marvel doesn’t really go in for the whole “secret identity” thing. Heroes are frequently on magazine covers, and are the subjects of major motion pictures (Toby MacGuire still played Spider-Man in the Marvel comic universe; actual Spider-Man was not pleased about it.) I think the average person in the Marvel universe knows a lot about their superheroes, although how much of what they “know” is accurate is open to question.
The X-Men were created by two Jewish men. Calling mutants homo superior was an intentional parallel to “God’s chosen people” and the racist resentment that might inspire.
