Sure, but I’m not talking about one-off jokes, like how Deadpool sets off his spidey sense because he’s so annoying. Spider-Man fights a lot of robots, Mindless Ones, comic book-style sociopaths who literally have “no emotions,” and other stuff that should fly under his radar if it were based on detecting emotion.
Plus, “radiation = anger” is specific to gamma radiation, and we know Spider-Man wasn’t given powers through gamma, because gamma always turns you green.
Joe Fixit would like a word with you.
That’s pretty high up there on the list of, “Most terrifying sentences in the Marvel Universe.”
I might also have mentioned various Red Hulks, but I’m not clear on whether they’re gamma powered or not (it’s been a long time since I followed comics regularly).
I think an ‘annoying field’ that Spidey can sense is reasonable, but Deadpool may be radiating anger all the time anyway. Robots and other mindless stuff may carry some of the anger from there creators. Anger may leave residual anger field radiation that Spidey can detect. And radiation didn’t make Peter angry, it gave him the ability to sense it by way of changes to his cellular structure caused by the bite of a radioactive spider. This ability could give him the ability sense many form of radiation. It could also be an enhanced ability to detect certain patterns he can hear or feel with his other senses that is actually a spider power unknown to arachnologists.
Also, if it turns out to be true I got dibs on it.
ETA: And without my theory you’re left with no rational explanation for how spider sense works.
I think “spiders are psychic” is probably easier than, “robots have residual emotional radiation from their creator.”
Doesn’t precognition exist in the Marvel Universe? Could it be that he’s got, y’know, that?
The Hulk transforms in to a giant infinitely strong brute due to his emotions and their interaction with radiation. That’s a well established fact.
Sure, he could if you consider anything is possible. How does getting bitten by a radioactive spider confer that ability on him? Is that how it happened with anyone else with the power of precognition?
I think I heard somewhere that the grass spider hunts using reflexes with nerve-conduction velocity so fast that some researchers believe it almost borders on precognition…
“Professor Einstein’s statement is based on theory. Superman’s speed is based on fact"
I read on the now vanished Life Of Riley site (all about the Clone Saga), that the Spidey clone Kane was originally intended to have all of Spidey’s powers at extremely heightened levels. Rather than just a spider sense, Kane had full precognition.
I always figured it was meant to represent spiders sensing prey by feeling vibrations in their webs. They’ve doubled down on this idea (relatively) recently with the “spider totem” stuff, where Spider-Man’s precognition is related to his connection to a cosmic web that connects all life across all realities.
Actually, this is another of those things that changed over time. At first, Banner changed into the Hulk at really random times, with no rhyme or reason, the way (later in the story) Dr. Jeckyll randomly changed into Hyde. Sometime he deliberately induced the change by standing on a gamma-ray emitter that looked like a bathroom scale. Eventually they decided that the physical change was caused by mental stress and anger, an idea that was adopted by the 1970s TV show. I also notice that it showed up as a feature of Jeckyll/Hyde in Alan Moore’s conception of the character in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But it had no roots in Robet Louis Stevenson.
IIRC originally, Banner changed into the Hulk when the sun went down.
For what it’s worth, I was alluding to this.
Ha! Nice.
He originally invented the spider-tracers to be used in conjunction with a tracking device. It was about a year later he found out that, by altering the frequency, he could track the spider-tracers using his spider-sense. On occasion, when the tracer has gone beyond a certain range, he has hauled the tracker out of mothballs.
True, nobody thought of them using the webbing as temporary police restraints. I remember a story where a manufacturer wanted to reverse-engineer the webbing (for benign purposes, believe it or not) but every time they got a sample, it had crumbled to dust after an hour.
As for Peter making his web fluid from scratch, it’s supposedly a compound similar to nylon. It’s not hard to imagine a bright high school science student messy around with the liquid polymer base for nylon and hitting on an interesting variation.
The webbing is unbelievably strong, beyond the capabilities of any know substance. Even if the substance crumbles to dust after an hour or so it is absurd to believe a chemical company wouldn’t offer him a fortune for his formula. This, and so many other examples presented in this thread are why you can’t trust that all the stories in a comic book depict an accurate account of the actual events.
Ah, so in addition the The Rule of Cool, we can have the Rule of Simple.
I’d be in favor of it! Hence, we’d have a scientist (from Large Chemical Corporation, Inc.) saying "We could try to figure this web stuff out and then throw buckets of money at Spidey to help us develop our own version (“Strong But Dissolvey!”)…
… BUT that would complicate the comic continuity. So never mind.
In one of Doc Smith’s series (don’t remember if it was Lensmen or Skylark), he handwaves his FTL travel (always just by acceleration, none of that fancy warp drive/worm hole/etc stuff for him (although the Lensmen universe does have an inertia-less drive)) by having one of the characters say basically that - “we’ve traveled faster than light, so the theory is wrong and will need to be revised”