Undoubtably - as did TV, Movies, Books, Music, School, Schoolmates, all the events in my life and possibly even, to some small degree, my Parents (tho' i hopefully have recovered from that).

Sex roles: comics showed me, long before Ripley in Aliens, that women could be strong and kick butt.

Racial tensions: where I grew up I only saw minorites on TV.  And TV roles, especially for blacks, could be somewhat lacking.  But in comics there were characters like Storm and Randy Robertson who were people, not racial representatives.  And Peter Parker worked by Randy's dad Joe, a straight-up professional (MUCH more professional than JJJ!).

Nationalities: there's only one that immediately comes to mind.  My dad was a major Reaganite and spent a lot of time railing against the Communists in the USSR.  He didn't make a fine distinction between the government and its citizens (not that he didn't think there was one).  Peter Rasputin defied the stereotype for me and that was significant.

Wow.  It's barely breakfast time and there's 100% of your RDA of words!

Tuesday, 5/11 toss-up: worse idea just waiting to happen - Spider-Man gives Daredevil a pair of webshooters, or Batman builds a version of that Dark Knight Returns armor?

(P.S. if one of these has already happened, please think up a substitute and pose it to the thread.)

Spidey, DD and the webshooters. They're a part of Spider-man's suite of skills/ powers and sharing them with others just detracts from the man himself.

As for the armour, Bruce Wayne's got the resources to do it, but it wouldn't allow him to break stealthily into buildings, sneek up on crooks, spy on the guilty. He's the world's greatest detective and that armour doesn't help him one iota in that respect. So although he might build it for a one-off, he would never continue using it.