There was a mini-series some years back called "Big Town" with the premise that all of the Stark tech and Reed Richards-devised gadgetry was out there in the world, improving it, and shaping it into a sort of techno-Utopia.

One of the reasons this series isn't remembered, I believe, is because the premise is not one iota off from what was even then the current state of the Marvel Universe. Playing the game of "Implications" has made certain that there is advanced tech everywhere. Pym's pocket universe inventions are used in housing criminals, as is the Negative Zone. Super heroes and villains run all of the industries and hold all of the political offices. Whatever "normal" is or once was, it has no place in the state of the curent DC and Marvel universes. Everyone is a super-hero.

When I was younger I remember going off once on the idea that Professor X knew Reed Richards, knew Tony Stark, apparently had the wherewithal to construct Cerebro as well as the robotic death-traps and alien-tech holographic projectors for the Danger Room, and yet still rolled around in a conventional wheelchair. It made no sense! 

Apparently, the creators of the book came around to my point of view, for before long he was floating about in this imposing techno-throne of Shi'ar origin like some sort of emigrate New God... It had it's own weapons systems and forcefields... And then someone must have asked why we can't just fix it so he can walk. So he was cloned, and the clone could walk. But that wasn't as cool as before, so the clone was crippled. But that didn't make sense, because we can fix stuff like that, so he was up and walking around again... The last time I saw him he was sitting down, but man alive, I gotta tell you... What I wouldn't give for a return to that simple wicker-back wheelchair...

I wrote a huge, spiralling post earlier today about the problem writers today have with respecting the concept of Premise. Maintaining a balance between Premise and Story has always been an issue with serialized fiction. Story can twist Premise, jeopardize it, or invert it for however long the Story lasts, but if it does away with Premise, whatever ties we had to the character and his situation at the outset is also lost. We may embrace what then becomes, by default, the character's new Premise, but for the sake of everyone involved, this new thing had better be sufficiently appealing to maintain the sales levels of Underoos.

The matter becomes more muddled in modern times with the introduction of Event, which imposes change from without as opposed to Story, which generated it from within.

Simply put, (and skipping the voluminous content of my original post) Lee and Ditko knew what they were doing in making Peter simultaneously down at heel financially and brilliant enough to create the web-shooters. They addressed the question directly in story and if that answer isn't enough for you, no other answer is likely to be sufficient either. You either "get" Spider-Man or you don't. Fixing this one little thing that bothers you isn't going to redeem the whole concept.

I, myself, recommend going with it. First off, it makes as much sense as anything you're likely to come with to replace it, and secondly, the stories are fun with the existing elements in place. The adventures of a wealthy on-staff, corporate polymers researcher might be cool, too. But it wouldn't be Spider-Man.

Premise. It's key to the whole thing. Without it, the characters are no longer the characters, and they are the reason we read these stories, at least to the extent that anyone does anymore...

This persisted even after Ditko left, as Stan limited Spider-Man's rogue's gallery to "realistic" opponents -- "realistic" here in a classic comicbook sense. Robots, guys with mechanical arms, guys who had been turned to living sand, etc.

But what happened at the EXACT MOMENT Stan left? Spider-Man fought a VAMPIRE! Sure, it was a "scientific" vampire, but a vampire nonetheless. And this was immediately followed by a trip to the Savage Land to battle an alien avatar of King Kong!

Not long after. MARVEL TEAM-UP was born -- the book Roger Stern has described as the "death" of the real Marvel, as it was there that Spider-Man, the "eternal loner", found himself teaming up with a different character every month, AND becoming involved in stories that were more appropriate to those other characters. Thus Spider-Man found himself up against that vampire again, and even mixing with genuinely supernatural elements of the MU -- the "Werewolf by Night" and Ghost Rider. Sci-fi and magical elements abounded in MTU, and by the time I came to Marvel he was casually traveling thru time, and even taking a trip to the Moon!*

Spider-Man, in short, had found himself pulled into the same kinds of stories that we saw happening around Batman, during the years when he, too, veered wildly off-course. We used to joke around the office that it would not be long before New York was erecting Spider-Man statues and asking him to open libraries!

The truly weird thing, tho, was that while all this was going on -- while Parker was getting older, getting a steady (and glamorous) girlfriend, finding a glamorous career, and even picking up appurtenances like the "spider-buggy", if you ASKED anybody, fan or pro alike, to describe Spider-Man in 25 words or less, they would invariably default to the Lee/Ditko version -- the loner, the sad-sack, the never-gets-the-girl version. A version that really had not been seen in a long time!

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* The first issue of MTU, with its wildly inaccurate portrayal of the Sandman -- even to giving him the wrong name! -- seems, looking back, like an almost deliberate change of course. As if the issue announced "From here on, we are looking at an alternate reality. This is no longer the 'real' Spider-Man."

QUOTE: But what happened at the EXACT MOMENT Stan left? Spider-Man fought a VAMPIRE! Sure, it was a "scientific" vampire, but a vampire nonetheless. And this was immediately followed by a trip to the Savage Land to battle an alien avatar of King Kong!

I think that was the first issue of Spider-man I bought. And I dint buy too many after that. I fact I traded it to a friend for some sweet Adams drawn Avengers issues.

Brian Hague, poster of the year! Awesome, insightful analysis!