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Sometimes student, sometimes scientist and sometimes photographer, Peter Parker is a full-time super hero better known as the web-slinging and wall-crawling Spider-Man. As an orphaned child, Peter was raised by his Uncle Ben and Aunt May. At a science expo, Peter was bitten by an errant radioactive spider which granted him an array of arachnid powers. He initially became Spider-Man to use his powers as an entertainer, growing so conceited he didn't bother stopping a passerby burglar. In a twist of fate, the same burglar wound up killing Peter's Uncle Ben, leading him to realize that he needed to use his powers responsibly. From then on, Spider-Man became a crime-fighting vigilante.
Puny Parker
High school student and child prodigy Peter Parker submerged himself in his passion for science to avoid the taunts and threats of his fellow classmates and stumbled into a world beyond his imagining. While visiting a public exhibition of new breakthroughs in radiation manipulation and genetics, Parker felt the bite of a common house spider exposed to a particle beam and felt immediately ill from it, little realizing how much his life would change in the coming hours.
On the way home, the teenager unconsciously avoided a wayward automobile by making an incredible leap to the wall of a nearby building, finding himself miraculously able to stick to it by his hands and feet. Quickly realizing he had somehow acquired the abilities of a spider, he began testing his new-found powers and marveled at their width and breadth. Parker tested his spider abilities in the ring of a local wresting competition and, wearing a mask to hide his identity, easily bested the reigning champion.
Parker, an orphan, lived with his kindly Aunt May and Uncle Ben and was wary of exposing them to the public scrutiny that would surely ensue if he revealed his powers to the world, so he adopted a suitable costume and the name of “Spider-Man” to hide his true identity. He also designed and crafted two wrist-worn “web-shooters” to approximate a spider’s web-spinning capability, and with them swiftly became a smash television personality. Now with money to take care of his guardians and acclaim to salve puny Peter Parker’s wounds from classmates, the young man grew cold to everything but his media-darling career.
Peter Parker's bedroom, he explains why he has become Spider-Man
Everything changed when, in an act of selfishness, Parker allowed a burglar to escape police arrest during a Spider-Man appearance rather than intervene. Later, when he returned home, he learned of his Uncle Ben’s murder at the hands of the very same burglar and instantly felt the weight of hubris upon his young shoulders. Vowing never to use his powers again for his own gain, he tracked down his uncle’s killer as Spider-Man and brought him to justice. From that moment on, he abandoned his media star persona and spun his web solely to capture criminals of all kinds.
Great Power
Like his namesake, Spider-Man’s strength and agility stand far above those of the average human, allowing him to lift nearly ten tons and to leap and move at incredible speeds with high accuracy. He also heals faster than normal when injured, though he is not completely immune to viruses and other human ailments.
An inner “spider-sense” allows him a high degree of awareness to impending danger and to gauge not only its level of threat to him personally, but also the general direction of its approach. Combined with his unique fighting style, this grants Spider-Man an edge in his battles that often times defies logic.
Spider-Man has designed and built many devices to aid him in his crime fighting, but the stand-out invention among these are his web-shooters. Strapped to both his wrists and activated by finger pressure applied to touch pads on his palms, the shooters can spray a unique fluid of the hero’s creation which solidifies to various thicknesses upon exposure to air and form into “webbing.” The tensile strength of the substance may be modified with each activation of the shooters, but at its peak can stop a large vehicle and also hold several persons for nearly two hours, after which, the webbing begins to dissolve.
In addition, Spider-Man carries small “spider tracers” that once placed upon a person or object transmit a specialized signal the hero may identify with his spider-sense and thus allow him to track to its origin point.