In general, though, I recommend against thinking too hard about the biology of Spider-Manness. Peacock spiders also manifest a structural 'superblack,' a none-more-black that looks utterly matte, almost dimensionless … kind of like a comic book panel, actually. Butterflies do it, and so do peacock spiders. The bugs and birds that do display blues tend to make them not from chemical pigments like melanin but with what are called structural pigments-photonic crystals, basically, that bend light into new, iridescent hues.

But when other artists, like Gene Colan or John Romita, took over, they played the blue up, and Spidey became a happier, primary-colored hero (though he was still plenty depressed in his personal life).Īt this point you might ask: Why would a spider ever be blue? It's a relatively rare color in the animal world. But if you ran into Spidey in real life, would his costume be red and black? Or red and blue? Like a lot of '60s-era Marvel heroes, Spidey had a bit of darkness about him. So artists by convention used blue, like in Superman's and Wonder Woman's hair, or Batman's everything.ĭitko was a master of moody, noirish shadow, perfect for Spider-Man's creepy, more lithe design. You need them for definition, but white (which would really just be letting the paper show through) would've made the black look gray, or like reflective metal. Comic book art used to often separate the jobs of penciler, inker, and colorist, and the blacks of the inking, while perfect for shading and outlines, don't show highlights well. Comic production technology wasn't great back in the early 1960s-cheap, on crappy paper, with a four-color dot process that Georges Seurat would've appreciated. But why, true believers, is Spider-Man blue? It's controversial whether Ditko, Spidey's co-creator alongside Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee, intended the costume's legs and body to be blue or black.

Arachnophilia spiderman