The Real Origin of Spider-Man Is Grief

Culture & Meaning
Written By Chris Conley, LPC

Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened in theaters on July 31, 2026, and Amazing Spider-Man #1000 is scheduled for September 30, 2026. Which makes this a good time to admit something about myself.

I was a dorky middle-school kid. Big surprise, I know. I didn't always fit in, the way a lot of us didn't at that age, and one of the things that captured my imagination and gave me somewhere to belong was comic books. I remember the comic shops and the bookstores, always hunting for the latest issue. I remember trading comics and cards with friends. And for better or worse, I still do it. Collecting comics is one of the ways I take care of myself now, one of the ways I check out from the heaviness of the world for a while.

Throughout my life, plenty of characters captured my attention. But Spider-Man stayed.

The moment that stuck

Here's the memory I keep coming back to.

In the 90s, Spider-Man went through a gloriously messy storyline called the Clone Saga. A clone of Peter Parker named Ben Reilly showed up, and at one point the story asked us to believe that Peter was actually the clone, and Ben was the real Spider-Man. If that sentence gave you a headache, you understand the Clone Saga. Fans still argue about it.

But here's how it ended. The Green Goblin, long believed dead, turned out to have been alive and pulling the strings the whole time. He launched a brutal attack on Peter, and Ben threw himself in the way, giving his life so that Peter's wife and unborn child wouldn't lose their husband and father. And then the last twist landed. Peter had been the real Spider-Man all along.

Soap-opera plotting aside, that ending has never left me. Ben laying down his life so a family wouldn't lose someone they loved. Setting aside your own needs, even your own life, for the good of someone else. That, it turns out, is the whole idea.

It has been from day one.

With great power

You know the line. "With great power there must also come great responsibility." It's plastered all over T-shirts and coffee mugs these days, which almost hides how strange and good it is.

Because notice what it's actually about. Not the power. The responsibility. The web-slinging is the fun part, but it was never the point. The point is that a kid gets handed something bigger than himself and has to decide, over and over, to use it for others instead of himself. That one sentence has held up more than sixty years of stories because it gives the power a purpose.

What makes it work is that Spider-Man is allowed to be a person while he carries it.

The hero who was allowed to be human

When Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created Spider-Man in the 1960s, they gave the industry something it did not really have yet, a teenage hero with ordinary problems. At the time, superheroes were mostly godlike. Pure, powerful, untroubled. Spider-Man was broke, anxious, unlucky in love, and constantly late. He built a bridge between the hero and the rest of us, and it's a bridge people have been walking across ever since.

Then, in 1973, the bridge got stronger in the most painful way possible.

In The Amazing Spider-Man #121, the Green Goblin threw Peter's girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, off a bridge. Spider-Man shot a web to catch her. He thought he'd saved her. He hadn't. The issue strongly implies that the sudden stop caused the fatal injury, and Peter was left holding someone he loved, realizing he was too late.

It's hard to overstate what that did to comics. Killing off someone that important was almost unthinkable at the time. Heroes didn't fail that badly. But Spider-Man did, and then he had to grieve. It is often cited as the moment superhero stories grew up, the end of one era and the start of a darker, more honest one. The vulnerability we now expect from these characters, the failure and the grief, largely starts here.

And once the door was open, Spider-Man kept walking through it. He has been angry and had to learn what to do with it. The black symbiote suit story from the 1980s is often remembered as a tale about power feeding his worst impulses, especially in later adaptations. In the original comics, the danger was more literal and unsettling: the suit was alive, used Peter's body while he slept, and tried to bond with him permanently. He chose to separate from it. He has wanted to quit, famously dumping the costume in a trash can in "Spider-Man No More." He has been lonely, heartbroken, and has grieved more than his share.

In other words, he keeps going through the stuff we go through. Just with better upper-body strength.

Why it lasts

That's the thing that kept him with me, from the dorky kid to the guy who still hunts for old issues.

It isn't the powers. It's that he fails, and hurts, and loses people, and gets up the next morning and chooses responsibility anyway. And when he gets it wrong, and he often does, he owns it and tries to make it right.

I've spent my adult life in work that's mostly about carrying weight for other people. First in ministry, now as a therapist. Different rooms, same job underneath. So a story about an ordinary person who keeps choosing to shoulder responsibility, who fails and grieves and shows up anyway, is more than an escape for me. It’s like a mirror, and a quiet permission to keep going.

That's the strange gift of a guy in a mask. He gets to be honest about being human in a way we sometimes can't.

It is fitting that the 1,000th issue arrives this year, a milestone built on the same old engine: power, loss, responsibility, and the choice to keep showing up. A thousand issues in, the character still returns to grief because that was always the real origin. Not the spider bite. The loss, and what he decided to do with it.

More than sixty years later, the message hasn't changed. Whatever life throws at you, you still get to choose to do the right thing. And when you miss, you get up and course-correct. Brand New Day is a fitting title for this character’s latest movie adventure, because with Spider-Man, it always is.

Go deeper

If this resonated, and you're a clinician who wants to bring story and meaning more intentionally into your work, that's the kind of thing I love thinking about with people at Open Harbor. Reach out anytime.

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Chris Conley, LPC https://www.openharborconsulting.com
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