ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an analysis of 33 years of fan mail published in Marvel Comics' Amazing Spider-Man comic book, from the beginning of the series in 1963 through 1995. Many fans expressed their sympathy for Spider-Man's pain, citing their own experiences with grief and loss. Spider-Man co-creator Stan Lee has been credited with revolutionizing the superhero genre by developing more realistic characters with significant life trials and personal problems. The chapter employs mixed methods, including text encoding and analysis, topic modeling, and close reading. The digital and computational methods employed here would be indispensable in exploring, as the authors hope to do in future work, a larger corpus of comic book fan mail spanning more decades, multiple publishers and genres, and dozens or hundreds of titles. The work serves as a useful foundation for further studies on larger corpora of fan-centric and reader-centric corpora.
