How Strong Is Spider-Man?

hello i'm tyler this is the imaginary axis and guys i get it we're all tired of seeing spider-man's origin story i mean how many times does uncle ben have to die kid visits a science exhibit gets bitten by a radioactive spider becomes a superhero we've heard it all before but did you know there was more to that story that simply getting bitten by an unlucky spider isn't enough to make you go from this to this certain variations have suggested that since the spider was crawling around in a science exhibit it was part of a study itself a genetically engineered super spider that carried a powerful retrovirus capable of spreading from cell to cell in peter's body and eventually becoming ingrained in his dna other stories have suggested that peter actually had a rare dormant gene caused by celestial experiments on early mankind when he was bitten by this fighter something about that radioactive venom activated those genes and turned him into spider-man still other stories suggest that the spider bite was magical and peter was actually chosen to become spider-man by an extra dimensional spider deity but no matter which version of this story you buy into they're all trying to fix the same basic problem spider-man is too strong according to the old-fashioned unexpanded unedited conventional origin story when peter was bitten by that spider he gained spider-like senses speed and strength while an ordinary human might be able to lift four times their weight if they're really really good some spiders can lift up to 50 times their weight meaning if a teenager of peter's size had the proportional strength of a spider he'd be capable of lifting up to 8 350 pounds or about the weight of two cars stacked on top of each other that's some impressive work but it really doesn't make a lot of sense because of something called the square cube law take a look at spider-man's arm here we all know that as someone gets stronger their muscles increase in height and width but not length that would be weird in other words their strength increases by a square a buffer spider-man wouldn't necessarily be taller he would just have more surface area but if we wanted spider-man to grow in general his volume would increase by height width and length like cube as an organism grows it gets bigger faster than it gets stronger meaning spiders don't lift up to 50 times their weight because their muscles are better than ours they lift up to 50 times their weight because they're tiny if they were scaled up to peter parker's size they'd just be about as strong as an average human scale them up even further and they'd eventually collapse under their own weight but spider-man stands in blatant defiance of that rule he lifts things up to 50 times his size as though he were an inch tall or smaller i mentioned earlier that eight thousand pounds was impressive and it is eight times the world record but spidey can do way better than that here he is lifting a massive chunk of cement blown straight from the side of a building and here he is just lifting a building or supporting one section of it anyway it was a big building here spider-man lifts a train car while enraged the average train car weighs about 20 tons or 40 000 pounds so that's 240 times his weight at this point we're getting way stronger than a spider should be one time he literally knocked scorpion's jaw off with a single punch and in another story this private jet was falling out of the sky so spider-man just goes outside forces the landing gear down and supports the weight of the entire plane on his back being a nerd like me he even calculates the struggle in his head landing weight over 75 000 pounds full-on fuel add another 30 to 40 000. combined with thrust and spider-man is supporting over 115 000 pounds in this panel that's and a half tons at this point not only is spider-man holding up nearly 689 times his weight but it's the equivalent of supporting eight african elephants at once the largest land animal on earth or six t-rex whichever you prefer spider-man spot dinosaurs before but interestingly enough despite his amazing strength one of the most iconic spider-man moments of all time was about him struggling to lift something if this be my destiny is a classic story arc written by stan lee and illustrated by steve ditko it acted as one of the earliest powerful dramas in comic book history when peter parker's adoptive mother aunt may suffered a mysterious illness apparently caused by an earlier blood transfusion between her and peter and sadly the doctors tell him she probably won't make it peter does everything he can of course contacting some experts and even managing to raise money for a possible cure but a necessary ingredient gets stolen by a super villain while on route to delivery this makes him furious spider-man isn't going to have this aunt may's blood will not be on his hands so he tracks down the super villain responsible in an underwater base because why not and the two face off in a battle so intense that they actually collapse the support beam for the base's iron interior oops you see you can't have a base under water without making it out of something that can withstand the pressure underwater nearly the entire upper section collapses on spider-man the villain runs for his life and the penultimate issue of this story ends with spider-man trapped beneath an unmovable iron surface as water slowly starts to fill in from above this is the cover for that story's conclusion beaten weak his aunt's life hanging by a thread his own life measured in minutes as the ceiling begins to break spider-man can't even budge the heavy debris he's trapped under and the one thing that can save his only family is just out of his reach because he couldn't control his temper because he made the ceiling collapse aunt may is sick because of his radioactive blood and as peter laments his tragedy he can almost see his aunt and uncle beside him it always came back to him he was the one who let uncle ben's killer get away and he was not going to be responsible for another death so with every muscle in his body spider-man starts to stand up and it should be too much for him it might be too much for him his head is pounding his eyes are blacking out that stuff was keeping the ocean out but anyone can win when the odds are easy it's when the going gets tough when there seems to be no chance that's when it counts limits are a liability i have two different proposals for what happened in this scene proposal one by comparing the iron layer to spider-man's size we can determine that there are about 37 peter's worth of iron visible in this panel assuming the metal's width is roughly equal to peter's height and there's not much extra iron off panel this would put the iron's weight at a rough 24 tons sure he's done more impressive things since but maybe he's been working out and proposal 2 while the hunk of iron is falling on spider-man he estimates that it must weigh more than a locomotive hyperbole probably but he is a super genius he's made rough estimates of heavy things while lifting them since and we never see the full extent of the metal he's trapped under so giving him the benefit of the doubt the most common locomotive in north america in 1965 was the emd gp9 locomotive weighing in at 129.8 tons far more weight than anything else we've described today but again he was really pushing his limits when he lifted this thing now i know some of you are probably thinking tyler come on spider-man can't lift 130 tons you just told us that less than half of that was like lifting eight african elephants i mean why even bring it up for comparison because i just wanted to point out that in spider-man homecoming peter parker actually manages to hold this entire ferry together for at least a few seconds we can see in this scene that the vessel's name is spirit of america and that's a real fairy that you can actually ride between staten island and manhattan according to george g sharp incorporated the company that designed the ferry it weighs 3 200 tons so in this scene spider-man is holding together 1 600 tons of metal with each hand that's over 45 390 times his body weight or over 21 blue whales the largest animal to ever exist this peter parker would be the strongest thing on our planet so the next time somebody tells you that spider-man can do whatever a spider can tell them to give him a little more credit he's nothing short of amazing so thank you for watching this video you know i think we might need to give spider-man an award for being like the first superhero ever who's stronger in the movie than he is in the comic i'm not forgetting anyone am i if i am let me know in the comment section and speaking of the comments section why not give this video a like if you liked it and follow up by swinging into that subscribe button if you want more superhero stuff in your life check out my twitter page in the description below where i have literally just launched a campaign to start sending out interesting comic book facts daily related videos will be on screen momentarily and again special thanks for waiting it out to the end but just because you can beat him up doesn't give you the right to remember with great power comes great [Music] responsibility [Music] you

Channel: The Imaginary Axis

Views: 3,323,228

Rating: 4.837348 out of 5

Keywords: spiderman, spider man, spider-man, how strong is spider-man, how strong is spiderman, how strong is spider man, peter parker, aunt may, avengers, spiderman homecoming, spider man homecoming, spider-man homecoming, homecoming, captain america civil war, mcu, marvel, marvel cinematic universe, movie, comic, comic book, spider powers, spiderman's powers, spiderman strong, spiders strong, iron man, suit, infinity war, strength, powerful, superhero, super hero

Id: JC0CcRdRQ04

Length: 10min 20sec (620 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Wiebejamin]

Can't Spidey lift upwards of 10 tons?

[u/kaijunexus]

I won't dispute that Spidey's strength has gone off the charts in the comics, but I disagree with his overall assessment of the feat of strength displayed in the ferry scene.

Peter clearly spends some time connecting both sides of the ferry with webbing. When this fails to do the job well enough, he adds his own might to the mix...which STILL isn't enough. The ferry continues to slowly split despite his efforts. In fact, it's apparent that the ferry is falling apart relatively slowly, so who's to say the Spider-Man is even having that much of an impact.

Point being, Spider-Man is not successfully lifting a Staten island ferry in this scene... he's failing to hold a ferry together horizontally even with multiple strands of supporting webbing.

This is not the strongest Spider-Man ever.

[u/Rios93]

I'm sure he's super strong in the comics, but maybe the suit pushes those limits even further?