Word: spider
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...huge success of the first Spider-Man movie, in 2001, not only saved the day for Marvel but also set its business model in motion. Because Spider-Man's theatrical rights had been sold to Sony, Marvel received just 5% of the $400 million U.S. box office. But it raked in millions by licensing the Spider-Man brand, including $155 million from toys in the first year...
Buoyed by its hits, the company has turned its attention to frontiers previously left unexplored. Many of its comics now arrive from cyberspace, and the amount of interactive features and user-created content on its website increases daily. Marvel is also exporting its characters. In Japan, Spider-Man is a 4-ft. version of himself. In India, he exchanges his blue-and-red suit for more native garb. "Our strategy is to find best-in-class partners in those respective parts of the world and use their expertise and cultural knowledge," said Rothwell before exiting Marvel in late July...
...haven't been to Doug Wallace's place before, the big black spider hanging above the front steps will give you, if not a heart attack, a hint of what's inside: 83-year-old Wallace-"I'm a bit of a joker," he says, for the spider's only plastic-and, lurking among the books and papers that swamp what most people call the lounge room and he calls his workshop, more spiders, real but safely dead and under glass...
...that brought Wallace and spiders together. In 1943, as an infantryman in New Guinea, he was reconnoitring in the jungle when he ran smack into a web and felt "this huge spider" scuttle onto him. A mate brushed it from his hair, but Wallace couldn't get the spider, a golden orb weaver, out of his head. "It was the size of it," he says. "And its silk was so strong...
...living." After the war, while he and his late wife Claire raised their three children (in this very house, which he built in 1951), he armed himself with books, a magnifying glass and, later, a video camera, and "followed up every bit of a clue I could find" about spiders. His discoveries about what he calls "probably the greatest predators of all"-our silent allies, he says, in the fight against insect pests-at times moved him to poetry: "the rearing plunge, one breath/ One quiver, trussed, immobile, bound in silk!/ Transfixed by spider fangs-held fast in death...