How tall is Spider-Man?

Spider-Man's official height: 5′10″ (177.8 cm)

Spider-Man, the identity of Peter Parker of Queens, New York, is listed at 177.8 cm (5′10″) and 167 lb (about 76 kg). The Marvel Database gives those figures in its profile of the main-universe Peter Parker, known as Earth-616, following the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. The same entry gives him hazel eyes and brown hair. The site uses 177.8 cm as Spider-Man's canonical height.

The conversion is exact: 5′10″ is 70 inches, or 177.8 cm. The site rounds it to 178 cm on the 178 cm to feet page, which explains the math and shows what the height means in percentiles.

For a superhero, 5′10″ is strikingly ordinary. Most of Marvel's headline heroes are listed taller, and many of DC's are taller still. That is not an accident. Spider-Man was created as a teenager readers could identify with, and his listed height keeps him at the scale of an everyday young man.

Where the 5′10″ figure comes from

Marvel has published character statistics in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe since the 1980s, in several editions and updates. These handbooks give height, weight, eye and hair color for each hero and villain, and the Marvel Database uses them for its infoboxes. Peter Parker's figures of 5′10″ and 167 lb have been the standard reference for the adult character.

Spider-Man first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15, cover-dated August 1962, created by writer-editor Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, according to Wikipedia. In that story Peter is a high-school student bitten by a radioactive spider at a science exhibit, gaining the agility and proportionate strength of a spider. His solo series, The Amazing Spider-Man, began with a March 1963 cover date. Since then, Wikipedia notes, the main-continuity Peter has aged from high school through college to somewhere in his late twenties.

The handbook height describes that grown Peter. The teenage Spider-Man of the early 1960s comics has no official height, and later stories have generally drawn the adult character at about the same slim, medium-height scale.

Built light: Spider-Man's proportions

Spider-Man's 167 lb is light for a 5′10″ superhero. The figure reflects how artists have drawn him since Ditko: lean, long-limbed and flexible, more like a gymnast or a sprinter than a bodybuilder.

That build fits his powers. The Marvel Database describes his abilities as the proportionate capabilities of a spider, including:

• Superhuman strength. He can lift about 20 tons, and the database notes he has easily swung a 3-ton wrecking ball on a steel chain. None of that requires bulk in his case; his strength comes from the spider bite, not his muscles.
• Agility and wall-crawling. A lighter frame suits a hero who sticks to walls, swings between skyscrapers and contorts himself into crouching poses.
• Durability. His body is tougher and more resistant to impact than a normal human's, so he survives falls and blows that his slim build wouldn't suggest.

The contrast with heavier heroes is part of the visual identity. Spider-Man is often drawn crouched or upside down, which makes his height hard to judge on the page. When he stands next to Captain America or Thor in team scenes, the gap is clear.

Spider-Man next to the Avengers and his rogues

The site's Marvel data uses the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe throughout, so these comparisons share the same source.

Spider-Man sits in the lower half of Marvel's major heroes. Captain America is 10 cm taller, and Iron Man, Peter's mentor in the recent films, is 7.6 cm taller in the comics. Thor towers more than 20 cm above him.

Only a few prominent heroes are shorter. The most famous is Wolverine, whose handbook height of 5′3″ is one of the best-known facts in comics. Spider-Man and Wolverine have teamed up many times, and the 18 cm gap is a running visual joke, with the gruff mutant much shorter and much heavier than the wiry web-slinger.

Daredevil, Spider-Man's fellow New York street-level hero, is 5 cm taller, and the Punisher, who often crosses paths with both, is 7.6 cm taller.

Spider-Man next to DC's icons

Fans often compare Marvel and DC heroes, and the two publishers' reference books make that possible. DC's DC Comics Encyclopedia (2008), as recorded by the DC Database, lists Batman at 6′2″ and 210 lb and Superman at 6′3″ and 235 lb. Against those figures, Spider-Man is the small man of the trio.

Spider-Man is about 10 cm shorter than Batman and nearly 13 cm shorter than Superman, and he weighs 43 lb less than Batman and 68 lb less than Superman. The difference reflects a generational shift in superhero design. DC's two flagship heroes, created in the late 1930s, were drawn as idealized strongmen and adventurers. Marvel's 1960s heroes, Spider-Man above all, were built around flaws and ordinariness. A shorter, lighter hero who struggles with rent and homework embodies that change.

The weight gap is larger than the height gap for a reason. Spider-Man's strength is proportional to a spider's, not tied to muscle mass, so artists have been free to keep him slim. Superman and Batman, by contrast, are drawn with the bulk that classic comic art associated with power.

Why an average height suits the character

Spider-Man's modest height reflects the thinking behind his creation. Wikipedia notes that Stan Lee wanted a teenage hero readers could identify with, at a time when teenage heroes were usually sidekicks. Lee chose the name "Spider-Man" rather than "Spider-Boy" because he wanted the character to grow older as the series went on, and because "boy" would make him sound inferior to other heroes.

Wikipedia also records that Jack Kirby drew early pages for the character before Lee handed it to Ditko, and that Joe Simon later recalled the Kirby version looking too heroic, more like Captain America with webbing than an ordinary kid. Ditko's Peter Parker was thin, bookish and unremarkable, and readers identified with his self-doubt and loneliness. A 5′10″, 167 lb hero belongs to that tradition: a young man who looks like the person next to you on the subway.

Later artists kept the scale. After Ditko left following The Amazing Spider-Man #38 in 1966, John Romita Sr. took over and drew a more conventionally handsome Peter, but not a giant one. Even as modern artists draw him more muscular, the handbook height remains a reminder that he is meant to be the everyman of the Marvel Universe.

Spider-Man actors and their heights

Live-action films have cast several actors as Peter Parker. The site's people data includes two of them.

Tom Holland and Tobey Maguire are both listed about 5 cm shorter than the comic-book figure. Maguire's listing is a reporter's estimate in TIME, while Holland's comes from Wikidata. Andrew Garfield, who starred in The Amazing Spider-Man films, is not in the site's database. Holland's casting as a teenage Peter fits the character's origins as a high-schooler, a version for which the comics never set an official height.

What 177.8 cm means in the real world

Spider-Man's height is almost exactly average for an American man. The site uses NCD-RisC estimates for adults born in 1996, from the collaboration's 2016 eLife study of 200 countries.

At 177.8 cm, Peter Parker is less than a centimeter above the average height of US men in this dataset. Of all the heroes on this site, he may be the closest to a perfectly typical American adult, which is fitting for a character from a working-class family in Queens.

Wikipedia's summary of his early comics shows how deliberately ordinary his life was: raised by his Aunt May and Uncle Ben after his parents' deaths, Peter struggles to help his widowed aunt pay the rent, is taunted by the school bully Flash Thompson, and earns money as a freelance photographer selling pictures of Spider-Man to newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson. A hero of exactly average height belongs in that world.

The site's growth-chart tools use the CDC's 2000 stature-for-age reference, whose median for American boys reaches about 176.8 cm by age 20. A young adult Peter Parker at 177.8 cm would sit just above that median, again right in the middle of his peers. You can line him up against anyone with the height difference calculator.

Common mix-ups about Spider-Man's height

Spider-Man has many versions: the Earth-616 Peter Parker, Miles Morales, alternate-universe Spider-People, and characters from animation and games. The 5′10″ and 167 lb figures on this page belong to the main-continuity Peter Parker as recorded in the Marvel handbooks. Other Spider-Men have their own statistics, and a younger hero such as Miles Morales, introduced as a teenager, is usually drawn noticeably shorter than the adult Peter. When you compare "Spider-Man" with another character, check which Spider-Man the source means.

Fans also sometimes quote film actors' heights as the character's height. Those are facts about the performers, not changes to the comic canon. For Peter Parker as Marvel's reference books describe him, the figure is 177.8 cm.