Opinion | He’s Awkward. He’s Sticky. He’s the Best Superhero.

He doesn’t have a hidden high-tech lair filled with an endless arsenal of deadly crime-fighting gadgets. In “Brand New Day” he has an attic workshop where he makes his own devices. And he’s not superhero hot. Yes, he’s impressively jacked in the new film, but when he has to strip off his kit to meet with Black Widow in a Russian bath, he still looks like a nervous teen.

Believe it or not, Spider-Man was almost doomed to the wastebasket before he ever existed. In the early 1960s, Stan Lee pitched his publisher the idea. The response: “Stan, that is the worst idea I have ever heard,” Mr. Lee recounted to BBC Radio 4 in 2015. “First of all, people hate spiders, so you can’t call a book ‘Spider-Man.’ Secondly, he can’t be a teenager — teenagers can only be sidekicks. And third, he can’t have personal problems if he’s supposed to be a superhero — don’t you know who a superhero is?” But Mr. Lee pulled together a story and published it in the final issue of a canceled comics title in the summer of 1962, and Spider-Man took off.

That’s because Spidey’s limitations make him more, not less, of a superhero. He’s finite right down to his crime-fighting brief and his clblockic territory — baddies in New York City, no more, no less. That’s a powerful part of his unspoken mission statement: Act locally. Be the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Plus, he’s entangled. Yes, he has archenemies like Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus. But he has friends and frenemies, a horrible boss, that on-again, off-again romance and a secret he does everything to protect. That pretty much describes me and everyone I know.

That’s what made me love Spider-Man as a kid. When I was growing up in rural Wisconsin in the late ’70s, far from any place you could buy a 45 record or comic book, The Milwaukee Journal had “The Amazing Spider-Man.” He was the only superhero I ever imagined being — a young man living in the city, trying to keep it all together with a combination of frayed nerves and spider silk.

It was impossible to be Superman. I was never going to be as rich as Bruce Wayne. But, hey, I was good at science. For all I knew, I could visit a lab on a school trip, get bitten by a radioactive spider and start transforming. And this fantasy came with a bonus, which any teenage boy going through the agonizing social-blockual changes and perplexities of puberty could relate to. (If only every adolescence came with one supercool secret instead of 1,000 embarrblocking ones.)