KINGPIN

Wilson Fisk debuted in The Amazing Spider-Man #50 (July 1967) — “Spider-Man No More!”, the issue where Peter Parker quits — as a Spider-Man villain, not Daredevil's. Stan Lee wanted a crime boss who ran organized crime the way a chairman runs a conglomerate: remove him, and the city itself would show the damage. Fisk moved to seize the city's crime vacuum the moment the Bugle announced Spider-Man was gone.

Artist John Romita Sr. modeled Fisk's build on not one but two Hollywood heavies: Sydney Greenstreet — the Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon star, Oscar-nominated for the latter — and Robert Middleton, a career screen villain. Blend the two and you get the silhouette: bald, massive, white suit, cane.

And the canon insists the bulk is muscle, not fat. The very first appearance dressed him even louder than today: comics scholar Paul Young describes a “monstrously obese bald man wearing a white tux jacket, a diamond-studded ascot, and purple pants,” with a cane that fired a ray blast and a tie-pin that emitted sleeping gas. Frank Miller later called the early version “the Jackie Gleason of supervillains” — before reinventing him as Daredevil's arch-enemy.