While America celebrates Free Comic Book Day (where you can get a selection of free comics at your local comic shop), we would like to bring up a grammatical quibble from legendary Marvel creator Stan Lee.
According to Lee, the accepted spelling of "comic book" as two words is wrong. As he told AMC's Comic Book Men blog:
People always write it as if it’s two separate words. But to me, if it’s two separate words, then it means a funny book — a comic book. If you write it as one word, which is the way I do it, then it’s a generic term meaning a comicbook! So I feel everybody ought to write comicbook as if it’s one word, because it doesn’t mean funny book.
Lee appears to be fighting a losing battle on this one, even if his rationale makes sense.
When it comes to the hyphen in "Spider-Man," however, the co-creator is the authority and he refuses to give an inch:
Oh, that’s get me angry! It’s gotta have a hyphen, because that’s the way I stated it. And also, it makes it look very different from Superman, which doesn’t have a hyphen. It should be a capital “S” and a capital “M.” If I don’t see it done that way, it arouses my ire. So if you don’t want my ire to be aroused, you’d better write it correctly.
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