Does Whatever a Spider (and a C.E.O.) Can
By ROBERT LEVINE

LOS ANGELES

WHEN the novelist Michael Chabon agreed to try his hand at writing "Spider-Man 2," he came here to meet with Avi Arad, the chairman and chief executive of Marvel Studios. He assumed he would encounter a hard-headed businessman — Mr. Arad is, after all, the reigning king of the popcorn blockbuster. His first seven films at Marvel opened at No. 1. The two "X-Men" movies combined grossed just over $675 million internationally, while "Spider-Man" took in $806.7 million.

But Mr. Chabon, who set his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," in the early days of the comic book business, found himself chatting with someone who takes superheroes as seriously as he did. "I was expecting someone more interested in leveraging and marketing," he said in a recent telephone interview. "But the guy knows Spider-Man backward and forward — all the minor super-villains and their secret identities. I found myself totally able to talk to him on this ridiculous, wonderful level of, `Who's tougher, the Lizard or the Rhino?' "

Yes, Mr. Arad sometimes speaks of the "Marvel brand" or refers to the company's characters as "intellectual property." More often, though, he talks about the comics as "literature" with the universal resonance of Greek myth. And in Marvel's Westwood office, he keeps souvenirs from his childhood in Israel: tattered, 60's-era Hebrew translations of Marvel comics that he handles with the reverence usually accorded first editions of Hemingway.