Amazing Spiderman #3

Anybody who read only the Steve Ditko issues of Amazing Spiderman would know exactly who was Spidey's arch-enemy, and it wasn't the Green Goblin. It was Dr Octopus, who was the first villain to appear in a two-part story (ASM #11-12,) the first to appear in a three-parter (#31-33), and who also headlined the first Spiderman Annual.

His initial appearance here also features the debut of the Spider-Signal:

It's a neat reversal of the Bat-Signal, indicating that trouble is here for the crooks who see it. I don't recall it getting much use in the Romita era, other than on the cover to ASM #72.

We get our first glimpse of the good doctor here:

The apparatus he uses is vaguely similar to a "Waldo":

Incidentally, the name "Waldo" for that device, which allows scientists to handle dangerous chemicals and elements from behind a protective barrier, comes from a Robert Heinlein short story.

But Doc Ock gets a little careless and:

With the result that the arms are grafted to his body and he's just a mite touched in the head. He takes over the hospital where he's been recovering. Peter gets involved when JJJ demands that he obtain some pictures. As with Clark Kent's job at the Daily Planet, Parker's employment at the Bugle guarantees he'll know where he's most needed.

As Spidey climbs up the outside wall of the hospital, he muses that it's all too easy; he almost wants a villain worthy of his talents. In fiction as in real life, that's just begging for trouble and sure enough, Spiderman discovers that Doctor Octopus is a handful and more:

Spidey is thrown unceremoniously out a window. Doc Ock returns to the atomic research center where he worked, and makes it into his own fortress. Meanwhile, Peter mopes about, having never been defeated before. Fortunately the Human Torch comes by his high school to give a demonstration and a pep talk:

Once inside the atomic research center, Spiderman puts his science background to work:

He creates an acid that fuses Doc Ock arms together. But he's still hard pressed until:

Comments: Solid, entertaining story with the usual terrific Ditko art. I particularly liked the bit with Peter sulking about after being beaten; that's a common teenaged reaction.

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Marvel Swipe #1

Marvel didn't do as much recycling of old stories and plots as DC did, for several reasons:

1. Marvel had a much shorter back history than DC did when it came to superheroes, and it was in the process of reprinting a much greater portion of that history than DC did.

2. Marvel stories were more difficult to recycle as the supporting cast of characters was constantly changing.

But they did do one major swipe in the course of only a few years and it involves this magazine:

Marvel made several efforts at establishing a magazine like Creepy or Eerie, which would be oversized, sell for a premium over comics, and feature black and white interiors. They finally succeeded, of course, with the Savage Sword of Conan, but before that there were the short-lived efforts of Savage Tales (1971) and The Spectacular Spiderman (1968). It appears likely that neither magazine sold well enough to justify continuing, probably because the kids who bought ASM and Conan just weren't used to flipping through the magazine racks, which were often separate from the comics.

Marvel dusted off the story from Spectacular Spiderman #1 in ASM 116-118, early 1973. Large portions of the story were used with virtually no changes, as you can see here:


Aside from the update on recent events in the latter, those two splashes are word for word, as are the next eight pages or so. But, as I noted, Marvel's supporting cast changed often, and some surgery was required in order to make the story work.

For instance, consider this scene:

Fine in 1968, but in 1973, Captain Stacy had been dead for over two years. This creates a major problem, as a significant subplot of the earlier story is that the Captain is one of the few people not swept up in the enthusiasm for Raleigh's candidacy, which sets the stage for one of the story's major subplots. As a result, the skeptic role must be switched over to Joe Robertson, although that still creates an uncomfortable moment. In the original, the dialogue here makes sense:

Here's the update:

Would Jameson talk to Robbie, his editor, about "my" newspaper? Wouldn't he be more likely to refer to it as "the" newspaper, or if he was being magnanimous, "our" newspaper? Note as well that the reference to Peyton Place (which was canceled in 1969) was deleted, and the comparison to Goldwater now uses Humphrey instead (which isn't as funny, because Goldwater lost in a landslide, while Humphrey was only narrowly defeated). This reveals another problem with Marvel recycling; Stan's constant use of then-current pop culture references.

There's one other major change to the story. In the original we learn pretty quickly that Raleigh's faking it:

But in the revised version that scene is rewritten:

Overall, that particular change makes a lot of sense, as it adds some drama to the story. However, it is still pretty obvious from the start that Raleigh is not all he's cracked up to be. There's something about the nature of fiction that tells us that the lone skeptic is always right. And Raleigh's biggest supporter is J. Jonah Jameson, the worst judge of character around.

In both stories, the Raleigh campaign is being attacked by a gigantic thug. In the original, the thug is controlled by Raleigh himself, while in the reprise, it's a shadowy figure known as the Disruptor, who turns out to be Raleigh in disguise. In both stories, in classic Marvel fashion, the thug turns on his master in the end, killing him. In both stories, Jameson stays clueless to the end:

In the sequel, Spiderman hides the Disruptor's costume, letting Raleigh be considered a hero, because:

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Amazing Spiderman #2: Get a Job

Peter finds a solution to his aunt's financial problems in this issue, which also introduces the first of the major villains in Spiderman's rogue's gallery: The Vulture. As you can see from the cover above, he falls into the category of villains who facially resemble the animal after which they're named. Some others Silver Age examples include the Shark, a Green Lantern antagonist and the Clock, a Green Arrow baddie.

As the story begins, we see the Vulture making off with a fortune in bonds. J. Jonah Jameson wants photos of him:

I believe that's the only time that NOW magazine is ever mentioned in the Silver Age Spiderman; in all other stories Jameson is a newspaper man, not a magazine publisher. Maybe Stan thought that a magazine would be more willing to pay big bucks for color photos?

At any rate, Peter borrows Uncle Ben's old miniature camera and decides to get a photo of the Vulture in action. Sure enough, he gets lucky the first time out:

But the Vulture overhears him and doubles back, knocking Peter out with a vicious kick. He puts him in a rooftop water tank, thinking that Spiderman will drown, but:

Peter develops the film and does some work upgrading his equipment:

I would argue that Marvel's Silver Age characters were not as well-designed as DC's initially. Their real strength came from the way they developed over time. They became better characters than DC due to the constant tinkering.

In the next segment, the Vulture has announced that he's going to rob a jewelry shipment. The police have sharpshooters on the rooftops and a helicopter overhead. How can he pull it off?

I thought that was really cool the first time I read it as a kid and it's still impressive.

Using his spider-sense, Peter is able to locate the Vulture, who again tries the loop around gimmick. But this time Spidey's ready:

This is another one of those "I only meant for you to die," moments that Stan seemed to enjoy scripting.

Somehow Spiderman has disabled the Vulture's wings. Peter uses his web fluid to swing to safety, while the Vulture manages to slow his plummet to a nearby rooftop by spiraling downward. He lets the cops do the actual arrest, just snapping a few more pix. As for how he stopped the crook, he explains here:

As Dr Who would say, just reverse the polarity!

The second story is definitely an oddball in the Spiderman saga, as it is the only story involving aliens. However, this fits very well with the Marvel pattern, as most of the Silver Age heroes found themselves up against other world menaces in their second issue: the FF, Iron Man and the Avengers, for example.

Peter gets an assignment to work with one of the sharpest electronics minds around, Dr Cobbwell. But his first task doesn't require a lot of brainpower:

Of course vacuum tubes in radios were about to go out with the advent of transistors. Peter senses some weird electronic emanations coming from the basement of the radio repair shop, and later he realizes that the same emanations are coming from the repaired radio at Dr Cobbwell's. So he decides to pay another visit to the Tinkerer in his costumed identity.

Eventually the aliens capture him but he escapes and foils their plans for invasion, so they leave.


Update: The aliens concept doesn't seem well-suited to Spiderman, just as it was inappropriate to Batman. Although both faced major-league criminals and super-villains, they also dealt with the low-level hoods. This is not all that surprising as both lost relatives to common street thugs.

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Amazing Spiderman #1

George M. Cohan once observed that plotting a three-act play was relatively simple. In Act 1, you get the hero up in a tree. In Act 2, you throw stones at him. In Act 3, you get the hero down from the tree.

Many comic stories follow this simple formula. Where Spiderman was different, was that Stan and Steve never got him down from the tree; they just kept throwing the stones at him.

This issue offers a classic example. After a quick summary of the events in Amazing Fantasy #15, we see that Uncle Ben's death has put Peter and Aunt May in a rough situation:

Peter considers taking up crime to pay the bills, but he knows it would break his aunt's heart if he were ever arrested. So he gets the bright idea of going into show business. Problem solved? Nope, because there's another stone waiting:

Spidey indeed finds it impossible to cash his check. And things get even tougher with the first appearance of his longest-running nemesis:

The inspiration for J. Jonah Jameson is probably found in the works of Ayn Rand. In the book The Fountainhead, Howard Roark runs afoul of a character named Ellsworth Toohey, who sees it as his duty (as a socialist) to tear down heroic individuals in favor of the ordinary working man. Ditko was famously a Rand fan, and echoes of her philosophy often appeared in Spiderman and in the Question series, as I discussed here.

Jameson's son is an astronaut (note: astronauts were huge celebrities in 1963), and is being launched into space shortly after Spiderman is basically drubbed out of the entertainment biz. But his space capsule develops a problem and he appears to be doomed until Spiderman steps in:

He commandeers a plane and a pilot from a nearby base and:

He rescues Jameson's son and emerges a hero to all, right? Well, yes to the former, but Stan and Steve haven't finished off their pile of stones:

Jameson has trumped up a patently ridiculous charge that Spidey had caused the problems with the capsule in the first place, so that he could look like the savior. So our friendly neighborhood Spiderman remains treed:


In the backup story, Spiderman tries to join the Fantastic Four, figuring that he ought to command a good salary with them. But:

The remainder of the story features Spiderman's first battle with the Chameleon, a quick-change artist. At one point, the Chameleon impersonates Spiderman himself. Peter captures him but the Chameleon gets away and does another makeover. We see the first appearance of Spider-Sense here:

The Spider-Sense is an ingenious gimmick that would become an important weapon in Spiderman's arsenal. But when he catches the phony cop, the Chameleon claims loudly that Spiderman is really the Chameleon in disguise again. This results in Peter fleeing, angry and hurt:

Like I said, the stones never stopped coming.

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Amazing Fantasy #15

I consider Spiderman the single best Silver Age character. For starters, he has the best motivation for putting on the outfit and fighting crime: Because when he failed to stop a criminal, it resulted in the death of his uncle Ben. That is a simple, direct and personal motivation.

Second, of all the Silver Age superheroes, he has the best-realized secret identity. As I have mentioned before, all of the superheroes have a pretty strong cast of supporting characters when wearing the mask and tights. But only Peter Parker seems to have much of a life outside the spandex.

Think about all the characters that Peter interacts with. He has Aunt May at home. He's got (initially) Flash Thompson and Liz Allen at school; after graduation that expands with the addition of Gwen and Harry. He's got J. Jonah Jameson, Betty Brant, Joe Robertson and Fred Foswell at the Daily Bugle where he works. And most of those characters have supporting actors of their own. There are even people that we hardly notice in the Silver Age: Professor Warren and Doctor Bramwell, for instance.

So I thought I would go through the Silver Age Spiderman in a bit more detail than I have in the past. The book he debuted in, Amazing Fantasy, had debuted as Amazing Adventures, then switched to Amazing Adult Fantasy with the seventh issue. For this finale to the series, the word "Adult" had been dropped.

Characters introduced: Peter Parker, Uncle Ben (dies), Aunt May, Flash Thompson, the Burglar (kills Uncle Ben). In addition, we meet Peter's high school science teacher, who is named (in ASM #15 as Mr. Warren (apparently not the same man as Professor Warren). All (except for the Burglar) are introduced on this second page, which does a good job of introducing us to Peter:

That's a solid introduction to the character, giving us the general outlines: Good-hearted, studious but a bit geeky. He attends a science lecture that night, where he is bitten by the famed radioactive spider. He discovers his odd powers and uses them to win a hundred dollars by lasting a round in the ring with Crusher Hogan. This results in his brief TV career. At the studio, he makes a critical mistake:

A short while later, Uncle Ben is murdered by a burglar. Peter tracks him down in an old warehouse, but is stunned to realize:

Note the pupils in his eyes in that bit; the idea that his mask was opaque had not yet been developed. And in the end, comes the phrase that the Spiderman movie made famous:

The story closes with an exhortation to buy the next issue of Amazing Fantasy for the further adventures of Spiderman. Of course, that next issue never arrived, and it was not until seven months later that ASM #1 hit the newsstands.

Comments: An argument can be made that aside from the compelling motivation, there is not that much new about Spiderman in this introductory story. Clark (Superboy) Kent had some troubles fitting in with his classmates, although it was never a continuing theme, just an occasionally recurring one.

But look a little harder and you'll realize that there is a great deal of novelty in this story. Was there ever a superhero before this whose reaction to his powers was the quite natural, "How can I make a buck off this?" Was there ever one who had a continuing antagonist like Flash Thompson, who was not a villain per se, just a bully?

A very solid introduction to the series.

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World's Finest Silver Age Comics: Amazing Spiderman #18

Out of the thousands of comics published in the Silver Age (my guess is about 20,000 in total), there are not a handful that are finer than this one. I've talked about it before briefly, but I thought it was time for a longer look.

To set the stage, in ASM #17, Flash Thompson had held the inaugural meeting of the Spiderman Fan Club. Liz Allen's father provided the hall, and a strong turnout was rewarded by a genuine appearance of the friendly neighborhood webslinger. But he gets a nasty surprise when the Green Goblin also shows up and begins fighting him. At a crucial moment in the battle, Peter overhears that his aunt has had another heart attack and is in the hospital. He runs out on the Goblin, turning most of his fans against him, convinced that he'd turned coward.

We get a look at the reactions from some of Spidey's foes and several of the other heroes in the Marvel Universe:

Meanwhile, JJJ is in a celebratory mood:

Peter is having trouble paying the bills, and he's too worried about Aunt May to go into action. If something happens to him, there'll be nobody left to take care of her. To add to his woes, Betty Brant is mad at him for not taking her to the Spiderman Fan Club meeting the previous issue.

Spidey tries selling a local merchandising firm on Spiderman trading cards, but they're not interested in a has-been hero. And improbably, a chemical firm is not willing to purchase his web-fluid because of a designed-in weakness:


Steve shows a bunch of scenes from the first Amazing Spiderman Annual, featuring Spidey in action against six of his greatest foes. As it happens, Peter runs into one of those old foes, the Sandman as he's leaving the chemical company. And the result is further embarrassment:

The news gives JJJ further exposure on TV as the man who revealed Spiderman as a phony long before anyone else. The Human Torch appears to remind us that he had an adventure with Spidey in Strange Tales Annual #2 (discussed here). Meanwhile Flash Thompson gets the brilliant idea of dressing up as Spidey himself and trying to stop a couple of crooks:

Fortunately, the cops come along and save him from a worse beating. To cap off Peter's bad week, he comes across Betty Brant and a new young man (Ned Leeds) exiting a movie theater, obviously in the middle of a date. Fed up with the problems that being Spiderman have added to his life, Peter decides to chuck his costume (literally):

But the next morning he's startled to find Aunt May's wheelchair empty. She's up and about, testing her legs, despite his protests. She gives him a bit of spine-stiffening here:

Peter takes it to heart and so:

And:

As noted, this is one of the rare superhero issues that featured not a single fight (well, other than the one between Flash and the car thieves). And yet, the psychological battle that Peter undergoes is deep and dramatic. As I have discussed in the past, the real charm in the Spiderman series was this inner tension that Peter felt. On the one hand, his obligation to his dead uncle, and on the other, his need to take care of his live aunt. How does he balance those demands? Well, in the end Aunt May tips the scales, but in the opposite direction from what we are expecting. Terrific storytelling and even better characterization. Those are why I dub Amazing Spiderman #18 one of the Silver Age's

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