By Stan Lee, John Romita, John Buscema, Jim Mooney & various (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-2462-7
Amazing Spider-Man was always a comicbook that matured with – or perhaps just slightly ahead of – its fan-base.
This nail-biting ninth full-colour compilation of chronological Arachnoid Amazement sees the World’s Most Misunderstood Hero navigate another rocky period of transformation and tribulation on the road to becoming the world’s most popular comics character.
After a shaky start The Amazing Spider-Man quickly became a popular sensation with kids of all ages. Before too long the quirky, charming, thrillingly action-packed comics soap-opera would become the model for an entire generation of younger heroes impatiently elbowing aside the staid, (relatively) old thirty-something mystery-men of previous publications and hallowed tradition.
Smart-but-alienated Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider during a school trip. Discovering strange superhuman abilities which he augmented with his own natural chemistry, physics and engineering genius, the kid did what any lonely, geeky nerd would do with such newfound prowess: he tried to cash in for girls, fame and money.
Making a costume to hide his identity in case he made a fool of himself, Parker became a minor media celebrity – and a criminally self-important one. To his eternal regret, when a thief fled past him one night he didn’t lift a finger to stop him, only to find when he returned home that his guardian uncle Ben Parker had been murdered.
Crazed and vengeful, Peter hunted the assailant who’d made his beloved Aunt May a widow and killed the only father he had ever known, discovering, to his horror, that it was the self-same felon he had neglected to stop. His irresponsibility had resulted in the death of the man who raised him, and the traumatised boy swore to forevermore use his powers to help others…
Since that night, the Wondrous Wallcrawler has tirelessly battled miscreants, monsters and madmen, with a fickle, ungrateful public usually baying for his blood even as he perpetually saves them…
The rise and rise of the Amazing Arachnid increased pace as the Swinging Sixties drew to a close and, by the time of the tales collected herein (re-presenting Amazing Spider-Man #78-87, originally released between November 1969 and August 1970), Peter and his ever-expanding cast of comrades were practically household names and the darlings of college campuses and the media intelligentsia throughout America and the world.
Stan Lee’s scripts tapped into the always-evolving zeitgeists of the times and the deft use of soap opera plots kept older readers glued to the series even if the bombastic battle sequences didn’t.
One of those American “time-ghosts†was crime and gangsterism and dependence on flamboyant costumed super-foes as antagonists was finely balanced with the usual suspect-pool of thugs, hoods and mob-bosses, but these were not the individual gangs of the Ditko days.
Now Organised Crime and was a huge cultural touchstone with comics cashing in on modern movies, novels and headlines…
Illustrated by John Buscema, Amazing Spider-Man#78 opens this volume with ‘The Night of the Prowler!’ featuring John Romita Junior’s first ever creator-credit for “suggesting†dissatisfied young black man Hobie Brown who briefly turned his frustrations and innate inventive genius to costumed criminal purposes until set straight by Spider-Man in the concluding ‘To Prowl No More!’
With #80 a policy of single-issue adventures was instituted: short, snappy stand-alone thrillers delivering maximum thrills and instant satisfaction. First off was a return for the wallcrawler’s very first super-foe as ‘On the Trail of the Chameleon!’ found the criminal charlatan indulging in a spree of robberies after which an action-packed if somewhat ridiculous punch-up resulted from ‘The Coming of The Kangaroo!’, including a clear contender for daftest origin of all time…
Romita senior then returned as penciller for ‘And Then Came Electro!’ with the voltaic villain attempting to slaughter Spidey live on national TV.
There were big revelations about the Kingpin in the 3-part saga that featured in issues #83-85 with the introduction of ‘The Schemer’ (Lee, Romita sr. & Mike “DeMeo†Esposito): a mysterious but extremely well-heeled criminal outsider determined to destroy the power of the sumo-like crime-lord and usurp his position in the underworld.
‘The Kingpin Strikes Back!’ (Romita sr., Buscema & Mooney) and ‘The Secret of the Schemer!’ changed the Marvel Universe radically, not just by disclosing some of the family history of one of the company’s greatest villains, but also by sending Peter Parker’s eternal gadfly Flash Thompson back to a dubious fate in Vietnam.
It wasn’t the kid’s first tour but now the war was becoming unpopular at home and the bombastic jingoism of earlier issues was being replaced by more contemplative concern as evoked by authorial mouthpiece Stan Lee…
‘Beware… the Black Widow!’ then gave Romita and Mooney a chance to redesign and relaunch the Soviet super-spy and sometime-Avenger in an enjoyable if highly formulaic misunderstanding/clash-of-heroes yarn with an ailing Spider-Man never really endangered. The entire episode was actually a promotion for the Widow’s own soon-to-debut solo series…
The dramas conclude for now with ‘Unmasked at Last!’ which found Parker, convinced that his powers were fading forever and suffering from a raging fever, exposing his secret identity to all the guests at his girlfriend’s party…
Using the kind of logic and subterfuge that only works in comics and sitcoms, Parker and Hobie Brown convinced everybody that it was only a flu-induced aberration…
This is another fabulous celebration of an important teen icon and symbol. Spider-Man at this time became a permanent, unmissable part of many youngsters’ lives and did so by living a life as close to theirs as social mores and the Comics Code would allow. Blending cultural authenticity with spectacular art, and making a dramatic virtue of the awkwardness, confusion and sense of powerlessness that most of the readership experienced daily, resulted in an irresistibly intoxicating read, delivered in addictive emotionally-intense instalments, but none of that would be relevant if the stories weren’t so compellingly entertaining. This book is Stan Lee’s Marvel and Spider-Man at their peak.
© 1969, 1970, 2014 Marvel Character, Inc. All rights reserved.