... Look out, Here Comes the Spider-Man

LAST TIME, I looked at the first few Spider-Man stories and how they set the agenda for the whole of the character's future. But it wasn't until issue 3, when the full-length stories began, that Amazing Spider-Man really took off as a title.

The Doctor Octopus in ASM3 story was reprinted in MCIC1 just two and a half years after it first appeared. This may well have been in response to the volume of letters the Bullpen was receiving asking for back issues of the Marvel titles. 

The first time I would have come across the story from ASM3 would have been in reprint form in Marvel Collectors' Item Classics 1 in late 1965, or possibly early 1966. "The Strangest Foe of All Time - Doctor Octopus" was a genuine milestone for the character, as the increased page count opened up story opportunities that hadn't been possible in the earlier 14- and ten-page episodes. 

The first page of the story (this is the reprint from Marvel Collectors' Item Classics 1), acts as a second cover, letting the reader know that Human Torch is also inside.

Even though there was only the one story in ASM3, Ditko still kicked off with a second-cover style splash page that acted as a kind of poster for the rest of the story. I've noted this Ditko foible in previous blogs, but I cannot figure out why Ditko continued to pursue this. If it had been based on some industry wisdom of the time -"Give the kids an additional big selling image once they pick the comic up in the store and open it" - then it might have made sense. But during the first three or four years of Marvel's rise, the practice was abandoned pretty quickly in the rest of the line. Other artists, notably Kirby, used the opening splash as the first scene of the story, and I'd have thought (based on my few years as a comics editor) that that would have been more effective at converting a browser into a customer.

But once we're past that, the story kicks off at breakneck pace. Spidey foils some run-of-the-mill burglars heisting safe, and ponders that it was too easy. If only he had a foe that really tested his mettle. In the next two pages we're introduced to brilliant nuclear scientist Dr Otto Octavius (called Doctor Octopus behind his back by co-workers), see him injured in a laboratory explosion and diagnosed in hospital as having brain damage and his uncanny mechanical arms fused to his body. And we're only on page 4.

It takes just one page for Dr Otto Octavius to go from hapless victim to scowling supervillain. Lee and Ditko sure knew how to move a story along.

Pretty soon, the now-deranged Octavius is entertaining thoughts of busting out of his secure hospital room, while elsewhere J. Jonah Jameson is assigning Peter Parker to get pictures of the injured scientist. But it's Spider-Man that gains access to the medical facility and witnesses Doc Ock threatening the staff.

Overconfident, Spidey wades in, thinking to teach the crazy guy a lesson, but doesn't reckon with the super-strong mechanical arms of Doctor Octopus. In a one-sided battle, Doc Ock snaps Spidey's webbing, slaps him around and flings him out a window. And to add insult to injury, he calls him "Super-Man" during the fight.

Of course, Doc Ock has no way of knowing how Spider-Man got his powers ... but Spidey's abilities are also "born of the atom", and of the hapless arachnid that was bombarded with radiation before it bit Peter Parker.

This is the first time that Spider-Man has been roundly and comprehensively beaten. Sure, the Vulture dropped him in a water tower in ASM2, but that was hardly a death trap and Spidey escaped that with ease. But with the longer page count, Stan and Steve have the space to add a little more depth to the story and allow Spidey to lose the first battle to build the dramatic tension.

No one does misery like Steve Ditko, right? Given his immature years and the fact Peter's never been beaten as Spider-Man before, we can understand how he feels. And Ditko puts it across beautifully.

And not unnaturally, Spidey feels pretty sorry for himself. But, while Peter's wondering if there's any point in going on, Doctor Octopus is taking control of an atomic research facility to "give the world a demonstration of my strength".

But even as a kid reading this, I knew that it wasn't really the end of Spider-Man. And help comes in the unlikely guise of The Human Torch. Visiting Peter's high school, Johnny Storm gives the students a lecture on how they must stick to their goals no matter what obstacles life puts in front of them. "Ability alone isn't enough," he says. "Even the Fantastic Four have had defeats -- but we always come back."

As it would many times in Spider-Man's future, Peter's knowledge of lab work helps him defeat a far stronger foe. The image of Doc Ock, blinded by Spider-Man's webbing is an absolute classic and powerfully memorable.

Newly energised, Peter realises what he has to do. Using Peter's scientific know-how, he first builds a simple weapon he can use against Doc Ock. Then with his Spider abilities, he easily gains access to the nuclear facility and, even though the super-villain knows Spidey's there, Peter's powers allow him to easily evade Doc Ock's attack and fuse two of Octopus' arms together with his crude acid bolo.

Spidey defeats the scary super-villain and Ditko gives a couple of strong images of Spidey being heroic. The epilogue with Spidey thanking a puzzled Human Torch for all his help is a nice touch, and feels like a trademark Stan Lee moment.

From there, it's not so difficult to squirt web over Doctor Octopus' specs then biff him into unconsciousness with a good old-fashioned right-cross. Then, with Octopus safely trussed up and delivered into the arms of the waiting military, it only remains for Spider-Man to look up The Human Torch and thank him for all his help.

When I break it down like this, the story might sound formulaic and a little trite, but it's important to stress that this sort of thing just didn't happen over at DC Comics. The Flash never had a crisis of confidence after such a minor defeat. And Green Lantern never heard a pep talk in his civilian identity that made him realise what a twonk he was being. Only Stan had the savvy to realise that giving his heroes such human traits wouldn't make his readers look down on them. Quite the opposite. We could all identify what it felt like to fail. Twelve years olds face failure on a regular basis. It's all part of growing up.

The original Marvel trademark corner boxes were designed by Steve Ditko. So it kind of makes sense that a giant version would be included on the Amazing Spider-Man letters page as an advertisement.

Amazing Spider-Man 3 also featured the first "Spider's Web" letters page, with readers' reactions to issue 1. Though the letters were a little on the dull side - readers hadn't really cottoned on to Stan's informal style at this point - the comments were positive and showed how involved readers' were in the storyline. And I liked the giant Marvel trademark on the second page. 

Amazing Spider-Man 4 introduced a major villain into the Marvel canon - The Sandman. Flint Marko would quickly ascend the super-villain league table, eventually defeating the Fantastic Four as a member of the Frightful Four just a few short years later.

As with Amazing Spider-Man 3, I would have first seen ASM4 (Aug 1963) as a reprint in Marvel Collector's Item Classic 2 (Apr 1966), which would have reached the UK in the late summer of that same year. The story introduced one of Marvel's most enduring super-villains, The Sandman, a career criminal who is (you guessed it) exposed to radiation while escaping from prison over a beach. The radiation fused the sand molecules to his body and suddenly Flint Marko is able to transform his body into sand at will.

Right after Ditko's trademark "second cover" splash page, Spider-Man tries to foil a robbery, only to have the criminals accuse him of assault and call for a cop.

Stan Lee continues to stress the story elements that will become trademark components of the Spider-Man myth. Right there on the first page, Spider-Man is unable to stop a crime because the criminals claim he's victimising them, due in part to J. Jonah Jameson's ongoing tabloid attacks on Spider-Man.

In their first encounter, The Sandman manages to defeat Spider-Man by accidentally tearing his mask, so Spidey has to retreat lest his identity become known. 

Then, Spider-Man is defeated by the Sandman because of dumb bad luck, when his mask is torn from his face during the scrap. And on returning to his civilian identity of Peter Parker, his Aunt May treats him like he's a six-year-old with the sniffles. Then, teed off at JJJ, Spider-Man drops a gloop of sticky webbing on his office chair so that Jonah sticks to the seat. It just the kind of thing Peter's classmates would do to him, so it's hardly surprising that this prank would appeal to Peter. It's all kind of funny and tragic at the same time.

I really liked the way Stan and Steve portrayed the principal as a heroic figure, standing up to the scary Sandman and trying to delay the villain so his students can escape.

Finally, there's a cathartic showdown with The Sandman at Peter Parker's high school, with the brave principal first putting himself between the pupils and the villain, then Spidey bounding in to save the day. There's a nice post-fight bit when Spidey realises he didn't take pictures of the fight for JJJ, so he fakes the fight by punching handfuls of sand from a handy fire bucket. All in all a pretty cool issue that further cements the elements of the Spider-Man legend in the readers' heads.

Not one of my favourite Spider-Man issues, ASM5's cover was a little weak. And I was never much taken with Ditko's version of either the Fantastic Four nor their premier foe Doctor Doom.

Amazing Spider-Man 5 (Oct 1963) was never one of my favourite stories. It was reprinted in Amazing Spider-Man Annual 2, along with a couple of the shorter tales from ASM1 and ASM2 (see last month's post). I think pitting Spider-Man against Doctor Doom would have been Stan's way of trying to bring Marvel's First Family into Spidey's storyline, perhaps as some kind of circulation booster, though Stan was already heavily featuring the Marvel characters in each other's books by this time as a matter of course. But for me, Doom wasn't the sort of villain that Spider-Man should be battling. That said, the story had a couple of fine moments. For example, Stan brings Flash Thompson's admiration of Spidey to the fore in a sequence that begins with Flash disguising himself as Spider-Man to give Peter Parker the scare of his life. Of course, it goes horribly wrong when Doctor Doom, searching for Spider-Man, gasses and kidnaps Flash by mistake.

Flash Thompson's practical joke backfires on him when Doctor Doom takes him for the real Spider-Man. Lucky for Flash that Spidey saves the day long before the FF turn up.

Peter realises what's going on when Doom demands a ransom from the FF for the captured "Spider-Man" over the airwaves and sets out to rescue the bogus superhero. The fight with Doom was designed to be epic, but I felt it just went on too long. I was much more interested in Peter's civilian life and the first hints that JJJ's secretary, Betty Brant, was romantically interested in Peter. And Stan uses the final caption box to announce that Amazing Spider-Man is going monthly from the next issue.

I already covered ASM6 in a previous blog so I won't repeat myself here.

Amazing Spider-Man 7 (Jan 1964) featured the return of The Vulture. Now I always thought that The Vulture was a bit of a creepy villain. The character, Adrian Toomes, was clearly a much older man and shouldn't have been able, by any account, to offer any kind of threat to the super-powerful Spider-Man. There have been attempts by other writers to retrofix this and offer "plausible" explanations of why this should be so (his flying harness gives him super-strength and increased lifespan ... Huh?), but I prefer it was never explained and we just accept that this weird-looking old guy is somehow strong enough and wily enough to give Spider-Man pause for thought.

I wouldn't have seen Amazing Spider-Man 7 as it came out before I knew about Marvel Comics, but I would have certainly read the story when it was reprinted in Marvel Tales 4 (Sep 1966).

In his opening battle with The Vulture in this issue, Spider-Man foolishly relies on beating his foe the same way he had in ASM2, with an electronic jamming device, not realising that Toomes had modified his flying harness so that Spider-Man's "Invertor" would be ineffective. Spidey is knocked from a rooftop and lands heavily on his shoulder, injuring his right arm.

Over-confident and inexperienced, Spider-Man believes he's going to beat The Vulture the same way a second time. The mistake costs Spider-Man another defeat and an injured arm into the bargain.

With his arm in a sling, Peter has to take a bit of razzing from his classmates at school. And then there's the knotty problem of how he's going to fight the Vulture with just one arm. But, while visiting JJJ's offices, Peter Parker is witness to The Vulture trying to steal the Daily Bugle's payroll. While JJJ is trying to talk the villain out of robbing him, Peter ducks out and changes to Spider-Man. The ensuing battle trashes the Bugle's offices, but not before Spider-Man defeats the Vulture by webbing his wings together and floating him to earth gently on a webbing parachute.

Spider-Man defeats the Vulture and saves JJJ's payroll and what thanks does he get - just more threats and invective from the greedy, ungrateful newspaper publisher. But Peter does get to dally for a short while with Jameson's comely secretary, Betty Brant.

The Issue closes with JJJ holding Spider-Man responsible for the damage to him premises and Spider-Man silencing JJJ in his own inimitable way, then Peter and Betty share a quiet romantic moment amid the wreckage left in the wake of the battle. All in all a satisfying conclusion to a good battle issue.

I think the "Special Tribute-to-Teen-Agers" cover line was Stan's way of trying to reach readers beyond the traditional 8-12 year old audience for comic books. Perhaps he felt it made Amazing Spider-Man more of an aspirational read.

I'm not really sure what Stan Lee was trying to do with issue 8 of Amazing Spider-Man. It was a return to the two story format, but not in the same way that ASM1 and ASM2 were two story. ASM8 has one 17-page story and a short six-page backup - drawn by Jack Kirby and inked by Ditko - featuring the Human Torch.

I suspect putting Peter Parker in spectacles was Ditko's idea. He wore similar spectacles himself at the time. So I also believe that getting rid of the glasses was Stan's decision, which Steve may not have agreed with. Certainly, when Steve left the title Stan seized his opportunity to have John Romita make Peter much more rugged and heroic than Ditko's portrayal. Just speculating, though ...

I wouldn't have see the second story till later, as it wasn't reprinted in Marvel Tales in 1966. The main draw for me in that first story - and for Stan who cover-featured it - was the boxing match (the result of an incident where Flash breaks Peter's glasses) in which Peter batters Flash senseless. I'm sure just about every kid reading that wanted to do that to the school bully. I know I did. And I'm betting Steve Ditko did, too. The main plot, featuring Spider-Man's battle with a giant computer on wheels was pretty unmemorable, and very much had the feeling of a filler.

Stan never gave a reason, at the time, for having a second (Kirby-drawn) Spider-Man tale in the issue, aside from mentioning at the end of the letters column that it was intended as a "change of pace". The only reason I can think of is that it may have originally been drawn as a filler story for Fantastic Four Annual 1, but then replaced with the six-page "FF meet Spidey" story that actually saw print there. Then Stan would have had to write a shorter Spidey tale for ASM8 to accommodate the inventory strip, which meant that because of the space constraints, "The Terrible Threat of the Living Brain" was a bit *meh*.

"Spider-Man Tackles the Human Torch" was the third time the pair had met (they'd encountered each other before in ASM1 and Strange Tales Annual 2 - Spidey's appearance in FF Annual 1, which came out a month after the Strange Tales Annual appearance, is just a re-telling of the incident from ASM1), and up till this point, their relationship had always been friendly. Admittedly, it's more interesting dramatically to have Spider-Man and Torch feuding, but it's not clear why (if I'm right) Stan decided to delay the onset of the feud until ASM8. The next time the pair would meet would be in ASM17, where their feud continued.

The defeat of Spider-Man - again. Despite the very goofy costume, I really liked Electro as a villain. Ditko always managed to imbue Spidey's earliest villains with an air of thuggishness, and Electro is no different.

Amazing Spider-Man 9 was, for me, a bit of a return to form, with the introduction of a cracking - indeed, crackling - super-villain in the shape of Electro and the first of Aunt May's major health scares, when she's hospitalised for an operation. 

There was no National Health Service in the States back in 1964, so Peter would have to raise a large amount of money quickly to pay for Aunt May's treatment, something that wouldn't be a worry for us in the UK. Luckily - or perhaps not - there's a new villain on the scene and there's a reward for his capture.

Aunt May's illness is what motivates Peter to try to raise the $1000 he needed for her medical bills. First he tries to borrow the money from Jameson, but Peter knows, as we do, that that will never work. So he resolves to capture Electro for the reward money. When that doesn't work out so well, he sells Jameson photographic "proof" that Electro and Spider-Man are the same person. It's not Peter Parker's finest moment, and though he might tell himself he's saving his aunt's life, it's just another example of how Stan was pursuing greater realism by making his heroes morally ambiguous.

Spider-Man's defeat of Electro is simplicity itself. Spidey short-circuits him with a handy firehose. And in the closing scene with JJJ, Peter is able to redeem himself by giving the publisher pictures of Spider-Man's battle with Electro.

But when Electro frees all the prisoners in a local penitentiary, Spider-Man has to leave the now-recovering Aunt May and go battle the electrical menace. It also provides Peter with the opportunity to do the right thing and make it up to Jameson for the dodgy pictures he sold him with a fresh (and genuine) batch showing the defeat of Electro. 

It's a bitter-sweet moment, and I'm sure that Stan and Steve had this difficult relationship planned right from the beginning. It's hard to identify where this is coming from, but I suspect the sentiments are Ditko's and the words are Lee's.

All that remains if for Peter to have a poignant scene with Betty to close out this extra-length 22-page story, certainly one of the better issues of the early Amazing Spider-Mans.

Even better, in my opinion, was Amazing Spider-Man 10 ... this issue introduced a sinister new villain, The Big Man. While he didn't have super-powers himself, his three henchmen, The Enforcers, did have skills. Fancy Dan was a master martial artist, Montana had traditional cowboy abilities and used a lasso as his weapon of choice, the The Ox was just big and very strong. With his keen intellect and his Enforcers as muscle, The Big Man sets out to take control of all organised crime in New York.

The cover to Amazing Spider-Man 10 was a strange composite. GCD credits the Spidey figure to Jack Kirby and The Enforcers in the background to Steve Ditko. On the right is the original - rejected - cover for this issue. My guess is that Ditko redrew the cover art, but Stan still wasn't satisfied with the result and had Kirby redraw the Spidey figure in the final version.

Meanwhile Aunt May is still recovering from the operation she underwent in ASM9, and now requires a blood transfusion to help her recover her strength. When the doctor asks Peter about his blood type, Peter is fearful is radioactive blood might harm his aunt. But of course he can't admit to that and reluctantly allows the medical staff to use his blood.

Steve Ditko manages to cram so much story into his pages though, even at nine frames a page, it never feels crowded or rushed. Same with Stan's captions and dialogue balloons - there may be lots of them, but they serve the story well and the plot moves along at quite a clip.

After that, Peter needs to rest as it's likely his powers have been weakened by the transfusion. However, when The Enforcers threaten Betty Brant, Peter decides that Spider-Man needs to get involved. Spider-Man scares a small-time hoodlum into revealing where he can find The Enforcers, then sets out after them. But they find him first and a skirmish ensues. Weakened from the earlier blood transfusion, Spidey realises he's not strong enough yet to take them all on, so he douses the lights and makes his escape. Outside he sees J. Jonah Jameson passing and develops a suspicion that JJJ's the Big Man, thinking that might explain why Jonah's accusing Spider-Man of being the Big Man.

I really like the way Ditko placed the Big Man squarely in the centre of page 13, while the "plight" of Peter Parker unfolds around him. And the fight with The Enforcers and the gang-thugs is both thrilling and fun, as Spidey brings a bit of playfulness to his beating-up of the gangsters.

So to get to the bottom of things, Peter resolves to boast that he's figured out the Big Man's true identity, hoping the underworld hears about it and brings him before the Big Man. Interestingly, Flash pulls Peter aside and warns him that, if he continues, the The Enforcers will be coming for him, not realising that's exactly what Peter wants. Even this early on, it seems like Stan and Steve were intent on softening Flash's character. Predictably, The Enforcers show up, grab Peter and lock him in a storeroom. Though Spidey quickly escapes, he's spotted by the mobsters and an epic battle kicks off. The fight choreography is some of Ditko's most imaginative to date, full of clever touches. Responding to the Spider signal, the police show up to round up the gangsters, while the Big Man makes his escape.

But Spider-Man, thinks he knows where the Big Man is going and heads for the office of the Daily Bugle. Watching from outside he sees the police show up and arrest ... Frederick Foswell, a timid columnist on Jameson's staff.

Busted ... The Big Man turns out to be not J. Jonah Jameson, but ...Frederick Foswell. And the final scene of a snuffling Betty Brant is setting up the next story where we discover just what a pain in the nether-regions this girl turns out to be ...

The final scene where J. Jonah Jameson explains to an empty room just why it is that he hates Spider-Man so much never rang true with me as a kid, and even less so now. Even this early in the series, Jameson has never at any point demonstrated even the slightest level of self-awareness, so for him to arrive at this epiphany of self-realisation shrieks of "author's message". Now it may be that Stan was getting loads of letters from readers asking just why it is that Jonah has this unreasoning hatred for Spider-Man, and in all fairness, perhaps Stan thought it would be a good idea to try to offer up some motivation. I just think he offered up the wrong motivation.

I've never really liked this scene. I'd prefer to think Jameson isn't this much of a hypocrit. I'd actually think the character would be more interesting and sympathetic if he actually believes Spider-Man is a menace and does more harm that good.

I was discussing this very point recently with a work colleague, Philip de Sausmarez, and he came up with a much more insightful explanation. J. Jonah Jameson, he reasons, is typical of the Great American Dream ... a man who, through his own ability and tireless hard work, has dragged himself up to the very top of his chosen profession. He's the owner and editor-in-chief of a big metropolitan newspaper, and he has little time for people he considers shirkers or those he thinks want something for free. He's worked hard for everything he's got and, by golly, so should everyone else.

Then along comes Spider-Man - a much younger man - who appears to have had everything handed to him on a plate. He has super-powers, gained by some happy accident, and is admired by many. And that's something JJJ just can't stomach.

These scenes from earlier Amazing Spider-Man issues are a true reflection of what Jameson thinks. To have him reveal in ASM10 that actually, all this time, he hasn't actually believed his own oft-stated views just seems plain wrong.

Time and again, in these early issues of Amazing Spider-Man, you'll see Jameson railing against the younger generation and how they all want something for nothing, and how nobody but he knows the value of hard work. So Philip's take on this is, for me, so much more plausible than that awkward monologue Stan and Steve put in the mouth of J. Jonah Jameson on the final page of Amazing Spider-Man 10.

By now, anyone reading this blog has probably heard enough about Spider-Man for a while, so I want to take a look at the Marvel anthology titles of the mix-Sixties, with a special focus on my all-time favourite superhero, Captain America.

Next: America, America!

... Does whatever a Spider can

AS A KID in the Sixties, I was first a reader of DC Comics, then discovered Marvel. My introduction to the work of Stan Lee and his collaborators was a bit of a slow burn ... I didn't really start reading the flagship Marvel title The Amazing Spider-Man until mid-1965, by which time Lee and Ditko were in full swing.

Okay, this kid is reading a comic in the 1940s, but his experience wouldn't have been much different from mine. The Superman behind him is the November 1947 issue, though the Ha Ha Comics he's reading is from mid-1943. See if you can identify any others ...

In my last blog entry, I described how I had come to be a regular reader of the title and how Stan Lee's and Steve Ditko completely different approach to superhero stories captivated my imagination and made me feel they really understood my life. I didn't realise at the time they were telling stories that resonated with any number of teenagers and tweenagers, and it was this that started Marvel's inexorable rise to dominance of the comic business. And I had got as far as Amazing Spider-Man 26, which left an unconscious and helpless Spider-Man in the hands of The Green Goblin, the Crime Master and their baying hordes of gangsters ... a development that had me holding my breath until I could track down the next issue to discover Spidey's fate.

A brilliant "hero in jeopardy" cover from Steve Ditko encloses one of my favourite Spider-Man stories of the 1960s. Look at that great cathartic moment at the foot of page 4 as Spider-Man breaks free of the ship's anchor chain that's been holding him (not quite) helpless.

I needn't have worried. Even though Spidey has been trussed up with heavy duty chains, the gangsters are unable to tear off his mask (which he glued in place with webbing last ish, remember?), and he's not about to sit still while they polish him off. For, just as Spidey breaks the grip of the gangsters holding on to him, the police arrive. The distraction allows Spidey the space he needs to literally break free of his chains in one of the greatest single panels of Ditko's entire Spider-Man run. And we're only on page 4 ...

The Green Goblin hangs back, leaving Spidey and the three police officers to battle with the Crime Master's goons over three epic pages. The Goblin escapes but Spidey trails The Crime Master beneath the dockside pilings, losing him in the sewers. Later, when Spidey confronts Frederick Foswell in Jameson's office with his suspicions that Foswell is The Crime Master, the real Crime Master is lurking on a rooftop outside the Bugle building. Cornered by tipped-off police officers, The Crime Master is shot and unmasked. Turns out Foswell has been working on the story for Jameson and uncovered The Crime Master's identity ... a mobster called Nick "Lucky" Lewis. (Stan must've really liked the nickname "Lucky" because he gave it to the gangster Lucky Lobo in ASM23, as well.)

From Amazing Spider-Man Annual 2 - The Crime Master.

Again, readers were left wondering who The Green Goblin really was. I remember reading somewhere that Stan and Steve had very different ideas on the Goblin's real identity. After a quick search of the Internet I found some quotes from a Steve Ditko interview that had appeared in US fan-magazine, Starlog: "Stan's synopsis for The Green Goblin," said Ditko, "had a movie crew, on location, finding an Egyptian-like sarcophagus. Inside was an ancient, mythological demon, the Green Goblin. He naturally came to life. On my own, I changed Stan's mythological demon into a human villain."

From Amazing Spider-Man Annual 1 - The Green Goblin (riding his pre-glider broomstick).

This fits in with Ditko's commonly known antipathy towards super-human or fantasy-based foes for Spider-Man, something I had noticed even back in 1965 and covered in my previous blog entry.

As for The Goblin's civilian identity, I also recall reading someplace that Ditko wanted to have The Goblin turn out to be a complete non-entity, as he felt it more realistic. But he must have changed his mind as the story in Amazing Spider-Man 26-27 unfolded because in Starlog, Ditko later recounted, "I had to have some definite ideas: who he was, his profession and how he fit into the Spider-Man story world. I was even going to use an earlier, planted character associated with J. Jonah Jameson: he [was to] be [revealed as] the Green Goblin. It was like a subplot working its way until it was ready to play an active role."

This makes me suspect very strongly that Ditko may have been lining up Foswell to be the civilian alter ego of The Green Goblin ... though it's possible he really was going to reveal the Goblin to be someone we'd never seen before. I guess we'll never know for sure, because that story was the last time Ditko would ever draw the character.

In the closing few pages of ASM27, the identity of the mystery villain is revealed, our suspicions about Foswell prove to be unfounded, Spidey reaches the end of the road with the Incredible Shrinking Costume, and Peter meets the nosiest man in the universe, Barney Bushkin. This would have taken up an entire issue of a modern comic.

The last few pages of ASM27 deal with the nasty shop-bought costume that had been giving Spidey so many problems and his efforts to find another outlet for his crime pictures, which leads him to Barney Bushkin, perhaps the nosiest newspaper picture editor ever. And the comic finishes with Peter and his Aunt May happily going off to the movies together, a rare moment of stability in Peter Parker's normally hectic and unpredictable private life.

So I suppose after this startlingly good brace of issues, the only place for Lee and Ditko to go was down. And, perhaps a little unfairly, Amazing Spider-Man 28, featuring The Molten Man, was never one of my favourites.

In retrospect though, I suppose this would have been a pretty popular issue with most kids. It's certainly action-packed - Spidey's battle with The Molten Man goes on for an epic seven pages. But for me it lacks the cleverness and subtleties apparent in the Spidey-fights of the last few issues. You have to wonder if Ditko constructed a long - and it has to be said, repetitive - toe-to-toe slugfest because he'd been told to by Stan.

Though the cover design is striking, I'm not sure what story it's telling. And I think the second cover/splash page is a bit bland too. However, the interior 7-page battle between Spidey and the Molten Man is pretty epic.

The more interesting components in this story are: the scene in which Peter manages to switch the cheap shop-bought costume for his original at Professor Smythe's lab - though the coincidence of Smythe's assistant being transformed into The Molten Man just as Peter Parker was visiting stretched the definition of "coincidence" even for my 11-year-old sensibilities - and; Peter's high school graduation.

Now, back in 1965, I didn't have much grasp of what "graduation" entailed. We didn't have that in the UK back then. The biggest educational challenge that faced me was the "11-plus", an exam that determined whether you'd be sent to an academic "grammar school", or be dumped with the dunces in a "secondary modern", after the summer holidays. But graduation seemed cool and exciting, and even I could gather that it was a big day for Peter and his fellow students. The fact that this ceremony marked an exit for Liz Allan from the series pretty much escaped me at the time and I was only reminded of it while reviewing the story for this blog.

I was never much of a fan of Liz Allan. My first bias was always towards girls with dark hair, so Liz didn't appeal to me on that level. But she always seemed a bit of a game-player, and even at my tender years, I found that annoying. She wouldn't return to the comic until much later, by which time Gerry Conway was writing the series and I had long lost interest in it.

So, was ASM28 a filler issue? I think, kind of ... Molten Man is a pretty uninspired villain and I think was just there to provide a peg to hang the story of Peter's graduation on. What's more interesting here is that, at this point, Marvel Comics were allowing their characters to grow and develop. Moving Peter on to University was a massive step and where other companies' characters pretty much stayed static in their lives (Clark Kent was a reporter for the Daily Planet for, what, 25 years? Never promoted, never changed papers, never made editor?), Stan's characters' lives would change as the years passed. That all pretty much stopped when Stan relinquished editorial control of the Marvel line and the suits decided that all character development should be frozen to better serve Marvel's growing number of licensing deals.

Just about the best hero-in-danger cover of the entire Spider-Man run. Putting the audience's eye-level at the surface of the water makes us feel like we're right in there with Spidey ...

I liked Amazing Spider-Man 29 a lot better, though it too was a bit of a filler issue. It featured the return of The Scorpion, the thug that Jameson arranged to be given super-powers back in Amazing Spider-Man 20, which came out before I began buying the title on a regular basis. I'd catch up with ASM20 a bit later when it was reprinted in Marvel Tales. But issue 29 offered a recap, so I didn't feel too much out of the loop.

First, let's take a look at that cover. Steve Ditko had already demonstrated a liking for placing Spider-Man in real danger on the covers. No other Marvel character faced cover jeopardy with quite the same regularity or intensity as Spider-Man. Towards the end of Giant Man's run, some attempt had been made to bring a similar sense of peril to the Tales to Astonish covers, but these had largely failed because they had made Giant Man seem like he was ineffective, rather than generating reader concern for the character.

It must have been fairly obvious to Stan that the whole Giant Man thing wasn't working. Trying to apply the hero-in-jeopardy schtick to Giant Man failed because it's hard to believe a 25-foot guy could be under threat from any normal-sized person. The situation on the cover of Tales to Astonish 68 is just plain daft.

But Amazing Spider-Man 29 ... now that is a jeopardy cover. I have written about this one on my website, in conjunction with the book I wrote a while back, How To Draw and Sell Comic Strips, offering it as an example of the perfect comic cover. And what made the Scorpion more than a bit scary was that he plainly didn't care whether he killed Spider-Man or Spider-Man killed him. Even as a kid I recognised that that is possibly the most dangerous type of person you could ever meet.

I'll come back to Amazing Spider-Man 30 a bit later, as I missed it in its original run and wouldn't discover a copy until a couple of years later ...

Amazing Spider-Man 31 was the start of an even bigger Spidey saga, that would run across three issues and is still, for my money, the best Spider-Man story ever.

The start of a super-saga ... this would be one of the last times that Ditko would put a secondary cover on page of of the story. This scene refers to the closing fight with the Master Planner's goons that starts on page 17.

The structure and pacing of the storytelling is pitch perfect. Spider-Man has a run-in with some masked goons who are stealing scientific equipment for "The Master Planner" and making their getaway via helicopter. They're well organised and obviously well funded. But he loses track of them after he causes their copter to crash into the East River. All this is quickly forgotten as Peter heads off to Empire State University for his first day of college, little suspecting that Aunt May has been feeling quite ill. When his aunt takes a turn for the worse that evening, Peter is shocked to hear Doc Bromwell wants to send her to hospital. The next day, lost in thought, Peter doesn't hear Flash trying to introduce him to two new friends, Harry Osborn and Gwen Stacy. They think he's ignoring them and Peter's high school history looks set to repeat itself. In the meantime, Bugle reporter Frederick Foswell, disguised as police stool-pigeon Patch, is also on the trail of the technology robbers. A chance meeting between the pair sends Spidey back down to the docks where the same masked goons are heisting more scientific equipment. There's an inconclusive battle but the thieves get away. And while Peter regrets not taking pictures of the fight for Jonah Jameson, at the hospital Aunt May's tests indicate she's sicker than Dr Bromwell thought.

An unprecedented eight pages are spent on Peter Parker's problems with Aunt May and his (lack of) college social life. Yet none of this is unimportant, and will become the very heartbeat of this whole masterful story. By this point, Steve Ditko was being credited with plotting by Stan, so there's little doubt that lavishing that amount of space on material that isn't superhero action was all Ditko's idea.

Essentially, the entire issue is setting up what will follow ... but stick with it. It's going to be worth it.

The cover essentially tells the reader the entire plot. The splash page was the first Ditko had drawn that formed the opening of the story. And the violence of Peter's frustration is a startling moment for any 11 year old reader.

Amazing Spider-Man 32 is where the whole thing really gets going. Steve Ditko's splash page breaks with tradition and actually forms the opening panel of the story, instead of acting as a second cover. Admittedly, it's a little dull, but I see this page's function as a kind of movie-style establishing shot, so the readers know exactly where the following action takes place.

Immediately, Ditko abandons the idea of keeping the identity of The Master Planner a secret. He probably realised that he'd over-played that hand in the battle between The Green Goblin and the Crime Master for control of the city's mobs and just dumped the idea. So we see Doctor Octopus issuing orders to his henchmen, but identifying himself to them as The Master Planner. Why was he keeping his identity a secret? Who knows? Not me ... probably not Ditko, either.

Meanwhile, Aunt May's doctors tell Peter that May is dying of radioactive poisoning. Horrified, Peter realises that it's because of a transfusion May received of Peter's blood back in Amazing Spider-Man 10 and it's his super-power that is killing her. As Spider-Man, Peter manages to enlist the aid of Dr Curt Connors - the former Lizard - to find a cure for Aunt May. Connors identifies the problem and orders a rare isotope, ISO-36, which he'll use to neutralise the radioactivity. But Doc Ock gets wind of the delivery and has his goons steal the rare element. Spider-Man goes after the thieves and starts tearing up the town to find them. Of course he does find Doc Ock's underwater lair and there's a mighty battle, but the structure is weakened by the two enemies flinging heavy plant equipment at each other and, with sections of the ceiling coming down, Doc Ock clears off, leaving Spidey trapped beneath some machinery ...

There's cliffhangers and there's cliffhangers. This one, surely, must be the grandaddy of them all.

When I originally read this in the early months of 1966, I was stressed breathless by Peter's predicament, so "in" the story was I at this point. The thought of having to try to find the next part of the story - given the erratic distribution of American comics to UK shops - made it even worse. I probably felt like that for about half an hour ... then something else distracted my attention and I carried on with all the other stuff I did - swapping gum cards, playing war, climbing trees ... that sort of thing.

Probably Marvel's most memorable moment, and definitely Spider-Man's -  wringing such high drama out of such a simple situation is a testament to the storytelling skills of both Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.

When Amazing Spider-Man 33 finally did roll around, probably around March of 1966, I was ready for it. Stan and Steve didn't have some rubbishy movie serial type resolution planned for Spidey. There was no "with one bound Spider-Man was free" kind of escape. Nope, they kept Spidey under that machinery for five pages. It's an extraordinary piece of storytelling. As each second drags past, and as each drop of water falls on Spidey from above, I was right there with him, straining uselessly against the dead weight above even as Spidey did.

And when he does somehow find the strength to heave that giant block of cast iron off his shoulders, it's the greatest moment in comics.

Yes, I said the greatest moment in comics ... anyone want to argue? Thought not.

But even then, Ditko wasn't finished. With the underwater structure crumbling around him, Spidey grasps the life-giving cannister of ISO-36 to his chest and stumbles through the rising waters. The ceiling gives way, enveloping Spider-Man in a bruising torrent of water. Somehow he finds his way to the surface and crawls exhausted from the water, only to find eight of The Master Planner's goons waiting for him. For goodness sake, Steve, give this kid a break ...

Three pivotal points in this story - Spidey not realising he's beaten The Master Planner's henchmen, recognising that Betty was just too highly strung to make an acceptable girlfriend for a superhero, and then understanding that if he stands up to Jameson, he might finally get reasonable payment for his first class crime pictures.

The battle with the goons is incredible, not because Spider-Man does so well, but because he does so badly. Exhausted, battered and on the point of collapse, Spidey keeps on swinging, even after the last goon is prostrate, hardly even realising he's won. 

Spidey manages to get the precious isotope delivered to Dr Connors, even finding a few moments to photograph the arrest of The Master Planner's goon squad by the police, but when he goes to The Daily Bugle to deliver the pix, he runs into Betty. When she sees his battered, bruised face, she goes into neurotic meltdown and rushes off sobbing. I think it was at this point that Peter caught up with my 11 year old self and realised what a pain in the butt Betty was. Finally, tired of Jonah Jameson's shenanigans, Peter decides that he'll use his exclusive photos of the police breaking up The Master Planner's gang to gouge the cost of Aunt May's hospital care out of the skinflint publisher. It's as though Peter has addressed each of the responsibilities that have been weighing him down and has finally dealt with them ... 

Thinking about it in retrospect, it's almost as though the final page of issue 33 is Ditko's farewell to the character and the book he helped create. And it would have been the perfect place for Ditko to stop ... but that's not what happened.

The issue ends quietly enough - I love Ditko's very cinematic split shot of Peter walking away. Others would ape this trick in later comics, notably Jim Steranko. But after the emotional rollercoaster of ASM33, how could the following issue ever hope to stack up?

Where before Stan and Steve had flirted with an extended storyline in ASM26 & 27, this was the first time that a Spider-Man tale had taken up three consecutive issues. Stan and Jack had been doing that kind of thing for a while over on Fantastic Four - at this point the Frightful Four saga was just winding down - and Ditko had told a multi-part story on Doctor Strange (Strange Tales 130-146), which began before ASM 31-33 and ended when Ditko left Marvel with the July 1966 issues. But these Spider-Man comics are a bit of a watershed in that a single coherent story ran across three issues of the comics. Even with Stan's and Jack's multi-parters, the storytelling involved one plotline seguing into another then returning to the previous storyline again - Fantastic Four 36-45 is just that; three intertwined plotlines (The Frightful Four, the loss of powers and Doctor Doom, The Inhumans) rather than a single story.

And I think that's all great. I'm all for an epic storyline - as long as the story is epic. Stan and Steve certainly delivered during the Master Planner arc. No one could complain that the tale lacks action, characterisation and emotional resonance. But as I've said before, the concept of continued stories would have its detractors - me included - as time wore on. Not because I think continued stories are bad, but because they became over-used and a crutch for lazy writers who didn't want to think up a new plot every month.

The remaining five issues of Steve Ditko's tenure as plotter and artist offered nothing as ground-breaking as the Master Planner saga. Even though he seems to be setting Spider-Man up for a return bout with Kraven the Hunter cheerfully enough, nothing he did with the title after this would have the verve and energy of anything he'd done in the first 33 issues.

After ratcheting up the tension to "11" in the issues before this one, ASM34 settles down to a more sedate "7.5". Here, it looks as though Ditko has given up on the second-cover idea for the comic's splash page and is now using page 1 to begin the story proper, just like Jack Kirby.

In all fairness, Amazing Spider-Man 34 isn't a bad comic by any stretch. It has some great developments - Peter trying to strike up a conversation with Gwen Stacy for the first time and getting knocked back, and the plotline with Betty Brant exiting Peter's life - but it can only compare poorly with the issues that immediately preceded it. It does, however, bring back an old foe, albeit not a super-powered one ...

There's a bit of a feeling that Ditko is marking time here. He's reverted back to using Page 1 as a second cover and the art seems a bit less detailed.

Amazing Spider-Man 35, on the other hand, bears some hallmarks of being a bit of a filler issue. The villain, the Molten Man, is in my view a b-team character. I wasn't mad about him in ASM28, so I wasn't overjoyed to see him back. The drawing seems a bit thinner and a bit less detailed than we've been used to. The final page seems very rushed indeed, not typical for Ditko, who never, as far as I know, ever missed a deadline. There's a funny bit where Spidey battles the Molten Man accompanied only by Artie Simek's sound effects, but that really does seem much more a Stan thing to do than a Steve idea ...

The last few covers have been very light on background detail and the interior art lacks the meticulous effort that made issues like ASM25 such a delight. And look at that pointlessly large panel of Spidey on page 11 ...

By the time I got to Amazing Spider-Man 36, I really did feel that Steve Ditko was just phoning the work in. As with the previous issue, Steve Ditko's art seems a bit rushed, lacking the detail that he'd put into the first 33 issues. Where before he'd stick with the basic six-panel layout, using larger panels to emphasise a dramatic point, now it seemed as if he was just jamming in big panels to save himself a bit of drawing. It did occur to me that it could have been because sometime around this point, Marvel (and DC) switched from the larger twice-up artwork to the smaller half-up size. Could this be why Ditko's art looks so ... thin? So I did some checking (actually, I looked at the IDW Artists' Edition of Steranko's SHIELD) and found that the date of the switch was around November 1967, more than a year after these issues of Spider-Man came out. So I couldn't even allow Ditko that excuse. Then, thinking about it, the three covers from ASM 34 on also lacked real jeopardy. No, there's little doubt ... by this point Ditko was just going through the motions ...

The cover was a big improvement over recent issues, but the splash page did look a bit crude. On the bright side, the interior story and art was almost a return to form for Ditko ... sadly, it wouldn't last.

Issue 37 of Amazing Spider-Man did seem to be a bit of a rally for Ditko. The cover had real menace, the issue introduced Norman Osborn as a slightly dodgy associate of the issue's villain, Professor Stromm, and even the artwork seemed a bit more detailed, like Ditko actually cared again. Overall I quite liked this issue the best of the post Master Planner Spider-Man comics. But as it turned out, ASM37 was just a blip.

The cover of this issue is an obvious paste-up, the splash page is the weirdest ever seen in a Ditko Spider-Man comic and the interior story is a bit "meh", lacking in any real danger. We should have seen the writing on the wall ...

Amazing Spider-Man 38 was the saddest issue of the entire Ditko run on the character, for oh-so-many reasons. For a start, there was no cover. That's right, Ditko left before drawing a cover for the issue. This meant the Bullpen had to paste something together in a hurry. The main image of Spider-Man was lifted from a panel on page 13. The three lower images are just action panels from the story pasted in. There's not even an attempt at a background behind Spidey, so my guess would be that no one realised until right on deadline that Steve wasn't planning on turning in any cover art for this issue.

The interior story is just about okay, very similar to the Meteor Man tale in issue 36, but just kind of bland and unmemorable. The only vaguely interesting bit is where Norman Osborn disguises himself and hires a bunch of gangster goons to kill Spider-Man. At this stage, we readers can only guess what his beef with Spidey is. But it does seem that even at this late stage, Ditko was setting Norman O up for something bigger than just the role of a walk-on trouble-maker.

Yet, for all my misgivings about Steve Ditko leaving The Amazing Spider-Man, the fact is that by the end of 1966, the title would be racking up an impressive 340,000 sales, overtaking Fantastic Four as Marvel's best-selling title and, though DC's core Superman and Batman titles were all still a long way ahead, this would begin to change over the next two years ...

But issue 39 of Spider-Man would confirm our worst fears. Steve Ditko had walked out on his two seminal characters, Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. From Amazing Spider-Man 39 onwards, a new hand would wield the pencil, and Stan Lee would return as plotter and scripter both ... and to be fair, do a very good job of it.

In the wake of Ditko's departure, the dynamic of the creative team behind the character would change drastically, not necessarily for the worse ...

But that's all for the next blog entry in this series, where I'll look at the impact of John Romita and how Marvel's increasing inroads into television and other forms of licensing would change the fortunes of the company ...

Next: New hands on the tiller