... 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!

... Catches thieves just like flies

AS I NOTED in last month's blog entry, at the age of 12 I hadn't been much enamoured of John Romita's version of Spider-Man. I had been a die-hard Steve Ditko fan and, when he unceremoniously ditched the creation that had made him famous, in 1966, I struggled to warm to the new, sleek, decidedly un-nerdy version of Peter Parker.

The whys and wherefores have been adequately covered in other blogs - mine and other people's. My reaction to this changing of the guard was to turn my attention firmly backwards and seek out the invaluable Marvel Tales reprints of the earlier Spider-Man stories.

At first, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Stan Lee had just aped the classic DC Comics reprints of earlier stories. The cover formats of the DC 80-pagers and the early Marvel Tales were visually quite similar. Both took either panels from the stories they were reprinting or generic images of the characters and put them together in a kind of patchwork quilt of a cover - no focal point, no single striking image. Just an attempt to show customers just how much they would get for their 25c (in the UK, 1/6).

The Secret Origins Giant was a bit of a holy grail in the early 1960s. I only ever saw the ads in other DCs but never saw the real thing. The first Marvel Tales I wouldn't own until much later, but it was another must-have item in my social circle in 1964. I did however have a copy of Marvel Tales 2 in 1965.

And for most kids, this quantity over quality approach would have worked just fine. But once Marvel's two reprint titles became regular bi-monthly publications, Stan thought it through and hit on a much better idea. He reproduced the original covers of the issues he was reprinting on the front covers of Marvel Tales and the new Marvel Collectors' Item Classics.

Above left: A typical Marvel house ad from 1965 - I loved these as a kid and there was a real sense of "treasure hunt" around trying to find all the issues in the newsagents. Stan tapped into the same feeling when he revised the layout of the Marvel reprint titles.

Of course he'd been doing this for a while with the Marvel House ads, which I've covered in an earlier blog. Those ads made me want to find all the Marvels they depicted. And it was the same with all the other kids I knew who followed comics. There was something quite compelling about those wallet-sized cover repros ... so when Stan used the same idea on the covers of Marvel Tales and Marvel Collectors' Item Classics well, it was like an ad for all those old issues we'd missed - with the issues actually inside.

And, as usual, Stan knew what he was doing. The way Marvel's sales had grown dramatically between 1961, when the first issue of the Fantastic Four came out, and 1966 demonstrated that there were many current readers of Marvel Comics who had missed out on the early issues. And Stan was also referencing those earlier issues in almost every story he was writing

So because Stan was a really generous guy (and because he'd also spotted a sales opportunity) he provided us with a jumping on point. Or rather, two ...

MARVEL TALES

During 1965 and 1966, as I was buying more and more Marvel comics and leaving DC behind, I quickly found that the two Marvel reprint books were a great source of stories I'd missed. As I've noted in another post, one of the first Marvel Tales I came across was issue 3, which featured a reprint of ASM6 from November 1963. But now, fifty years on, it's impossible to remember which order I found these reprints in. So I'll cover them in the order of publication of the originals.

The first appearance of The Amazing Spider-Man. The 11-page story was later reprinted in full in the first Marvel Tales Annual in October 1964. I never did see a copy of Marvel Tales 1 until much later.

Amazing Fantasy 15 was always a tough comic to find. First time I ever came across it was when I was on holiday with my family in France. It was our first foreign holiday and we were in a campsite just outside Antibes. There was an older kid a few tents away from us who had brought a stack of comics with him and in that pile he had an Amazing Fantasy 15. This would have been August 1964. I tried everything I could think of to get that comic from that kid. Any comic from my stack, any three comics, money ... I tried everything short of conking him on the head and running away. But there was no deal to be made. It was a compelling cover and it was the first indication I had that the adventures of the Wall-Crawler didn't begin with Amazing Spider-Man 1. He did, however, let me read the comic, so I was able to find out how Peter Parker had come to be Spider-Man. And quite a dark tale it was too.

Even in the first formative story, where it would have been Stan Lee driving the concept and plotting rather than Ditko, this was a pretty unusual comic scenario. From the very first page, Peter Parker is marked out by his peers as a complete loser. Despite a loving home life, with his Uncle Ben and Aunt May, Peter is rejected and ridiculed mercilessly by his schoolmates. And there can't be a comic nerd anywhere who doesn't know what that feels like.

Right from the very first page of the Spider-Man saga, Stan Lee establishes exactly who the character is. This kind of information would probably occupy 20 pages in a modern comic.

But then Parker's life takes a different turn ... in the kind of weird lab accident that Stan loved so much, Peter is bitten by a radioactive spider, which somehow transfers the arachnid genetic characteristics to Peter's blood and he begins to show signs of spider-like abilities. And at first, this appears to be a good thing.

Suddenly, through no hard work or natural talent, Peter becomes the celebrity known as Spider-Man and is all over the media - giving demonstrations of his abilities on television and appearing on chat shows, foreshadowing current media phenomena like America's Got Talent by many decades.

Although Peter never asked for his spider abilities, his first thought is how he can use them to make money and make his own life better. He's a selfish teenager who really needs a serious life-lesson ...

And that's when it all goes horribly wrong. The sudden fame, contrasted with how Peter Parker has been forced to put up with his classmates' relentless bullying, made the teen selfish and stupid, and in a moment of callousness, he allows a criminal to escape the pursuing police, little realising that this same criminal would go on to murder his kindly Uncle Ben.

... And when the life lesson comes, Peter learns one of the great truths of life ... good luck comes with a price and usually, it's way more than you planned on paying.

It's the sort of twist-in-the-tail that Stan Lee had been employing in the mystery tales he'd been running in the preceding 14 issues of Amazing Adventures/Adult Fantasy. But this was the first time it had been applied to a super-hero story. And for a ten-year old reading this, Peter Parker's realisation of how badly he'd messed up - blaming himself for the death of his Uncle and feeling guilt for the devastation he'd brought to the life of his aunt May - is tangible. And it is this simple blueprint that would drive every Spider-Man story of any quality ever after.

Accounts of what happened next vary. Stan Lee has said in autobiography Excelsior that he threw Spider-Man into Amazing Fantasy 15 because Marty Goodman had decreed that it would be the last issue of that magazine, and Stan figured he had nothing to lose. But the evidence tends to indicate otherwise.

Though I have no way of knowing, my opinion is that Stan didn't just put the Spider-Man story in the last issue of Amazing Fantasy. I think he planned to have Spider-Man as an ongoing feature in the title, in the same way that Thor was featured in Journey into Mystery 83, which debuted the same month. The editorial message in Amazing Fantasy 15, unsigned but almost certainly written by Stan, clearly states, "As you can see, we are introducing one of the most unusual new fantasy characters of all time - The SPIDERMAN, who will appear every month in AMAZING. Perhaps, if your letters request it, we will make his stories even longer, or have TWO Spiderman stories per issue."

That's pretty clear cut. "Spiderman" was to be regular feature. So when Marty cancelled Amazing Fantasy out from under Stan, there's a very strong chance he had a couple more Spider-Man stories in the inventory. And we know what Marty thought of inventory.

Journey into Mystery 83, featuring the debut of Thor came out the same day (5th June) as Amazing Fantasy 15, and Strange Tales 101, with the first solo Human Torch Story, was just two months later. Both comics contained three stories - 13 pages plus two five pagers. This fitted the standard Marvel format of 23 story pages per issue.

That first Spider-Man story ran 11 pages. The rest of Amazing Fantasy 15 was filled out with two five-pagers and a three-pager, a total of 24 pages of comic strip. Yet, the first Thor story in Journey into Mystery was 13 pages, and the first solo Human Torch story which appeared in Strange Tales 101 the following month was also 13 pages. So Stan's preferred pagination for Amazing would likely have been two-five pagers and a 13-page Spider-Man story, the same format as Journey into Mystery 83 and Strange Tales 101.

As it turned out, the first two issues of Amazing Spider-Man had two stories - each having one at 14 pages and one at ten. So it's my theory that the two 14-pagers were destined for the never-published 16th and 17th issues of Amazing Fantasy.

After Marty cancelled the title, Stan was left with two 14-pagers on his inventory. So when Goodman relented and gave Spider-Man's own title the green light, there was no way Stan could fit two 14-page stories in Amazing Spider-Man 1. He'd need to to put one in each of the first two ASM issues and commission a pair of ten-page fillers for the remaining story pages. If I'm right, then the untitled first story in ASM1, telling how Spidey saves astronaut John Jameson from certain death in a faulty space capsule would have been intended for Amazing Fantasy 16 ... and the first story in ASM2, "Duel to the Death with the Vulture" would have been meant for Amazing Fantasy 17.

These two tales introduce many of the elements that the Spider-Man strip would be built on: J. Jonah Jameson, the Daily Bugle and his unreasonable hatred of Spider-Man; Aunt May's belief that "Spider-Man is a horrible menace, just like that nice Mr Jameson says"; Jameson's Now Magazine; Peter Parker's selling pictures to Jameson; Spider-Man's spider sense power; and Peter Parker's science know-how used to defeat Spider-Man's enemy.

When you read the two ten-page stories, it seems even more likely that they are the filler tales. The ten-pager from ASM1, "Spider-Man vs The Chameleon", is definitely a weaker story, with a pretty trite plot device (the villain impersonates the hero) and a guest appearance from The Fantastic Four shoe-horned in ... just the kind of gimmick you'd want for a first issue. The ten-pager from ASM2 is also quite weak recycling, as it does, the old invading-aliens-from-space plot that Stan had used so many times before in titles like Strange Tales and Tales to Astonish.

This is all just speculation on my part, but it seems to fit with the known facts.

One story each from Amazing Spider-Man 1 and 2 was reprinted in the second Spider-Man Annual in 1965. I did manage to track down a copy of this at the time, though the remaining stories from ASM1 & 2 would elude for many years.

But none of this was on my radar back in 1965. I wouldn't catch up with a couple of these stories until they were reprinted in the mid-1960s in Amazing Spider-Man King Size Annual 2 - the 14-page lead story from ASM1 and the ten-page "The Uncanny Threat of the Terrible Tinkerer" from ASM2. The other two stories I wouldn't read until very much later.

To my mind, the Amazing Spider-Man comic didn't really get going until issue 3, when Stan and Steve were able to start doing book-length stories. But I'll cover that in the next entry in this Marvel in the Silver Age saga.

Next: Look out, here comes the Spider-Man

... Spins a web, any size

TO SAY I WAS DEVASTATED when Steve Ditko left Amazing Spider-Man (and Marvel) back in mid-1966 wouldn't be overstating it by very much. But then I had just turned twelve, and that sort of thing was a pretty big event in my life at that time. Other stuff, like schoolwork and washing the back of my neck, not so much.

I suppose the reason I engaged with the life of Peter Parker as depicted in Amazing Spider-Man comics was because there were more than a few similarities between us. I too was growing up in a single-"parent" household. I had family responsibilities in that I was expected to care for my younger brother and sister when my mum wasn't there. And though I can't say I was an unpopular kid at school, there was still a contingent of my classmates who were giving me a hard time because I was quite bookish and didn't play football at breaktime.

When Steve Ditko left the strip he'd helped create, his departure was so sudden that he didn't even draw a cover for his final issue, leaving the Marvel Bullpen to have to pull together the above cover by cobbling together bits and pieces of interior art.

Those aspects of Peter Parker's life were very much at the forefront of Steve Ditko's vision for how the Spider-Man saga should play out. But as time wore on during 1965 and 1966, it seemed that Ditko wasn't happy with the changes Stan Lee was making to his magnum opus.

Now, I'm one of the people who thinks Stan did a beyond-terrific job with his scripting of Marvel's comics. Though I agree that Kirby's and Ditko's plots were ground-breaking and superb, it was the scripting skills of Lee that pulled it all together into a coherent package, gave the entire Marvel line its own unique voice and was largely responsible for rocketing Marvel to the top of the sales charts during the last half of the 1960s.

Though there are those who would disagree with this, you only have to look at the work Kirby and Ditko did on their own to see that neither had much appreciation, or even understanding, of characterisation. And if they didn't understand that, then they could only ever see Stan's contributions as interference.

When both Kirby and Ditko struck out on their own, their projects didn't have the commercial success of Stan Lee's Marvel Comics. The "why" is complicated and is something that I'll look at in a later blog entry.

But none of that mattered to my 12 year old self. All I was concerned about was no more Ditko art on Spider-Man.

In retrospect, Stan Lee must have known that many of his readers would feel that way. So he took a big gamble. Rather than letting the new guy - John Romita, fresh off doing a very creditable job on Daredevil, including two stories that co-starred Spider-Man - ease himself into the job slowly, with a couple of safe, warm-up issues, Lee decided to sweep away the last remains of the Ditko plotlines and tackle the dangling Green Goblin thread head-on.

Except, far from being a new guy, John Romita had been a stalwart of the Atlas line of comics. From 1951 till the Great Atlas Implosion of 1957, Romita had been one of Stan Lee's most reliable artists. He'd spearheaded the Atlas hero revival on 1954 by pencilling Captain America ("Commie Smasher") and had drawn Western Kid for the entire 16 issue run, as well as contributing dozens of crime, war and mystery stories throughout the 1950s.

The earliest Atlas comic I could find with Romita art was Spy Cases 5 (June 1951), though he did only a five-page interior story. However, the cover art on Captain America 77 (Jul 1954) is Romita's, likewise the cover art on Western Kid 1 (Dec 1954).

But when Marty Goodman made that fateful decision about winding up his own distribution company, and the Atlas line went from 53 titles to 16 practically overnight, most of Stan's artists found themselves unemployed ... including John Romita. In an interview with Roy Thomas' Alter Ego magazine, Romita explained how he'd been furious when Stan had let him go in 1957. "I had done two or three days' work, ruling up the pages, lettering the balloons, and blocking in the figures on a story - and here comes a call from [Stan's] assistant ... and she says, 'John, I have to tell you that Stan says to stop work on the western book because we're going to cut down on a lot of titles.' I said to her, 'Well, I spent three days on it. I'd like to get $100 for the work, to tide me over.' She said, 'Okay, I'll mention it to Stan.' I never heard another word about the money, and I told [my wife] Virginia, 'If Stan Lee ever calls, tell him to go to hell.' And that was the last work I did for him until 1965." Luckily, Romita had been doing some uncredited work for DC's romance line, so when his Marvel work evaporated, he walked across the road and became a full-time romance artist for National Periodicals.

The earliest credit I could find for John Romita at DC was the cover of Secret Hearts 43 (Nov 57). Ironically, The romance comic was invented by Simon & Kirby, before Jack went on to help revolutionise the superhero comic at Marvel. By March 58 Romita was entrenched as one of DC primary romance pencillers. A few years later, Romita was mainly inking, here over Mike Sekowsky pencils for Girls' Romance 116 (Jun 66).

Then, after nine years hard graft, pencilling at DC, Romita was feeling burned out. Some days he'd get a script and sit staring at it, not knowing where to start. He'd been offered a 9-5 job at an ad agency, storyboarding commercials, paying 25% more than he could making by killing himself drawing comics. So he was seriously considering leaving the comic field altogether. But in the meantime, Marvel's fortunes had reversed and Stan was in the position of not having enough artists to feed the hungry Marvel machine. After all, Kirby and Ditko couldn't draw everything. Lee had hung on to Ayers and Heck during the lean years, and was in the process of wooing back George Tuska, Gene Colan and John Buscema, as well as trying to poach Gil Kane and Win Mortimer from DC.

He also called John Romita around 1963 or 1964, trying to get him to switch sides and come back to the new, re-envigorated Marvel Comics. "[Stan] would say, 'John, we're really starting to roll. It would be great if you could come back.' And I'd say, 'Stan, I'm making $45 a page. What are you paying?' He'd say, 'Twenty-five a page.' And I'd say, '"How can I take a $20 a page cut?' 'Well,' he says, 'maybe we can make it up to you.' I said, 'Stan, I can't give this up as long as I've got it, you know.' He called me three or four times, and I just kept telling him no. But I didn't tell him to go to hell, like I'd threatened."

Romita's first work for Stan was to ink the cover of Avengers 23 from Kirby pencils. But almost immediately, Romita was the new penciller on Daredevil. His first cover was a solo effort but was heavily "fixed up" by Vince Coletta. The next Daredevil cover was just inks over a very typical Jack Kirby design and pencils.

Finally, Romita was talked into coming back to Marvel. But after years of churning out pencilled pages for DC, Romita was determined to leave the pencilling to others and stick to inking. His first job was inking an Avengers cover over Kirby pencils. Then Stan threw him in at the deep end and put him on Daredevil from issue 12 to cover for departing Wally Wood. Romita, an experienced artist, floundered a little in coping with the Marvel way of doing things. Like many other professionals, he was unable to see what it was that set Marvel apart. After showing Stan the first two pages of his first Daredevil story, Stan wasn't satisfied. So he got Jack Kirby to do rough layouts for the rest of the issue for Romita to finish. "As soon as I saw Jack's breakdowns, I knew exactly what Stan meant by pacing. Jack laid out two issues. I still have the original art to those two stories."

Romita's solo pencilling in Daredevil 12 was still very much in the DC style. Everything at eye level and looking quite flat on the page. The later pages, laid-out by Kirby have a punchier feel to them.

Once Romita got the hang of the Marvel style, he was off and running. His story pacing and action sequences become more dynamic over the handful of Daredevil issues he did. So much so that with issue 16, Stan had Spider-Man co-star in the title just to see how Romita would handle the character. And he must have done a bang-up job in Stan's eyes because before he knew it, Romita was the new artist on Amazing Spider-Man. "When I did the Spider-Man/Daredevil stories, I really felt it was obvious that I couldn't do Spider-Man as well as I could do Daredevil. I was amazed when Stan gave me Spider-Man to do. I felt he was desperate. So I did the book to help him out, hoping all the while that it would be temporary."

John Romita was a seasoned pro with decades in the business when he took over Daredevil. Here, his Spider-Man is a curious combination of Ditko's version and what would later become the trademark Romita version of Peter Parker.

But in reality, Ditko was gone, and now it was just Stan Lee and John Romita in charge of guiding the company's second-highest selling title. And over the next couple of years they must have done something right, because within a few months, Amazing Spider-Man had overtaken Fantastic Four in sales and was Marvel's best-selling title and was closing the gap on DC's Superman and Batman comics.

Yet for all this, my 12 year-old-self was very much in a strop after the departure of Ditko. At the time, I recall I only read a couple of the John Romita issues before concentrating my attention of finding all the old Ditko comics I could find in second-hand shops and in swaps with friends.

SAME CHARACTER, DIFFERENT DIRECTION

With his new artist, Stan Lee was no longer walking on eggshells. From here on, this would be Stan's own version Spider-Man, still with troubles, but far less angst-ridden. And the first order of the day was to resolve a few dangling plot threads.

In earlier issues, Ditko had been quite careful to hide the true identity of the Goblin and also to introduce a couple of characters who could well have been the arch-villain. Opinion was divided between proven master of disguise Frederick Foswell, who'd had an earlier criminal career as The Big Man (ASM10), and the father of Peter Parker's college room-mate, who had been introduced as a member of Jonah Jameson's club in Amazing Spider-Man 37.

No longer reliant on the plotting of Steve Ditko, Stan Lee did a fine job of the storyline for Amazing Spider-Man 39, including two heart-stopping story twists.

Amazing Spider-Man 39 left us in no doubt as to the identity of the Green Goblin. Romita's pencil art, inked by "Mickey Demeo" (Mike Esposita who, with Ross Andru, was still one of the main artists over at DC) starts off a bit like a Ditko pastiche, then wobbles a bit before finding its feet around page 6.

But there was other stuff going on in the background. This was where Stan began to move Peter Parker away from being the perennial geek he'd been on Ditko's watch and to dial down the animosity shown towards Peter by his peers. On page 6 (see above), Peter shows some empathy towards Harry Osborn, who's been pretty unpleasant towards him so far in the series, and both Gwen Stacy and Flash Thompson see this and start to think Parker's must be much more of a mensch than they've been giving him credit for. As the series winds on over the next ten or twenty issues, Flash's ribbing becomes more good natured and he finally ends up one of Peter's friends.

But back to the plot ... The Gobin's henchmen stage a fake robbery to lure Spider-Man close enough so they can gas him with a chemical that neutralises his spider-sense. It's this that allows the Goblin to tail Spider-Man, then Peter Parker, undetected so he's able to learn who Spider-Man really is. From there on, Lee piles on shock after shock until there's a heart-stopping battle between the two right outside Aunt May's house, resulting in Peter/Spidey defeated, trussed up and unmasked (just like the spoiler on the cover). But the biggest shock comes on the final page of the story, where the Goblin is revealed to be ... oh, you guessed! (Again, see the picture above.) And of course, it's a two-parter, so we were all going to have to wait a month to find out how Spider-Man escapes from this trap, if indeed he ever does.

Inside another brilliantly designed cover by John Romita, Stan Lee's epic final battle between Spider-Man and his greatest foe, the Green Goblin unwinds with a couple of unlikely plot turns.

Well, he kind of doesn't. In ASM40, goaded by Peter, the Goblin's standard-issue super-villain ego gets up on its hind legs and decides that Peter should be untied so the Goblin can beat him decisively. It's kind of weak, to be honest. And when the Goblin is knocked into some electrical equipment, the shock causes Norman Osborn to lose his memory of ever being the Goblin. It only remains for Spidey to burn the Goblin costume and help his friend's father to safety before rushing home to Aunt May.

Now, I'm one of Stan's biggest boosters and even I find the plotting here a bit slipshop. I can only surmise that - as I speculated earlier - Lee just couldn't wait to clear the decks of all remnants of Ditko's Spider-plotting so he could crack on with his new vision for the series. And in doing so, made a couple of easy choices that got him where he wanted to be more quickly. Compare the contrived way in which Peter is freed of his bonds by the Goblin to the epic battle he waged to free himself of the machinery pinning him down in the Ditko-plotted ASM33. At the same time, to cut Stan some slack, it's only fair to point out that the departure of Ditko was abrupt - he didn't even bother turning in a cover for ASM38, after all - so Stan probably had to rush to pull the following issues together in record time.

Cover: Big, bold animal-style super-villain, check. Splash page: Acts as second cover, explains what changes are in store, check.  Interior pages: New artist has got the hang of drawing the hero? Not so much.

When we get on to issue 41 of Amazing Spider-Man, Stan is announcing that this is a new start point. First, he brings back the splash-page as second cover, something that Ditko was fond of but Stan wasn't. Here it's being used for a very specific purpose. It's letting readers know there's a new sheriff in town and it outlines the changes Stan's going to be making. Then there's the animal-based super-villain - goodness, how Stan loved that idea ... and Steve didn't. Finally, there's making Peter less of a nerd to allow the further softening of Flash, Harry and Gwen towards him. All clearly flagged up on the opening splash page.

The other thing that was apparent to me with this issue was the way Stan was perfectly capable of good plotting despite accusations from some quarters that he wasn't. This issue re-introduces Jameson's son John, US astronaut and all-round good-guy, who will be the super-villain in the very next issue.

The only slight niggle here is that as slick as Romita's art is, he didn't yet have a handle on Spider-Man. But that's no major criticism. After all, even the King himself, Jack Kirby, struggled to depict Spidey with any authenticity. The difference is that Romita would get better.

A detail from ASM 41 pg 16 ... Romita didn't quite have the hang of Spidey's mask yet. And in this poster by Kirby, you can see that Jack also wrestled with the same problem. (Though I've read somewhere recently that Bill Ward might have helped out with these Spidey issues)

As ASM41 unfolds, we can see there's a big improvement over ASM39-40. The pacing is polished, the Rhino's a pretty cool villain and there's the return of Betty Brant - not that I'd ever missed her - but Stan is drawing a line under that sub-plot as well. There's a nice little flashback to ASM1 to explain who John Jameson is, which can't be a coincidence. And it's kicking off what, for Amazing Spider-Man, is a rare three-part story-arc.

Issue 42 centred around one of Stan's favourite plot devices - Spidey must defeat a friend without harming them. But the most memorable scene in the story is the last one, so much so we don't even notice the trail for "Marvel Superheroes on TV" at the foot of the page.

The pace is kept up in Amazing Spider-Man 42, which brings a super-powerful John Jameson to the fore, forcing Spider-Man to battle one of his few supporters. The story is thematically similar to Spidey's battles with the Lizard - a friend is transformed temporarily into a villain and Spidey has to defeat them without harming the innocent human being behind the "baddie". But Stan carries it off well, never losing sight of the Rhino waiting on the sidelines for his comeback in ASM43. And rounds the issue with one of the most iconic scenes in Amazing Spider-Man ... the first appearance of Mary Jane Watson.

It was a plot device that had been around since Amazing Spider-Man 15 ... Aunt May and her friend Mrs Watson trying to fix Peter up with niece Mary Jane Watson, with Peter assuming she'd some kind of speccie geek, like him. It's doubtful that Steve Ditko could have carried off this moment quite as well as Romita did.

So impactful was this revelation on my twelve-year-old sensibilities that I missed entirely the panel at the bottom of the page that told us that Marvel Superheroes were going to be on television. Not in the UK, they weren't. I wouldn't see any of these cartoons until very recently, when they were released on DVD. (I'll cover these in more detail in a future blog.)

Considering Marvel must have been making money out of these cartoons, this ad looks like it was flung together a bit hurriedly ... but then, Marty Goodman wasn't renowned for throwing money at his comics. The double page CBS ad with Superman, that ran at the same time, was produced by professionals.

Stan had mentioned that Captain America, Iron Man, Sub-Marine, Hulk and Thor were going to be on TV in the Bullpen Bulletins in ASM 41. But ASM42 carried a full page house ad. I didn't make the connection at the time, but Marvel had obviously sold the rights to the characters appearing in the anthology titles that had their roots in the Atlas days - Journey into Mystery, Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish. Presumably, no one wanted the Strange Tales characters - Dr Strange and Nick Fury. Or maybe Marty Goodman was holding these two back for bigger things that never quite panned out. I guess we'll never know.

But the conclusion of the Rhino storyline beckoned and I put thoughts of Marvel tv cartoons to one side and again concentrated on the adventures of Spider-Man. John Romita was without equal at designing attention-grabbing cover art, and Amazing Spider-Man 43's was no exception.

Romita gets a great sense of motion into this Spidey-in-jeopardy cover. It really does look like Spidey's being thrown around like a rag doll. Inside the book, Romita draws what remains the definitive version of Mary Jane. (Kirsten Dunst? What was Sam Raimi thinking?)

Inside the book, Stan had clearly grasped the plotting by the, um, horns and was mixing Peter's new interest in Mary Jane with cool action sequences and even had Spider-Man go to Dr Curt Connors (sometimes also the Lizard) to concoct a fluid that would dissolve the unstoppable villain's protective hide. The first battle with the Rhino was memorable because - as usual - Spidey's getting his butt kicked and, in this instance, he's pulled to safety by one of New York's finest. It's a nice touch where a cop risks his life for Spider-Man while the general public has only shown up to see Spidey get pounded.

And, incredibly, this was about as far as I got with the Romita issues back in 1966. I wouldn't read the Lizard story (ASM44 & 45) and the Kingpin story (ASM50 & 51) until much later. More fool me. One Ditko comic I found in an unlikely place some time during 1967 was Amazing Spider-Man 30. Coming across it was a strange bit of synchronicity and ties in with my only sighting of the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon which, unless someone corrects me, was shown only on Scottish television.

SPIDER-MAN GLIMPSED ON-SCREEEN

The mid-1960s was a curious time to be growing up. As I've noted in other posts, the culture was divided between post-war austerity and the youthful optimism of the upcoming generation. For the well-to-do, the Summer of Love was just around the corner, but for kids living in working class areas, life was all about getting entertainment on the cheap. And comics were a great source of cheap entertainment.

In the post-wars years, buying new comics was a bit of a luxury. Fortunately, many shop-keepers were just as cost-conscious as their customers and would often have a plentiful supply of second-hand reading material we could swap (2-for-1) or buy.

Though the picture above shows American kids in 1946 checking out the comics in a corner tobacconist shop, the British experience wasn't much different. US comics were quite well-distributed over here (if a little erratically) and, unlike home-grown comics (or "papers", as we called them), had a perceived after-market value. So we too were able to find shops that had piles of used American comics we could riffle through, looking for issues we'd missed, bargains (second-hand shops didn't charge any more for 80-page annuals than they did for regular issues) or something we knew a mate would swap us two or three comics for.

If anyone's interested, the comics on the counter in the shop picture above are Police Comics 53 (Apr 46), 55 (Jun 46) and Feature Comics 100 (Jul 46).

And because of the way US comics were distributed in Britain, sometimes quite old comics would turn up a year or two later on newsagents' spinner racks, clean and shiny and brand-new, where they'd obviously sat forgotten in a warehouse until someone dug them out and boxed them out to retail outlets along with newer arrivals. In fact, UK distributors of American comics Thorpe and Porter arranged for the UK variants of Marvel Comics to have the month removed from the covers to facilitate just that sort of subterfuge.

So it was, during the summer holidays of 1968, that I came across that copy of Amazing Spider-Man 30 (cover-dated Nov 65) in a newsagents while on holiday visiting my grandparents in the Mansewood area of Glasgow.

By the summer of 1968, Amazing Spider-Man was up to issue 62 or 63 ... but I was only interested in the Ditko version. Where I didn't have the original comic, I usually had the Marvel Tales or Amazing Spider-Man Annual reprint. So you can imagine how happy I was to come across the missing issue 30, separated from my beloved Marvel Comics by around 450 miles.

I must have read that comic from cover to cover about 50 times during that holiday. It got so I knew the dialogue by heart, and even to this day, to me it's probably the most familiar issue of Amazing Spider-Man. And even more strange, it's not an especially great issue. Back in 1968, I thought The Cat was a bit of a weak villain. He was just a burglar, for goodness sake. The scariest thing he could do was swing his grappling iron around his head and cause Spidey to stumble. Pretty lame, right? But it was the only comic I had to hand, so I was going to read it to death.

Back in the summer of 1967, I read this comic so many times, I could recite the caption boxes and speech balloons by heart. And yet, it was never one of my favourite Ditko issues.

But looking back on it now, one thing I did notice was that Stan had misinterpreted what Ditko intended with the opening pages of ASM30. The scene has Spidey trying to foil a robbery carried out by masked goons in purple costumes. Stan has the dialogue reveal that said goons are working for The Cat. Yet these are the very same goons that are working for the Master Planner (Dr Octopus) in ASM31-ASM33. It's easy to blame Stan for this, and others have written to that effect. But bear in mind, Ditko wasn't talking to Stan by this time, and obviously hadn't explained what was going on in any border notes like Jack Kirby would have. So it's probably a bit unfair to lay this error at Lee's door, even if he did write the misleading balloons.

Left: a page featuring Spidey battling the purple henchmen from Amazing Spider-Man 30. Right: Spidey battles the very same henchmen in ASM33. Who were they working for? Stan sure didn't know, but my money's on The Master Planner.

And, for my part, despite the number of times I read that comic, I never recognised the purple guys when they turned up in the very next adventure. My research suggested that the mistake was noted when Marvel reprinted the story in Marvel Tales 23 (Nov 1969), though I've since checked the reprint and didn't see a sign of any such note. However, in the grand scheme of things, it really was the most trivial of mistakes in the history of No-Prizes.

The other thing that made this holiday trip to Glasgow so memorable was I was able to catch an episode of the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon on television. Most Brits will remember this series from the house ads that Marvel ran beginning in their November 1967 issues. The show certainly didn't screen in the London area. If anyone reading this has any info to add about other regions the cartoon was transmitted in, I'd be very interested to know.

This ad would have come out too late for me to have been forewarned that there even was a Spider-Man cartoon, as it wouldn't have reached the UK till November or December. And even now, I've never seen an episode of the Fantastic Four cartoon.

It's so long ago now, I can't remember what the episode was about. In many ways it didn't matter. The thrill my 13 year old self experienced seeing Spider-Man moving - swinging through Manhattan - for the first time was huge indeed. These days it's probably hard to understand, with three Sam Raimi movies and two by the other chap under our belts, but in 1968, it was a Really Big Thing.

In the early 1960s, tv cartoons were dominated by the Hanna-Barbera company. The founders had been responsible for the heyday of MGM's Tom & Jerry shorts, produced for cinema distribution. The pair, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, had won seven Oscars for their work on the cat and mouse cartoon and in 1957, as MGM wound down production on their theatrical shorts, Hanna and Barbera formed the legendary tv production company and set to work on their first original series, a half hour show comprising of Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Pixie and Dixie, the latter a variation on the Tom & Jerry formula. The series won them an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in the field of Children's Programming.

This was the style of tv cartoons to dominate the airwaves for the next few years. When Hanna-Barbera moved from syndication to network, their shows aped the style of popular tv sit-coms (The Flintstones was based on The Honeymooners, Top Cat was a take on the Phil Silvers Show). But in the UK we wouldn't see a show that looked beyond funny animals and similar themes until Hanna-Barbera commissioned comic book artist Doug Wildey to design their dramatically dramatic adventure animated show Jonny Quest in 1964. 

One of the highlights of my pre-teen years was the Hanna-Barbera show Jonny Quest, with its Lizard Men and its Living Mummies, it was the go-to show for all self-respecting nerds in the 1960s.

Jonny Quest was different because the animation art was rendered in a more "realistic" way. It used sf and fantasy themes as the basis for its plots and it mostly avoided the goofy and clownish sound effects ("Boing!", "Honk!") that peppered shows like Huckleberry Hound and Quickdraw McGraw. I especially remember the episode that featured an unstoppable living mummy ("The Curse of Anubis") and the story with the mechanical spider ("The Robot Spy").

There had been "realistic" action adventure animation shows before Jonny Quest - Alex Toth's Space Angel for Cambria Productions three years earlier, which I don't remember ever seeing in the UK - but Quest was the one that set a new bar for tv cartoon shows.

After the less-than-successful, one-season Marvel Superheroes tv show in 1966, Marty Goodman looked to get his big two titles on network television, as opposed to going the lower-budgeted syndication route. I have a pretty strong suspicion that Stan Lee might have had a persuading role in that decision.

I never saw any episodes of the Fantastic Four cartoon, which was produced by Hanna-Barbera under the supervision of comic book legend Alex Toth, but I did manage to see an episode of Spider-Man when it aired on Scottish television in 1968, and have since got hold of a DVD box set of all three seasons.

The show didn't use the logo from the comic, which was a bit of a disappointment for me back in 1968, and though Betty Brant was long gone from the comic by this time, she was prominently featured in the cartoon. They didn't make her very pretty, though.

The Spider-Man show was produced by Grantray-Lawrence, who'd produced the earlier Marvel Superheroes show. With Spider-Man they had a larger budget to play with and it showed.

The very first episode featured Dr Octopus, though the plot wasn't like anything from any of the comics. Curiously, it took Spider-Man out of his familiar urban environment and placed him on top of a remote mountain where Doc Ock has his lair.

Though it's mostly remembered for its insanely catchy theme song (it's going through your head right now, isn't it?), some stories stuck quite closely to the plots of the comic books, though simplified. The half-hour slot was composed of two adventures running about 11 minutes each with a couple of ad breaks.

The show did take liberties with the back story of Peter Parker, and in the very first adventure had him arriving at the mountain hideout of Dr Octopus in his own car, something that would have been way beyond the means of the comic book Parker. The supporting cast was limited mostly to just Jonah Jameson and Betty Brant, though the occasional episode might show Aunt May. Characters like Flash Thompson and Liz Allen were absent and Peter seemed to be a full-time employee of The Daily Bugle rather than a high school or university student.

The Spider-Man tv show worked best when Spidey was in his familiar New York surroundings, but also worked pretty well when it followed the storylines from the comics, as with "Where Crawls the Lizard".

The stories were kind of fun and in some cases, as with "Where Crawls the Lizard", followed the old Steve Ditko stories exactly. Reports of a man-size lizard bring Peter Parker to the Florida Everglades where he first battles the creature underwater. He discovers that the husband of Martha Connors - a two-armed scientist working on a cure for "swamp fever", not limb replacement - has disappeared. Spidey quickly figures out who the Lizard is. Using Dr Connors' lab, he concocts an antidote and, in a showdown in an old Spanish fort, pours the serum down the Lizard's throat.

The quality of the series deteriorated a little with the second and third seasons. Grantray-Lawrence went out of business and Krantz Animation took over, with Ralph Bakshi as the supervisor. Unfortunately, the budgets were smaller and Bakshi took to recycling as much of the animation from the earlier shows as he could to save money.

Looking at the show now, it does seem quite clunky, and the voice-actors' performances appear over-dramatic, but at the time, it was quite an innovation and further indication of how well Marvel's fortunes had fared in the five years from 1961 to 1966. Stan had created the MMMS to transform readers into customers and encouraged Marty Goodman to embrace licensing and merchandising, to further capitalise on revenue generated by the company's new, successful characters.

What I wouldn't have given back in 1966 to have been able to order an Incredible Hulk sweatshirt, but I had no idea where to get $3.95 from.

By getting Marvel characters on to television, Marvel had begun their unstoppable rise. After the Spider-Man and Fantastic Four cartoons came the Spidey Super-Stories segments on The Electric Company, The Amazing Spider-Man (live action, 1977), The Incredible Hulk (live action, 1977), Fantastic Four (1978), Spider-Man (live action, Toei Company, 1978), Spider-Woman (1979), Spider-Man (1981), Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends (1981), The Incredible Hulk (1982), X-Men (1992), Iron Man (1994), Fantastic Four (1994), Spider-Man (1994), The Incredible Hulk (1996), Silver Surfer (1998), Spider-Man Unlimited (1999), The Avengers: United They Stand (1999), X-Men Evolution (2000), Spider-Man the New Animated Series (2003), Fantastic Four: The World's Greatest Heroes (2006), Spectacular Spider-Man (2008), Wolverine and the X-Men (2008), Iron Man: Armoured Adventures (2009), The Superhero Squad Show (toy tie-in, 2009), Black Panther (2010), The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes (2010), Marvel Anime (2010), Ultimate Spider-Man (2012), Avengers Assemble (2013), Hulk and the Agents of SMASH (2013), Agents of SHIELD (live action, 2013), Marvel Disk Wars (2014), Agent Carter (2015), Powers (2015) and Daredevil (2015).

But in 1967, the company was less than a year away from the end of the constricting distribution contract it had with the DC-owned Independent News, and would soon be in a position to publish more than its allotted 12 titles a month. The beginning of Marvel's massive expansion phase was just round the corner.

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