GH: MARVEL TALES #151

As I’ve spoken about in the past, it proved to be relatively easy to get me to start buying a given series every month. A book just needed to make me picking it up a habit for an issue or two, and away I would go. In the case of MARVEL TALES, the long-running reprint series that re-presented earlier AMAZING SPIDER-MAN stories, this pattern was put to the test in 1982. At that time, new Spidey editor Tom DeFalco along with assistant editor Mark Gruenwald, not really liking the mid-1970s Spidey stories that they were stuck reprinting, decided to simply start the process over and begin again at the jump. Now, I had read the first 20 issues of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN prior to this, plus AMAZING FANTASY #15, in a series of three paperback books. So there wasn’t a whole lot of reason for me to keep on reading here. Yet, I did anyway–in part because these early Spider-Man stories are just so good, and it was nice to see them at full size rather than reduced to paperback proportions. But eventually, during my 1983 purge, the book wound up on the chopping block.

BHOC: MARVEL TALES #53

As I’ve spoken about in the past, the first issue of MARVEL TALES that I ever read was the one above, #53. It was a gift from my Uncle Jerry, a house painter who had come across it and two other comic books at some job site where he was working, and thought to pick them up for me. This was another of the Marvel books that I read in my early “only DC” period that failed to make me a Marvel convert. It was memorable, and well-executed, but the story also felt a little bit dark and dangerous to me. I didn’t like that the police were trying to capture Spider-Man, and that they outright shot at him. That wasn’t what I wanted from my super heroes at the age of seven, and so while I kept the comic, MARVEL TALES wasn’t a book that I paid any attention to.

BHOC: MARVEL TALES #91

But once I got a few years older, and began to expand my reading interests out into the Marvel Universe, MARVEL TALES was a series i came back to. My first issue was #91, seen above, which was right at the transition point of the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN series. Spidey co-creator Stan Lee had handed over the reins of the book to young newcomer Gerry Conway, who worked arm-in-arm with artist John Romita to keep Marvel’s best-selling series on top of the heap. I bought and read the book every month, even when I’d occasionally come across an issue reprinting a story I had already read (my grade school friend Don Sims had a small stack of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN issues, and I’d read through most of them at various points)

Back in the present of 1983, by the time this issue came out, reprinting AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #13, creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko had more or less figured out what they were doing with the character, after some early-on teething pains as they worked out the strip. Spider-Man was designed as something of an anti-Super Hero, a character comically plagued by ordinary problems and difficulties in a soap opera style. This human element was a new thing in comics at the time, and it separated AMAZING SPIDER-MAN from everything else in the field, even the other Marvel books of the day. Ditko’s art was quirky and strange and singular, and as he grew more adept and began to plot the series more and more, it became ever more exciting.

This issue, for example, includes a brief interlude in which Spider-Man goes to see a psychiatrist, fearing that he’s cracking up. You see, somebody else has been impersonating the wall-crawler and committing crimes, and Peter Parker can’t be sure that it isn’t he himself sleepwalking. But he’ got no explanation for how somebody else might be able to copy his unique spider-powers. The scene with the shrink is a short interlude in this story, but Ditko and Lee would come back to it again later in the next Mysterio adventure.

Speaking of Mysterio, he’s another of the wonderfully colorful villains that Ditko and Lee came up with for the wall-crawler to battle with. Spider-Man has just about the best collection of villains in the field, most of which were originated in these early days. In the story, Mysterio presents himself as a kind of sorcerer, a Doctor Strange type with weird, unexplained powers. In actuality, he’s a special effects wizard who is trying to cash in on his talents by using them for crime and framing Spider-Man. (He, of course, was the fake Spider-Man who framed Spidey at the beginning.) And especially in these early sequences where the reader doesn’t quite know what Mysterio’s deal is, he makes a strong impression.

The other thing that was unique about Spider-Man in the early days is how much emphasis was placed upon his life as High School student Peter Parker. There’d be pages and pages in every issue spotlighting Pete and his cast of characters, whether school kids like Liz Allan and Flash Thompson or the reporters of the Daily Bugle such as publisher J. Jonah Jameson and Betty Brant. Pete also had to take care of his doting Aunt May. It was a rich cast, and nobody else dedicates as much real estate to making the supporting players feel like an important part of the story. Legend has it that the DC editors of the era were mystified by this approach. They were certain that kids would lose interest in these Peter-heavy sequences. But far from it–it was his troubles that endeared Peter Parker to the audience.

The Lee/Ditko run of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN is pound-for-pound the very best material generated by Marvel in that early period, outdoing even Jack Kirby’s FANTASTIC FOUR during that same time. And while they clearly looked a bit dated by 1983 standards, these stories were still a lot more entertaining than much of what MARVEL TALES had been reprinting beforehand. So on that end, DeFalco and Gruenwald were absolutely right.

This issue even includes a Statement of Ownership, so we can get a better picture of just how well the series was performing at the point where I dropped it. As we can see, MARVEL TALES had been selling 122,435 copies an issue on a print run of 296,005, giving it an efficiency rating of 41%. While pretty much all of the other reprint books in the Marvel line had fallen by the wayside, the tremendous popularity of Spider-Man kept MARVEL TALES chugging along for years and years yet.

After dropping MARVEL TALES, I would drop in occasionally every time the book reprinted an issue that I hadn’t previously read. But I didn’t start reading it regularly again until I came on staff at Marvel and began to get a weekly bundle of the company’s entire publishing output. So my first issue back was this one, #228, reprinting a Juggernaut adventure that I had read when it was published new.