BHOC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #191

Another week brought another raft of new comic books at my regular 7-11’s spinner rack, and I was right there on Thursday as I was every week to pick them up. First book this week was this month’s issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, a title that I had been enjoying more and more thanks to the soap operatic work of writer Marv Wolfman and the Steve Ditko-inspired artistry of Keith Pollard. This whole period of about fifty issues is one that has been largely overlooked historically, but as a reader at the time, it represented a very good run, one that I enjoyed wholeheartedly.

Last month, Spider-Man had gotten involved in a battle with the Man-Wolf, who was actually the son of the wall-crawler’s employer and nemesis, Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson. At the end of the fight, the Man-Wolf seemingly fell to his death. I say seemingly, because Spidey saw his plummeting body vanish in a flash of light before it could hit the water. But nobody else did. And so as this issue opens, Jameson is absolutely on the warpath for Spider-Man’s head. The efforts of City Editor Joe Robertson to calm him down simply don’t work this time, and Jonah even demands that Peter Parker be fired, as the kid has some seeming connection to Spider-Man that Jameson isn’t willing to tolerate any longer.

Robertson, though, has a soft spot in his heart for Peter, and so he assigns him to cover another story anyway, regardless of Jameson’s orders to fire him. This winds up being perfect timing, as Mary Jane Watson had been hoping to be able to see the King Tut exhibit while it was in town, and Pete’s new gig gives him a pair of coveted tickets to the event. But things aren’t all peaches and cream for Spidey as he discovers when he web-swings across the city. Jameson’s full-blitz attack in the Daily Bugle about Spidey being a killer is convincing people that he’s a genuine menace, despite the fact that the police cleared him of any charges just a few issues ago. But there’s no easy way for the web-slinger to reverse public opinion, and so he’s on the outs with the people of New York City.

Not content to clobber his enemy in print, Jameson proceeds to do what he always does in situations such as this one: he goes to visit Spencer Smythe, the genius though criminal inventor who had built a series of Spider-Slayer robots to take down the wall-crawler. Jameson is unaware, however, that Smythe is the one that had been controlling the Man-Wolf from afar, and that he seeks revenge upon both the Bugle Publisher and Spider-Man for the parts they played in his impending demise: poisoning from the radioactive materials he used to power his Spider-Slayers is even now killing him. Delighted by his good fortune, Smythe presents Jameson with his latest model creation–before second later handcuffing the Publisher to a bomb.

Back at his apartment, after mixing up a new batch of web-fluid and quickly testing all of his powers to make sure everything is in order, Peter checks his mail–and is dismayed to learn that the toy and merchandising companies that had licensed his likeness for mech have all cancelled their deals due to Spidey’s newfound reputation as a killer. this does raise the question of why they’d be sending these notices of cancellation to Peter Parker’s place–way to safeguard that secret identity, pal! Either way, this pisses Spidey of, and he suits up and heads out for Jameson’s office to have a showdown with the creep.

But before he can arrive there, Spidey finds himself under attack by the latest Spider-Slayer, which has tracked him down across the rooftops. There follows an extended battle, on in which artist Pollard “borrows” a few poses from earlier Steve Ditko comics. But this makes the battle seem more classic and quirky, and really worked for me as a reader. In the end, the Spider-Slayer succeeds in knocking out the web-slinger, and Smythe is on the site himself to scoop his hated foe up and take him into captivity.

When Spidey regains consciousness, he finds that Smythe has chained him to a bomb–the same bomb that Jameson is shackled to. The explosive is set to go off in 24 hours, and will detonate prematurely should anybody attempt to tamper with it. And that’s the cliffhanger that we’re left with: Spidey and Jameson handcuffed together with a bomb that will kill them both in a few short hours, garnering Smythe his revenge. To Be Continued!

The Spider’s Web letters page this month includes this year’s Statement of Ownership, which gives us a sense as to how the title had been performing over the past 18 months or so. According to the data, ASM was shifting 248, 105 copies on a print run of 527, 215, giving the book an efficiency of about 47%