BHOC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN POCKET BOOKS Volume 1

So at around this point, I finally got my hands on a copy of the first volume of the MARVEL POCKET BOOKS paperback collections of early AMAZING SPIDER-MAN stories. Some months earlier, I had bought a copy of Volume 2 and loved it, but the first volume was by that point simply no place to be found in my area.

BHOC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN POCKET BOOKS Volume 2

So I believe that it got ordered from the Superhero Merchandise mail order catalog–or Heroes World as the chain eventually became known. And it must have been either a birthday gift or else an item that I ordered with birthday gift money–that $2.25 plus shipping costs would have been tough for me to have come up with without cutting into my weekly comic book purchases.

Back in 1979 when I bought this volume, there really weren’t a lot of good ways of being able to read older comic book stories apart from hunting down the back issues. There were regular reprint series, but their content was often haphazard, and by 1979 they were beginning to die on the vine. And there were few book collections about comic books. Each one that existed became a treasured tome, a repository of ancient and forbidden knowledge that otherwise was impossible to possess. These Pocket Books paperbacks reprinted in full the contents of around six issues of the title they were covering–seven in the case of this one, which included the introductory Spider-Man story from AMAZING FANTASY #15–with the pages reproduced intact, rather than having the panels cut up and arranged as often happened with comics in the paperback format. The lettering could indeed be tough to decipher for older eyes, but as a newly-minted 12-year-old, I was fine, and this was my preferred format for many years.

This little paperback contained AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1-6 (as well as the AMAZING FANTASY #15 story as I’ve already mentioned) by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. These were transformative comic books when they first came out, utterly unlike anything else that was being published. For all that I enjoy the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby run of FANTASTIC FOUR more personally, it’s difficult to argue that the Lee/Ditko AMAZING SPIDER-MAN run was the finest and most revolutionary series published during the early Marvel days. But that all said, I’m king of glad in retrospect that I wound up reading the second volume in this series first. That book was the first time that I really connected with Spider-Man as a character and felt his appeal. But these even earlier stories are far more haphazard, with occasional bad choices or weird changes of direction. It took Lee and Ditko five or six issues to really get their arms around what made this series work, so as a reading experience, these early issues are a little bit herky-jerky, for all that they’re also quite a fun deconstruction of the whole super hero mythos.

Spider-Man was and is the ultimate expression of adolescence in super hero comic books. The fact that the lead character was secretly only a teenager, and that he regularly made bad decisions and suffered crushing defeats, and that his superhuman powers gave him no great amount of joy made the character far more relatable and human than anybody else whose adventures were being published at the time. As I’ve said before, the earliest Spider-Man stories read almost like a parody of typical super hero adventures as they were codified by 1962, using the premise, “What would really happen if such characters existed in the real world?” Every place that a typical super hero strip breaks left, Spider-Man breaks right. So on that level, there was a layer of subversion built into the series. Over time, that subversion became the norm, as even characters and series that were well-established by the time that AMAZING SPIDER-MAN began coming out eventually attempted to incorporate some version of the approach that it continues to evidence.

The first two issues of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN contained two stories each before the series eventually adopted an issue-long format. The reason for this was simple; despite the legend that had been propagated in the years following the character’s awesome success, Spider-Man’s debut strip wasn’t simply thrown into the final issue of an already-cancelled series. Rather, Spider-Man was intended to be the new cover feature of AMAZING FANTASY, and Lee and Ditko had already completed a story for AMAZING FANTASY #16 and were in the process of crafting one for #17 when publisher Martin Goodman cancelled AMAZING FANTASY. Those stories were intended to occupy only the first portion of their issues, leaving another ten pages for a pair of one-off fantasy stories of the type that AMAZING FANTASY had been delivering regularly. So when Spider-Man was revived and spun off into his own title, new stories needed to be created to fill those 10-page slots. Consequently, the development of the strip is even more haphazard than usual, as the order the stories were created in isn’t truly the order in which they ran.

Many of the action-adventure conflicts in the first couple of Spider-Man stories feel uncharacteristic of the character, even if the Peter Parker conflicts within those stories are still in the proper neighborhood. As Steve Ditko took more and more command of the plotting of the strip, he focused the series on being relatively grounded in an urban setting–more Batman than Superman, if that makes sense. So Spidey’s early exploits saving a space capsule in distress, battling a face-changing Communist spy and taking on some weird aliens who are infiltrating America through gimmicked consumer electronics all fit poorly into the milieu that would eventually be worked out. Once the book-length stories begin starting with issue #3, the series has found its footing, and thereafter Spider-Man mainly contends with terrestrial super-villains who are committing crimes and vying for control of the underworld and other such relatively-grounded activities.

The artwork of Steve Ditko also began to flourish across these early Spidey stories. Ditko had only ever done one super hero strip, Charlton’s Captain Atom, before embarking on Spider-Man. And he seemed initially ill-at-ease trying to deliver the sort of bombastic action that was favored by editor Stan Lee–action that was the hallmark of Marvel’s juggernaut creator, Jack Kirby. Ditko’s forte, at least initially, was in creating characters and vistas that were off-kilter and eerie and weird. He didn’t lack for dramatics, but his were more evocative, more intellectual and emotion-based rather than adrenaline-charged. It took him a little while to find his rhythm depicting super hero battle sequences, but once he found his groove, he became a master at them.

So I dug the stories in this volume–though not quite as much as I had the second volume and issues #7-13. If I’d read this volume first, I’m not certain that I would have connected with Spider-Man in the way that I did, and it might have taken me far longer to have become a real fan of the web-slinger’s exploits. Having already made that leap, though, i could appreciate these early efforts for what they were: tentative first steps on the road to the realization of the greatest comic book super hero of the era.