BHOC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN POCKET BOOKS Volume 3

As a kid, I didn’t really have any way to get information about what new comic books and related publications would be coming out when. I was dimly aware of fanzines, but I never tried to purchase any on the regular–my meager funds were needed to buy actual comics, after all. So I had no idea that the Pocket Books series of paperback-sized collections of early AMAZING SPIDER-MAN stories would be continuing into a third volume until I saw said volume on a shelf in the bookstore during a shopping visit. I’m pretty certain that I talked my Mom into laying out the required $2.25 for it, a feat that I was getting better at managing.

This volume continued the run of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN sequentially, containing the stories originally published in issues #14-20. Due to the limited page count, however, the covers to those issues weren’t included, so I was puzzled by the note on the splash page indicating that the Hulk would be along before long. Not having seen the cover, I had no idea that he’d be showing up in that story. Missing from this collection with the first AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL, but its events are recapped in part in issue #18. This just frustrated me as a reader, though. I felt as though something important had been left out.

By this point, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko had shook out all of the false starts and boondoggles of the earliest issues of the series and were confidently crafting new adventures for the teenaged wall-crawler. Ditko became a more prominent force in the plotting of every issue (though he wouldn’t overtly get credited for it until issue #25, beyond the scope of this volume.) The storytelling is confident, and even at the relatively tiny size of this paperback volume it was clear that Ditko’s artwork was growing more polished and dynamic as well. He’d found a good groove that incorporated the elements of everyday discordance that had typified his suspense story work with a confidence in depicting frantic action. His Spider-Man moved and fought like no other character in comics at that time.

Ditko and Lee also continued to introduce new foes for Spider-Man issue after issue, building up a rogue’s gallery of enemies that was just about the best one in the field. In this volume alone, we meet the Green Goblin (whose true identity is kept a mystery–a mystery that doesn’t even have any real viable suspects this early on), Kraven the Hunter and the Scorpion. The team balanced that by bringing back established foes as well, including this time out the Enforcers (twice!), the Chameleon, the Ringmaster and his Circus of Crime (from an INCREDIBLE HULK appearance) and the Sandman.

The soap opera elements of the strip continued to evolve as well during this run. Having definitively paired off Peter Parker and Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson’s secretary Betty Brant, Lee and Ditko introduce a new complication: Liz Allen, Peter’s classmate who earlier wanted nothing to do with him, has come around after Peter did something foolish and heroic in an earlier issue, and pursues him at full tilt, much to the consternation of bully Flash Thompson–to say nothing of Betty herself. This triangle, while it never quite became an Archie-Betty-Veronica thing (because Peter pretty much never evidences any interest in Liz) helped to keep things interesting and provide for humorous complications in Spider-Man’s civilian life. Additionally, Jameson himself begins to take on a broader role as a foil for Parker in both his costumed and civilian identities. In Ditko’s hands, Jameson is a full-on caricature; venal, petty, self-aggrandizing, manipulative, egotistical, weasley, opinionated and just plain funny. It’s really no wonder he became so popular as a figure readers loved to hate.

This volume also includes a famous sequence that shifted the direction of not just this series but in a way of Marvel’s output as a whole. Lee and Ditko has been experimenting with serialized storylines in their Hulk strip in TALES TO ASTONISH, and here they produce the book’s first true multi-part adventure–one that hinges upon personal drama more than super hero conflict. In the middle of a pitched battle with the Green Goblin, Spider-Man learns that his Aunt May has suffered a near-fatal heart attack and he rushes to her side, appearing to all assembled as a coward. For the entirety of the next issue, Peter refrains from going into action, fearful that he could get hurt and leave his Aunt with nobody to look after her. Jameson, meanwhile, is in his ascent, making hay out of the wall-crawler’s seeming cowardice. It’s only when Aunt May herself gives Peter a pep speech about showing gumption that he gets back on the horse and vows to redeem himself as Spider-Man, tackling the Sandman whom he’d also earlier run from. On the letters page, Stan indicated that the story plot was entirely Ditko’s–he seems like he wasn’t confident that this would work, and so he was surprised by the positive reaction to the story, and it pushed him to do more things like it going forward.

This was the Spider-Man that I loved, the Spider-Man that wasn’t much in evidence in the current titles, where he’d mostly gotten his life together and become quasi-cool and confident. So I ate these stories up with a spoon, and they only made me love the character more. Unfortunately, this would be the final volume in the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN Pocket Books library. I’m guessing that while the initial volumes performed well, the later ones that focused on later issues didn’t have quite teh same sales draw, and so the line wound up discontinued. Again, without any way to get news about such things, I was oblivious to its fate, and so I haunted our assorted local booksellers hoping to find the nonexistent Volume 4 there at some point.