BHOC: MARVEL TALES #104

MARVEL TALES continued to carry on, reprinting stories from AMAZING SPIDER-MAN that had originally been published only a relatively few years prior. But as I was still in the process of filling in the gaps in my Marvel knowledge, these reprints were invaluable to me, and I followed them as avidly as any new comic book. We were entering the crux of writer Gerry Conway’s run on AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, the point where he had been matched with artist Ross Andru and the character and the strip took on its 1970s characteristics–a bit more manic and bonkers than what Lee and Romita had done in the 1960s, with some often-haphazard plotting and with every character interaction emotionally dialed up to eleven. Gerry was close in age to Peter Parker when he wrote these stories, far close than Stan had been, and so he channeled his own experiences into the book.

This was also about the point where the web-slinger was becoming commodified. Already, at the time this story came out, he was headlining in a second regular title, MARVEL TEAM-UP. Spider-Man merchandise began to pop up more often, buoyed on the back of the 1967 animated cartoon, which would run in syndication all throughout this decade. And in a short while, Spidey would begin making live action appearances on PBS’s The Electric Company. Point being that there was a lot more pressure and a lot more demands made of the person who was writing AMAZING SPIDER-MAN than there had been in the past.

Case in point: Conway had been asked to introduce a Spider-Mobile, as toy manufacturers wanted to be able to license a vehicle for the wall-crawler (not really caring that driving a car was the antithesis of web-swinging and wall-crawling.) Gerry wasn’t happy with having to do this, but he made the best of a bad situation by having Spidey and the Human Torch spend several issues constructing the new Spider-Mobile, and then having it turn out to be much more of a problem than it was worth. Spidey winds up driving it off the edge of a pier by accident, getting rid of the absurd vehicle (at least for the moment.) But Marvel had a spider car thereafter that could be licensed.

So what’s going on in this issue? Well, on his way to Mary Jane Watson’s apartment, Spider-Man comes across the aftermath of a crime scene. A woman has been murdered–and MJ apparently saw it all happen from her apartment window, making her a target of the killer to prevent her from revealing what she saw. Looking around for the culprit, Spidey runs into his old foe the Vulture, albeit a larger and stronger version of same. The paid engage in an inconclusive skirmish, but the Vulture gets away. After spending an evening with Johnny Storm putting together more of the Spider-Mobile, Peter Parker comes home to find his roommate Harry Osborn being absolutely hostile to him. Harry’s been in a bad way since his father Norman died, but this behavior is still pretty way out there.

After class–and a conversation with Professor Miles Warren concerning how Peter’s absenteeism is going to cause him to flunk another class, Peter and MJ take a ride with Flash Thompson in his new car. It’s during this joyride that the Vulture swoops down and snatches MJ up like a bird of prey. So startled is Flash that he loses control of the vehicle, and it crashes. Neither man is badly hurt, and this gives Peter the opportunity to change to Spidey and go to the rescue. Web-swinging frantically, he catches up with the Vulture just in time to see the villain drop MJ towards the ground below. This triggers Spidey’s PTSD about having failed to save Gwen Stacy from a similar fate, and he hurls himself bodily forward, snatching up MJ and ricocheting to safety on the ground below. During this period, the spectre of Gwen hung over pretty much every story, giving her demise an almost instantly legendary status.

With MJ safe, Spidey gives chase, pursuing the Vulture back onto the campus. It turns out that his target wasn’t truly MJ at all–spotting her in Flash’s convertible was merely a fortunate coincidence. The person he’s really out to kill is an unnamed lab assistant in the biology department. Spidey jumps in to protect the woman, and as he and the Vulture tussle, he realizes that his foe had been transformed–he’s not wearing a birdlike costume, he’s actually become a strange man/bird hybrid. The fight carried on outside, where the campus police can get into the act, and where Harry Osborn can witness it. From Harry’s thoughts, it’s clear that he knows that his father was the Green Goblin and that he intends to follow in the family business. But that’s a problem for another issue.

But we’re getting to the end of his issue, and so it’s time to set up a cliffhanger. The Vulture soars high into the sky with Spidey hanging on for dear life, and then when the pair are super-high above the ground, he knocks the wall-crawler loose, sending him plummeting towards the ground below. Given that we just saw Spidey save MJ from a similar fate (albeit a drop that wasn’t quite this high) it doesn’t really seem much like our hero is in such terrible trouble here. Gerry or somebody must have liked this cliffhanger, though, as it would be repeated a number of times over the next couple of years.