BHOC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #196

As I revealed when we covered the previous issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, as a young reader I completely bought into the legitimacy of Aunt May’s death in this storyline. And part of that was the result of this issue, which does a fine job of making it seem like a real thing (while also dropping in enough clues for older fans that when the turn eventually came, it would all track.) I wasn’t yet thinking like a comic book editor, so I didn’t question why the choice might be made to kill Aunt May in a random issue of the book (hey, hadn’t Gwen Stacy met her end in #121?) nor that the big issue #200 was in the immediate distance, which would have inevitably have been a big, special story. Nope, I took this one completely at face value–to the point where I argued its validity to my more skeptical (and correct) comic book reading friends such as David Steckel. But I think this is the magic of storytelling: being able to carry the reader along on the journey regardless of how skeptical about it they may be. Let’s see just how this creative team managed this for me.

Artwise, this issue was a fill-in, and the need for multiple inkers indicates that it was probably pretty in the hole on the schedule. Al Milgrom, newly freed from his duties as a DC editor and having come on staff in a similar role at Marvel, provides the breakdowns for this issue (credited as layouts, which would seem to indicate that they were relatively basic drawings without a lot of specific fine detail added in) which were inked and finished by the tag-team of Jim Mooney and Frank Giacoia, each an accomplished artist in their own right. It’s maybe not the most polished-looking issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ever released, but it’s far from the worst.

The writing was still in the hands of Marv Wolfman, who was also serving as the book’s editor. During this period, my appreciation for Marv’s work continued to grow, and at the point where he made the switch over to DC in a year or so, if you’d asked me at the time I’d have told you that he was maybe my favorite writer of the period. Marv has said in the past that while he himself was more of a fan of FANTASTIC FOUR, that he found that writing AMAZING SPIDER-MAN came more naturally to him, and he felt like he did better work on this title than on FF. Here, he was building off of the nugget of a plot that his friend Len Wein had set into motion months earlier while he was writing the series: the return of the nameless burglar who had killed Uncle Ben. That said, every other element of this serial was entirely of Marv’s devising.

There is relatively little Spider-Man in this issue, as the story is primarily dedicated to both the fallout of May Parker’s death and the ongoing subplots of the title’s assorted supporting characters. On this page, for example, with Jonah Jameson having gone unreasonably full attack dog on Spider-Man following the seeming demise of his son, John, Robbie Robertson has had enough and he quits the Daily Bugle. This kind of scene was routine at the time, but it’s hard to imagine any creator in modern times devoting this much space to players like Jonah and Robbie, not without Peter present. I feel like there’s a better balance that we could be striking in this regard.

Spinning back to the opening, the issue begins with Spider-Man racing across New York to the retirement home that Aunt May had been living in. There, after a fast change back into civilian garb, he’s confronted with the truth of May’s demise by Dr. Rinehart, the manager of the facility. As you’d imagine, this sends Peter into a grief-stricken spiral in which he articulates just how often he took his Aunt for granted and how he put off spending time with her whenever Spider-Man’s services might have been needed. This also brings up memories of all of the other people in his life that Peter had lost–including the Black Cat, who had only recently been introduced and who would be back among the living in a few short issues. Anyway, Peter is a big lost, but he imagines Aunt May speaking to him, telling him that he needs to go on with his life. And then Robbie shows up, having found Peter, and delivers the quasi-sermon that you see on the page above.

His spirits buoyed, Peter heads over to Aunt May’s old home in Forest Hills. She had used it as collateral to finance her stay at the Restwell Nursing Home, and Peter’s going to figure out how to liquidate it. But when he opens the front door, he finds the place completely ransacked and torn apart. This gets Peter thinking, and he picks up on the obvious clue that Wolfman has left for longtime readers: the name Dr. Ludwig Rinehart is an alias that a longtime Spidey foe has used before. So now, Spidey thinks that maybe that villain was responsible for May’s death, and he suits up and tears across town, intent on a confrontation.

But before he can make it to the rest home, Spidey is ambushed by a team of goons operating on behalf of a shadowy employer. Not really on his game, the web-slinger is clobbered in about two pages, and he wakes up in an issue-final splash confronted by his captors’ employer: the Kingpin of crime! Spider-Man doesn’t really have an ax to grind with the Kingpin at this point, so all he wants is to get out of there. But it’s clear that that isn’t going to happen until and unless he can take the big man down. To Be Continued! At this point, it’s patently clear that something more involved and sinister is going on at that Rest Home–but still, I continued to buy into Aunt May’s death wholeheartedly, even with the tip to a familiar villain. (I hadn’t read the initial Dr. Ludwig Rinehart story at this time, which is probably why the name and its ramifications didn’t jump out at me in the way it must have for any longtime reader. But that’s all business for future issues.)