Amazing Fantasy #15

I consider Spiderman the single best Silver Age character. For starters, he has the best motivation for putting on the outfit and fighting crime: Because when he failed to stop a criminal, it resulted in the death of his uncle Ben. That is a simple, direct and personal motivation.

Second, of all the Silver Age superheroes, he has the best-realized secret identity. As I have mentioned before, all of the superheroes have a pretty strong cast of supporting characters when wearing the mask and tights. But only Peter Parker seems to have much of a life outside the spandex.

Think about all the characters that Peter interacts with. He has Aunt May at home. He's got (initially) Flash Thompson and Liz Allen at school; after graduation that expands with the addition of Gwen and Harry. He's got J. Jonah Jameson, Betty Brant, Joe Robertson and Fred Foswell at the Daily Bugle where he works. And most of those characters have supporting actors of their own. There are even people that we hardly notice in the Silver Age: Professor Warren and Doctor Bramwell, for instance.

So I thought I would go through the Silver Age Spiderman in a bit more detail than I have in the past. The book he debuted in, Amazing Fantasy, had debuted as Amazing Adventures, then switched to Amazing Adult Fantasy with the seventh issue. For this finale to the series, the word "Adult" had been dropped.

Characters introduced: Peter Parker, Uncle Ben (dies), Aunt May, Flash Thompson, the Burglar (kills Uncle Ben). In addition, we meet Peter's high school science teacher, who is named (in ASM #15 as Mr. Warren (apparently not the same man as Professor Warren). All (except for the Burglar) are introduced on this second page, which does a good job of introducing us to Peter:

That's a solid introduction to the character, giving us the general outlines: Good-hearted, studious but a bit geeky. He attends a science lecture that night, where he is bitten by the famed radioactive spider. He discovers his odd powers and uses them to win a hundred dollars by lasting a round in the ring with Crusher Hogan. This results in his brief TV career. At the studio, he makes a critical mistake:

A short while later, Uncle Ben is murdered by a burglar. Peter tracks him down in an old warehouse, but is stunned to realize:

Note the pupils in his eyes in that bit; the idea that his mask was opaque had not yet been developed. And in the end, comes the phrase that the Spiderman movie made famous:

The story closes with an exhortation to buy the next issue of Amazing Fantasy for the further adventures of Spiderman. Of course, that next issue never arrived, and it was not until seven months later that ASM #1 hit the newsstands.

Comments: An argument can be made that aside from the compelling motivation, there is not that much new about Spiderman in this introductory story. Clark (Superboy) Kent had some troubles fitting in with his classmates, although it was never a continuing theme, just an occasionally recurring one.

But look a little harder and you'll realize that there is a great deal of novelty in this story. Was there ever a superhero before this whose reaction to his powers was the quite natural, "How can I make a buck off this?" Was there ever one who had a continuing antagonist like Flash Thompson, who was not a villain per se, just a bully?

A very solid introduction to the series.

World's Finest Silver Age Comics: Amazing Spiderman #18

Out of the thousands of comics published in the Silver Age (my guess is about 20,000 in total), there are not a handful that are finer than this one. I've talked about it before briefly, but I thought it was time for a longer look.

To set the stage, in ASM #17, Flash Thompson had held the inaugural meeting of the Spiderman Fan Club. Liz Allen's father provided the hall, and a strong turnout was rewarded by a genuine appearance of the friendly neighborhood webslinger. But he gets a nasty surprise when the Green Goblin also shows up and begins fighting him. At a crucial moment in the battle, Peter overhears that his aunt has had another heart attack and is in the hospital. He runs out on the Goblin, turning most of his fans against him, convinced that he'd turned coward.

We get a look at the reactions from some of Spidey's foes and several of the other heroes in the Marvel Universe:

Meanwhile, JJJ is in a celebratory mood:

Peter is having trouble paying the bills, and he's too worried about Aunt May to go into action. If something happens to him, there'll be nobody left to take care of her. To add to his woes, Betty Brant is mad at him for not taking her to the Spiderman Fan Club meeting the previous issue.

Spidey tries selling a local merchandising firm on Spiderman trading cards, but they're not interested in a has-been hero. And improbably, a chemical firm is not willing to purchase his web-fluid because of a designed-in weakness:


Steve shows a bunch of scenes from the first Amazing Spiderman Annual, featuring Spidey in action against six of his greatest foes. As it happens, Peter runs into one of those old foes, the Sandman as he's leaving the chemical company. And the result is further embarrassment:

The news gives JJJ further exposure on TV as the man who revealed Spiderman as a phony long before anyone else. The Human Torch appears to remind us that he had an adventure with Spidey in Strange Tales Annual #2 (discussed here). Meanwhile Flash Thompson gets the brilliant idea of dressing up as Spidey himself and trying to stop a couple of crooks:

Fortunately, the cops come along and save him from a worse beating. To cap off Peter's bad week, he comes across Betty Brant and a new young man (Ned Leeds) exiting a movie theater, obviously in the middle of a date. Fed up with the problems that being Spiderman have added to his life, Peter decides to chuck his costume (literally):

But the next morning he's startled to find Aunt May's wheelchair empty. She's up and about, testing her legs, despite his protests. She gives him a bit of spine-stiffening here:

Peter takes it to heart and so:

And:

As noted, this is one of the rare superhero issues that featured not a single fight (well, other than the one between Flash and the car thieves). And yet, the psychological battle that Peter undergoes is deep and dramatic. As I have discussed in the past, the real charm in the Spiderman series was this inner tension that Peter felt. On the one hand, his obligation to his dead uncle, and on the other, his need to take care of his live aunt. How does he balance those demands? Well, in the end Aunt May tips the scales, but in the opposite direction from what we are expecting. Terrific storytelling and even better characterization. Those are why I dub Amazing Spiderman #18 one of the Silver Age's

Best Character of the Silver Age: Marvel Edition

This is not a terribly difficult determination. One of the things I look for is how well all aspects of the character are developed. Almost all superhero characters have a well-developed heroic aspect; it's the central focus of the series.

But most of them do not have a well-developed secret identity, as we shall see. For instance consider Thor. The Thor series has a huge cast of characters: Odin, Balder, Sif, Heimdall, Loki, Karnilla, etc. But whatever happened to Don Blake? On a regular basis, Blake interacts with the following people:



As if that wasn't bad enough, Jane Foster disappeared from the series in early 1967, leaving nobody for Don Blake to interact with. Okay, Don Blake is kind of an oddity, apparently never having existed before Odin banished Thor to Earth, so it's not like the human side of his character was real. But what about Daredevil's Matt Murdock?



This is actually not all that atypical; whom did Clark Kent interact with other than the people in his office? Lana Lang is about it, and even she was more involved with Superman than his alter ego.

A somewhat similar situation applies with Bruce Banner/Hulk, although he does have a few more people in his life:



Tony Stark is pretty much the same:



Some of the Marvel characters don't lend themselves to an analysis like this. The Sub-Mariner, for example, does not have an alter ego; neither, arguably, do the Fantastic Four or Doctor Strange. Captain America's real identity of Steve Rogers was pretty much forgotten in the 1960s. The X-Men were self-contained.

So who's left? Oh, yes, Peter Parker. Here are the people Parker interacted with regularly:




Not to mention Liz Allen, Fredrick Foswell, Anna Watson, Ned Leeds, Joe Robertson's son, and numerous other characters that we may not (yet) have noticed were in the picture like Dr Bramwell and Professor Warren.

Don't get me wrong here; it's not that all these people make Peter Parker a more rounded character than any other in the Marvel lineup in the Silver Age. It's that they reflect how well-revealed Parker was to us. He's got family (Aunt May). He's got neighbors (Mrs Watson and Mary Jane). He's got a pal (Harry). He's got a love interest (Gwen). He's got a rival/enemy (Flash). He's got people he works with (JJJ, Betty, Robbie, Foswell). And the people he deals with have friends and relatives of their own (Captain Stacy, Robertson's son, Ned Leeds, Norman Osborne).

And I am not criticizing the other Marvel characters in favor of DC, as we shall see when I analyze the DC characters. Whom did Barry Allen interact with in the Silver Age? Iris and Wally West, and even Wally quickly became more of a companion for the Flash than Barry.

There's a logical reason for this as well; the more effort you put into characterization, the less time you have for plot. I have griped when reviewing some of the Spiderman Silver Age that at times the "Archie" aspect of the character interferes with the superheroics, but that's a tradeoff Stan was willing to make and which paid off handsomely for Marvel.