Amazing Spider-Man #39 has such a great cover! Not only does it look fantastic from a compositional standpoint and in terms of John Romita's draughtsmanship, but it also features the utterly arresting image of Peter Parker, his civilian clothing torn to expose his secret identity, bound and being towed across the New York skyline by the Green Goblin on his power-glider! That cover must've been impossible to resist for any young reader even remotely aware of Spider-Man that was browsing the spinner racks back in May 1966.

Bam! What a way to announce the John Romita era of Spider-Man has begun!





It's not just Ditko's residual influence on the comic – John Romita was deliberately aping Ditko's style. In Tom DeFalco's 2004 book Comics Creators on Spider-Man, Romita says that he was actively trying to draw as close to Ditko's style as he could for his first four or five issues on Amazing Spider-Man. His reasoning being that he felt he had an obligation to the readers to ease the transition from one artist to another.

Romita explained…
"I used a thin pen line on Spider-Man to mimic Ditko's inking style. I was also drawing a lot of nine-panel pages because that's what Steve had done. I only made one concession to my style and that was during the action sequences. I had to draw bigger panels because I just couldn't do the action scenes in small panels."

I have to say, the results of Romita's "Ditkofication" are somewhat hit and miss for me, insofar as some panels really do look quite Ditko-esque, while in others – particularly the close-up face shots – the characters look very different to how Ditko depicted them and exactly as you'd expect Romita to draw them.

Still, it goes to show what a fantastic artist Romita was that he was able to copy Ditko's idiosyncratic style as successfully as he did.





Yeah, the two panels of the Goblin taking his mask off and standing behind an open locker or similar in ASM #39 look an awful lot like Ditko's panels from the Goblin's first appearance ASM #14.

Here's Romita's art in ASM #39…



And here are Ditko's panels from ASM #14…




That has to have been intentional of Romita's part, right? It's gotta a deliberate homage to Ditko by his successor.





I find Stan Lee's phonetically rendered "blocked nose" dialogue for Peter really annoying!





Stan gets to work in ASM #39 undoing a lot of the hostility and animosity that Ditko had generated between Peter and his male supporting cast. So, we get Harry and Peter having a real heart-to-heart conversation about Harry's dad, and Peter and Ned Leeds decide to bury the hatchet too, with Peter telling his romantic rival that he's going to step aside and stop pursuing Betty Brant.

You can't help feeling that the earlier conflict between these characters was something that Stan really disliked and here he is putting things straight at the very first opportunity. Even Flash Thompson is grudgingly forced to admit that Peter might be a lot more man than he's ever given him credit for being in the past.





I love that panel of the Green Goblin circling the skyscraper on his glider, smoke bellowing, as he watches his hoods tangling with Spider-Man. It's super cool.





I must say that Norman Osborn's retroscope helmet seems like a bit of a lame idea. It's just a much too blatant narrative device to simultaneously pad out the issue, while giving any new readers the lowdown on Spidey and the Goblin's previous encounters. It seems like uncharacteristically lazy storytelling from Stan.





I have to say that I kinda disagree that this is a good ending to this particular Spider-Man/Green Goblin encounter. Frankly, I think that the amnesia shenanigans with Oborn losing all recollection of his time as the Goblin, thus preserving Peter's secret identity, is a bit rubbish. It's just a tad too convenient for my tastes.

I think I would have preferred Osborn to have been killed in the fire in his laboratory/hideout, but of course that would've robbed us of a lot of great stories further down the road. I will say that I'm glad the threat of Osborn's memory possibly returning at some point in the future was used to such great dramatic effect in the months and years to come. Who knows, maybe that was Stan's plan all along?





I believe I'm right in saying that Mike Esposito used the "Mickey Demeo" pseudonym because he was also inking for DC Comics at the time and didn't want anyone there to know that he was moonlighting at Marvel. I'm pretty sure one of the forum regulars here told me that waaaaay back in the old CBR days.



Overall, this two-part story is awesome. Stan Lee really pulls out all the stops, serving up one of the most exciting Spidey stories of the 1960s. Certainly, it's the best arc since the Master Planner adventure.

You really have to wonder if writing these issues felt personal for Stan…like he had something to prove. This was the first time he's properly co-written Spider-Man with an artist, using the Marvel method, in over a year. I suspect that Stan really wanted to create something that would knock reader's socks off to prove that the comic could survive the departure of Steve Ditko. Certainly, Romita has gone on record as saying that it is his belief that the Green Goblin's identity would not have been revealed in issue #39 had Ditko stayed on the comic. I think Stan decided that revealing the Goblin's identity in these issues was just the thing to blow reader's minds.

I'm a big fan of John Romita's artwork – he's probably my favourite comic book artist of all time. He really hits the ground running with these two issues. There are lots of strong character moments, note perfect pacing, and some brilliantly dynamic action sequences. The fight scenes especially really allow Romita to shine. Simply put, Spider-Man comics don't come much better than these two issues.

Starfire

Yep, this is the crux of the matter really. I do firmly believe you should avoid buying from faceless mega-corps as much as humanly possible and instead shop at local small businesses (or small businesses online anywhere in the world), but I do also absolutely accept that sometimes that's just not possible. I mean, for one thing, it isn't always financially sensible to do that. Being an ethical consumer is almost never the cheapest or most convenient option! I get that...and I will absolutely use Amazon a number of times a year myself because sometimes I have no alternative or the cost of not doing so is prohibitively expensive. But whenever I can, I will always try to use small or local businesses, even if it ends up costing me a little bit more.

The truth is that if we don't support small local businesses, our communities, labour markets, personal finances, the environment, and the very fabric of our society will all suffer.

I think old American back issues are way more expensive in the UK than they are in the U.S. generally. When I look at what back issues are going for in the States on eBay or at Lonestar etc, it's clear that we tend to get hammered on the prices. This is even more apparent when I visit comic shops in the States and compare them to stores in London. I guess it's down to less availability of U.S. comics in Britain.

Time was that I used to order fairly often from online American sites like Mile High or Lonestar, because it worked out cheaper than buying from UK-based sellers like Silver Acre (who I did and still do use sometimes), even with the international shipping. But a combination of the pound weakening against the dollar and huge increases in U.S. shipping rates means that it's no longer worthwhile to do that.


EDIT: Editing just to say that I kinda miss the pre-eBay days when you could go to a jumble sale or carboot sale and pick up bundles of old comics -- or even a whole box of them sometimes -- for pence. I got a complete collection of the Tintin books for a couple of quid back in the early '90s. That's still probably my best ever comics score!

Damn, this one seems really hard -- I had to really rack my brains to think of one. I'm going with...


King Muskar XII (from Tintin).

Congratulations to you and Mrs. Raider.

I disagree. I think the community here has matured considerably on this point. I think there's a much more tolerant attitude overall between pro-slabbers and anti-slabbers in this forum. It is not the hot, divisive topic that it was in days of yore. There's a much friendlier "live and let live" attitude these days, I believe.

Also, for the record, I don't recall anyone ever permanently deleting their account over a row about slabbing. I might be forgetting something, but it's really not a hot button topic in the way politics is, for example.