Jeez, keeping up with this thread is like trying to keep up with the Super Chief!

This is easily my least favourite cover of the early Lee/Ditko run. The four-panel comic strip just seems like a clumsy and not terribly striking way of putting across what a menace the Sandman is – especially not when compared with how well Steve Ditko put across the menace of the likes of Doctor Octopus, the Vuture and Doctor Doom in these earliest issues.

No major differences really in colouring on the Marvel Tales cover, but the more subdued colouring of Stan Goldberg and darker colours on Sandman from the original cover are better, I think. It's less garish or something.






Another all-time great Marvel villain. Stan and Steve were just on such a roll at this point.




Spidey pranking J. Jonah Jameson like this is such a cool element in the stories. It reminds us that for all his super-powers and daring-do, Peter is still just a kid who likes pulling stupid stunts against the grown-ups who needle him, just like his schoolmates probably do.




So, it was later established that Peter Parker was 15-years-old when he became Spider-Man. But even without that being canon, Peter is still at high school and Betty Brant is clearly working a job, so she is definitely older than he is. I used to assume she was in her very early 20s, which kinda moves her into "cougar" territory, but after comments I've read from other members in this forum on the subject, I think that, actually, Betty is likely still a teenager herself – maybe 18 or so?

She'd have to have been at least 16 years old to have left school and started working at The Daily Bugle because New York, like most States in the U.S., had compulsory education laws that required people to stay in education until they were at least 16 in the '60s. But my feeling is that she's more than just a year older than Peter. So, I think 18-19 is a good guess.

Clearly there was no sex involved, but yeah…Peter definitely gets into a romantic relationship with an older woman in future issues.




(referring to the bolded)

Yes, which I think is a nice touch. It gives the reader a sense of the wider, super-powered world outside of Manhattan and suggests that this isn't just another custom-made Spider-Man adversary (though, of course, he is). It's also mildly amusing that Peter, having heard the news reports, assumes that the Sandman is a hoax before he encounters him.




Oh really?!! I don't think I knew that. I just looked it up on Wikipedia and it appears to have been revealed in the Peter David-penned Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Annual #1 from 2007. I own that comic, but I must've forgotten about it revealing Sandman's true name. Ah well, every day is a school day!




I also love how inventive Ditko gets in depicting the way in which Sandman can change his form. In particular, the series of narrow panels showing Sandman jumping off a tall building, turning into a cloud of sand on his way down, and then re-coalescing into his usual form on the pavement below is brilliant…






I love that panel where Spidey comes bounding into the classroom and socks Sandman right in the kisser! There's so much kinetic energy in that panel. In fact, Ditko almost damn well draws movement in it. It's just a fantastic shot. POW!!







Peter Parker…the originator of "fake news!"


By the way, I don't think you mentioned it, but this is the first issue in which Peter's classmate Liz Allan is named.

I'd be really interested in your thoughts on Psychoanalysis!, RR. It's a series that has long intrigued me. I'm a big fan of EC's Piracy, which was another of those post-Wertham New Direction anthology titles.

Ha! Well, Peter's a teenager: all teenage boys are dicks to the women in their lives!

Oh yeah... so he has. That's a shame.

I was looking forward to seeing his box set picks. I hope he didn't get the hump about my proposing a "popular music only" rule for our run down because, as I said, I was more than happy for him to pick classical sets, of he wanted to. It was only a suggestion when we were trying to establish rules anyway!

BTW, I assume we are ordering out Top 10 lists by alphabetical order of the box set title, rather than the artist, right? I have both single artists and various artists sets in my short list, so I figure going by title is the most sensible way to go. Thoughts?

AKA 7pm Greenwich Mean Time.

Could be doable depending on what I'm up to on the day. I'd like to pop in.

There's not too much to choose between the original Stan Goldberg colouring on the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #2 and the '80s Marvel Tales reprint, as the colours are mostly the same...




That said, I do think the inset panel of Spidey encountering the Tinkerer does "pop" a bit more on the Marvel Tales cover.





One of the captions here refers to "Jameson Publications", so I always interpreted it as J. Jonah Jameson still being the editor of The Daily Bugle, but Now! was the Bugle's new magazine supplement. American newspapers like The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Washington Post had been publishing glossy magazine supplements for years by this point. Even in dreary old Britain, The Sunday Times began publishing a magazine supplement in 1962.

That said, the fact that Now! is emblazoned on the office building in which Jameson works is probably an artistic goof or an example of Stan Lee just forgetting about the Daily Bugle momentarily (shades of "Peter Palmer" perhaps?).

But yes, having Peter sell hard to get photographs (unless you're Spider-Man) to Jameson is an example of something that Stan was throwing at the wall in these early issues which stuck.

This issue also shows us Peter whipping up a handy pseudo-scientific doohickey in order to defeat the villain for the first time. That's another Spider-Man trope that will be retained in future issues.




Hmmm….maybe.

Jameson likely has more than one secretary or receptionist though. Maybe this is his receptionist in the Now! magazine offices, whereas Betty Brant works in the Daily Bugle offices? Of course, I'm almost positive that Stan wouldn't have known that he was going to introduce a regularly recurring secretary and future love interest of Peter's at this point.




I like the Vulture as a Spider-Man villain in this initial appearance. He seems like a genuine threat and quite a nasty, grumpy old man.

On a related subject, it's interesting that almost all of Spider-Man's villains in the early part of the series – the Vulture, the Tinkerer, Doctor Octopus, Doctor Doom, and even J. Jonah Jameson – are old men or at least middle-aged. This is the '60s generation gap writ large! This is a representation of the old white men in authority who were always keeping the kids down, telling them to stop listening to rock 'n' roll or wasting their time with comics, and later on sending them to die in Vietnam. This is Stan Lee tapping directly into the feelings of young teenagers in the early-to-mid '60s and that's one of the reasons why Amazing Spider-Man resonated with them so much.

It's also kind of interesting that Spidey gets beaten quite often in these early issues – memorably so, in fact, by Doctor Octopus in ASM #3. And here, the Vulture dumps Spidey's semi-conscious body into a rooftop water tower and leaves him to drown. Again, I feel as if these defeats by the likes of the Vulture and Doc Ock are examples of Stan tapping into that familiar feeling among the readers of grumpy, disciplinarian older folks always having the upper hand and always seemingly "winning". The young readers of these comics would've known that feeling from their own life all too well, I think.





I definitely picked up on the implication that the Tinkerer was an alien when I first read this comic back in the late-80s; he says to an alien in the story that Spider-Man is the "only mortal on Earth who suspects our presence here." The use of the word "our" being key – Tinker is an alien too.

Really though, this is without doubt the most Amazing Adult Fantasy-esque story we get in these early issues of Amazing Spider-Man, with its thinly veiled "Reds under the bed" use of aliens. I think Lee and Ditko realised pretty quickly that using space aliens in a Spider-Man story wasn't really a good fit, given that Spidey is a much more down-to-earth, street level character than the likes of the Fantastic Four. But again, these were very early says in Spider-Man's development and they were just trying out lots of different stuff.





As revealed in Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #50, right? That's a great issue and it's also revealed in that comic that the Tinkerer was employed by the future Mysterio, Quentin Beck, to masquerade as an alien, with hired actors playing the other aliens. Ridiculous, obviously…but still a lot of fun.


By the way, just as an aside, I think it's a nice touch that we see a bystander on the street blaming Spider-Man for starting a fire for the first time in this story. J. Jonah Jameson's anti-Spider-Man propaganda is definitely starting to have results!