After discussions last week with kirby101 about the pros and cons of the recent oversized Taschen reprints of the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man stories, I took the plunge and bought volume 1 in "as new", unread condition for the great price of £75 off eBay...






Really looking forward to receiving this and getting stuck into re-reading some of my all-time favourite Spider-Man stories as they were originally published. Especially so now that jtrw2024 is doing his Spider-Man review thread.

More catching up...





I kinds preferred this issue to the last one. There's some good story advancement here and it's great towards the end when events start to tie into the first two issues with the arrival of Ulic Qel-Droma and Tott Doneeta.




Yeah, Nomi's fear and hesitation about Master Thon seems kinda weird – especially as she's been living on the planet Ambria with him for a few months now, presumably without any incident.




Roach's artwork looks a whole lot better in this issue than it did in the last. It's still not necessarily wholly to my tastes, but it's a big improvement. Or maybe I'm just getting used to it? Certainly, the double splash page of the insectoid starship we get in this issue is really gorgeous – way beyond anything we got last issue.




What was the comic with the Jaxxon rip-off character that you are thinking of?

Ahh...gotcha! Well, welcome to the forum my Commonwealth brother. Really looking forward to seeing this thread grow.

I really hoped for the same thing. But realistically, I knew that it was unlikely. Still, you hope against hope, don't you?

Sorry for being absent from this excellent thread for a while, wildfire2099 . I've been crazy busy for a couple of weeks with work and a family wedding. Trying to play catch up now though...




Nomi Sunrider is a great character name. That is all.




I agree that the design of Nomi and the unnamed Jedi who the reader assumes is Master Thon is a bit "Star Trek", but I do actually really like the design of the yellow-skinned Jedi with his coiled head tails or lumps or whatever they are!




Yeah, that's a great twist at the end with Master Thon being revealed to be a quadrupedal beast, rather than a humanoid. This is not something that was even hinted at as being possible with Jedi in the original trilogy, which really serves to reinforce that this is a completely different time period than the original trilogy and that we will see things that seem very exotic or strange.




I completely agree. David Roach's artwork is scribbly as all hell and really not to my tastes. It's also kinda hard at certain points to figure out what's going on in the panels. Chris Gossett's artwork in issues #1 and #2 was much better.





I basically agree, but something that really jumped out at me as highly unlikely is the fact that the Hutt gangster's sail barge looks almost identical to Jabba's one in Return of the Jedi. Like, this is supposed to be many thousands of years before the original trilogy, but sail barge design has not advanced at all in that time? Hmmmm…seems unlikely.

I mentioned in my comments about issues #1 and #2 that Gossett's art was suitably unlike the aesthetic of the original trilogy, which I liked because it reinforced the idea that this was a totally different time. Roach's use of a near identical sail barge to the one from the OT just kinda spoiled that and took me out of the story.




Of course, we know nothing about how long-lived Nomi and Vima's race is, but in my head cannon, it was her immense strength with the Force that has given her such incredible longevity.

Overall, this wasn't a bad issue by any means, but nothing to write home about either. I do vaguely remember this story, although, as with the other TotJ issues, it's likely been a good 25 years or so since I last read it. Re-reading it this week, I definitely preferred the previous two issues, but I'm hoping that this story will grab me more as it progresses.

Jeez, I've been away from the forum a couple of days and I miss this review thread starting!

Spider-Man is my number 1 favourite superhero too, and like you, I first encountered the Lee/Ditko stories and early Lee/Romita stuff in mid-80s copies of Marvel Tales. As an adult, I'm not crazy about Marvel changing some of the then-current topical 60s references in some of these issues to mid-80s ones, but as a kid reading these reprints back in the day...I didn't care (or even realise, probably).

Hell, I didn't even realise that these were reprints! I just thought Marvel Tales was one of the many current Spider-Man comics available at the time, though it was clearly telling stories from when Spidey was young. But with stories by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, no wonder I thought Marvel Tales was the best Spider-Man comic on the stands in the mid-80s!

As for Andy Yanchus' new colouring of these issues. I think he did a damn good job overall. Again, as an adult, I feel it's kind of a shame that they didn't preserve the original colouring of Stan Goldberg, but I didn't give a cr*p about that back when I first read these issues in Marvel Tales. Plus, as I say, I think Yanchus did a decent job with the interiors.

As for the re-colouring of the covers -- and I've never been sure if that was Yanchus as well, but I assume so -- they are much more hit and miss. Sometimes the re-colouring actually does improve on the original, but not very often. For what it's worth, I prefer the colouring on the cover of Amazing Fantasy #15 to how the same image looks on Marvel Tales #137. The moody grey wash of the sky in the original is way more aesthetically pleasing to my eyes.

BTW, are you British? I see you spell certain words in the English manner, like wot I does!





Absolutely agree. They didn't mess about "writing for the trade" back then: this half-issue length origin story packs soooo much info and characterisation into its scant 11 pages. It's a tour de force of comic storytelling.





That's such a great splash page by Ditko. Just from a visual perspective alone, it imparts so much information about the character of young Peter Parker and the events of the story to come. Utterly brilliant work!





Sheer profundity. And poetry, for that matter! I've said it before in the forum and I'll say it again, there was a lot more philosophical depth in some of Stan Lee's writing than many people give him credit for.





Yeah, I think Stan Lee and Steve Ditko were definitely still trying to figure out what makes Spider-Man tick as a comic. There's lots of stuff being thrown at the wall here that ultimately won't stick-- such as Peter picking up messages encoded in frequency waves via his Spider-Sense -- but there's also a lot of stuff they get right straight away.

I think that both of the stories in this issue are still very much routed in the oddball/weird Amazing Adult Fantasy tradition. I also think (and there are at least a few others in the forum who agree with me) that these two stories and the pair from next issue were originally intended for publication in Amazing Fantasy, rather than in a stand-alone headline Spider-Man comic.





Fascinating. I had never clocked that small, but important change.