It’s Ditko’s last issue, and it’s a famously odd one. For starters, he doesn’t even do a splash, just gets right to it.
As monsters go, that looks a lot more like a robot to me.
Hey, I don’t know, maybe a film set shouldn’t have random chemicals lying around. Just a thought.
Peter and Ned sure have a bizarre history once you’ve seen it all laid out. And an exchange like this could serve to make someone decide Ned’s the Hobgoblin 20 years later, I think. Peter walks off dejectedly thinking about how it never could have worked between him and Betty, Meanwhile, our man Joe is called upon to film a big fight scene. But when he gets the direction to tear into them as if they’re his worst enemies, the clearly addled Joe starts to really believe they are, and really starts going crazy. The director love it. This guy won’t rest ‘til somebody gets killed on his set. As Joe’s sudden bloodrage leads him to smash right out of the set and onto the street, simultaneously discovering he has superstrength and deciding everyone has to pay for how badly his career’s gone, Peter is walking down the same street. As tends ot be the case, he’s so lost in thought he doesn’t notice everyone running in panic until a piece of rubble crashes into a wall next to him. And so, Spider-Man is soon on the scene.
Ditko repeats the Spidey that got nicked for the cover of X-Men 35. I can’t believe this not-so-great angle has been used 3 times. And see who the last panel is reproduced on the cover. Ditko had a habit of recreating cover images in the book, but that’s a straight stat. As this issue goes on, it becomes obvious Ditko quit before turning in a cover for this issue. Well, the fighting intensifies, and after Joe throws Spider-Man across the street and into a dumpster, the fog in his head clears, and he’s suddenly aware of what’s been happening. His manager, whose continued loyalty doesn’t make much sense, runs up and helps him flee the scene of his rampage. Then Spidey makes it back on his feet and thinks he’s never had to hunt down a villain whose name he didn’t even get. Meanwhile…
That “I cut the money in half” angle is BONKERS.
Gwen’s affection for Peter is genuinely bizarre. What’s there to see in him? He either ignores everyone or he’s mean to them. This protest sequence is pretty infamous. I won’t go so far as to say what creators are thinking, but plenty of people think it reflects Ditko’s awful Objectivist beliefs. When concern for your fellow man is weakness, what is there to protest? But the dialogue also seems to reveal something about ol’ Smiley, too. Stan Lee was already middle aged at this point, and an opportunist first and foremost. It seems quite likely that, circa this creation of this issue, he openly thought all the protesting and turmoil going on in the US was a lot of nothing, as so many people his age did. But once he really realized that the college kids who made Marvel a success are passionate about their issues, he had no choice but to start showing protesters in a more sympathetic light. We’ve seen how he tries to have it both ways on topical issues. How often the protesters are right, but the people they’re protesting are actually pretty great, if you get to know them. By the time ASM 68 rolls around, protesting will be heroic, but at this point, protest is a joke, and while Peter actively rejects it, none of the other main characters are participating, either. Well, at any rate, poor Joe goes to sleep in an apartment or something somewhere, as his manager thinks he really would like to help him, but doesn’t know how. Then a mob goon tells a roomful of other mob goons that there’s a reward for “beating Spider-Man” of $20,000. Then we see Harry making fun of Peter “trying to be a scientist! My old man FORGOT more about science than he’ll EVER know!” Harry hero worshipping his awful dad is baked right in from jump. But Peter ignores it, and then slips away to become Spider-Man after school.
There’s the 2nd panel on the cover. And we’re basically doing a speed run of where we left off in 1998. A reward offered by Osborn has people trying to jump Spidey in public. Not the exact same circumstances, but pretty close! And look at the next page:
The main figure on the cover is just the panel 5 Spidey, redrawn. I’d bet a dollar by Marie Severin. Joe heads down to the gym where he started trying to be a boxer and begins pummeling everyone in there, and Spider-Man happens to swing by and hear the racket. What a coincidence! Ditko really seems like he’s phoning these last few in. But all the guys in the gym know about the reward, so if Spidey thought he’d get a warm welcome (As he arrives in the final panel reproduced on the cover), he’s wrong. A battle ensues between him, all the boxers and Joe. In the course of it, Spidey hears about the reward and confirms Joe is not all there, and then Ditko does another page of fighting too dense to really dialogue, with another jokey caption from Stan about how “it’s sound effects time” trying to cover for it.
And that’s that, Ditko is outta here. Not the most important issue to end on, but life is rarely as dramatic as art. While Ditko was unquestionably the secret sauce that made Spider-Man so big, from his costume designs to his one-of-a-kind fight scenes to his great plotting, the bloom is very much off the rose by this issue, and he seems to have been, frankly, kind of a jerk. Some combination of Ditko and Lee produce Chameleon, Vulture, Doctor Octopus, Sandman, Lizard, Electro, Mysterio, Green Goblin, Kraven and Scorpion when they’re on good terms (And The Enforcers and The Tinkerer, but you know, you can’t win ‘em all). Some of the best villains in all of comics (And Kraven). And as things go south, Ditko creates Spider Slayers, Crime-Master, Molten Man, some random burglar guy, Looter and Robot Master. A pretty obvious drop in quality. Did he need Stan’s input? Did he just not care anymore? Is 10 all-time villains enough for anyone not named Jack Kirby? We’ll never know. I really do wish that offer to have Ditko do his own Untold Tales-type book in the 90s had worked out. It would’ve been very interesting. I suspect it would’ve been pretty bad, but I’d still love to have seen it. And while Romita may not have Ditko’s knack for fightin’, he’s a quite skilled designer and plotter, himself, and his long association with Spider-Man makes his the most recognizable version, even now, even as the MCU movies use his unmistakable take on the mask. It seems like, in an alternate dimension where Romita was on the book from the start, it might not have been as good. But with the foundation laid by Ditko, he’s all set to make Marvel’s biggest character even bigger. Well, anyway, in the back of this issue, we have a letter from young Cary Burkett, who’ll write a bunch of DC comics and a handful of Marvels (99% of which have been covered on this blog, in fact) in the 80s. He rightly says Kraven’s appearance in ASM 34 was pretty boring compared to his first run in 15. But he insanely calls Kraven “your best villain,” so maybe it’s a good thing he only wrote 7 Spider-Man comics (None featuring Kraven, oddly).