SPIDER-MAN: THE FURTHER NEWSPAPER STRIPS

Nearly three years ago, I read and posted about the first four years of the syndicated Spider-Man newspaper strip by Stan Lee and John Romita, by way of IDW's Library of American Comics reprints. Well, I finished up that run and even though I had another volume on my bookshelf, I decided -- at least for the time -- to call it quits with the newspaper version of the Web-Slinger.

Since then, I've picked up the next couple volumes in IDW's series, bringing us to a total of five books -- and I've decided that now is the time to crack them open and continue with Spidey's funny-page adventures. I'm going to run through all three of these books, which will take us from January of 1981 through 1986, and feature Lee working with his brother, Larry Lieber, plus newspaper strip veteran Fred Kida, as well as TRANSFORMERS TV series character designer Floro Dery, on art.

Unlike the first run of strips we looked at, where I was familiar with some of the storylines from a book I had as a child, this material will be nearly entirely new to me -- I believe only one full storyline from this era was presented in THE BEST OF SPIDER-MAN, along with one storyline that had only its Sunday strips collected. So I look forward to seeing where Lee took Spider-Man's adventures following Romita's departure.

Incidentally, I remember that our local paper picked up the Spider-Man strip somewhere around 1991 or so, and -- I'll be blunt -- I found it pretty lame, compared with the comics of the time, in terms of both story and art. But those are the memories of a teenager reacting to material that was published a decade after the stuff we're about to read. I don't know if my thoughts on the strip in the early nineties was right or wrong, but at least as late as his final few story arcs with John Romita, Stan was still his usual entertaining self (even if some of the plots were a little iffy).

I guess we'll find out soon exactly what to make of these stories, as I intend to spend the next several weeks on them. How many weeks? I'm not exactly sure. On my first go-round, I looked at two story arcs per week, and the two books took eleven weeks to cover. Now we're looking at three books, so going at the same rate, this could very well take us more than four months.

It all begins Monday, Web-heads -- be there!