But this is different from all of those. It’s its own thing, but it feels more true to my own idea of what Spider-Man is meant to be. And I suspect part of the reason for that goes back to the formative years of my childhood, and the book I mentioned several times over the course of these reviews: THE BEST OF SPIDER-MAN, published in 1986. When I announced my first round of Spidey strip reviews in 2017, I said of that book:
"When I was a youngster -- say, maybe seven or eight years old -- I had a book called THE BEST OF SPIDER-MAN, which reprinted a handful of story arcs from the earlier years of the Spidey strip. I very nearly read the cover off that thing, to the point that it became one of the most battered, dog-eared books I owned. In a way, it was more formative of my understanding of Spider-Man than the monthly comics, since I had never really been a regular ongoing reader at that point."And it's true. Though I was a Spider-Man fan from a very young age -- the first comic I can remember owning was AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #245 -- I dind't start reading with real regularity until the Gerry Conway run on SPECTACULAR and WEB circa 1987 or '88 -- and even then, I was only picking up random issues from spinner racks as I saw them. I didn't become an actual, honest-to-goodness montly reader of Spider-Man until somewhere around AMAZING #360 in 1992.
But what I did have, and what I read often when I was of elementary school age, were: THE BEST OF SPIDER-MAN, a few digests that reprinted the Stan Lee/John Romita "stone tablet" storyline from AMAZING 68 - 75, plus a squarebound book called SPIDER-MAN: THE SECRET STORY OF MARVEL's WORLD-FAMOUS WALL-CRAWLER, which was sort of a "primer" on Spidey that reprinted AMAZING FANTASTY 15 and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #80. Those books were my foundational introduction to Spider-Man. College-age Peter Parker. Lots of mobsters, lots of Kingpin, and relatively "grounded" storylines. (Yes, the stone tablet saga features a mutant, an Inhuman, and a magical de-aging serum, but I mean aside from that.)
So over the years, even as I've gone back and read all of AMAZING, even as I've seen Spider-Man go to the moon, to the Microverse, fight his own clone, be his own clone, battle aliens, vampires, demons, and everything else... even through all that, I've still had this idea of what Spider-Man is supposed to be, which was formed when I was something like seven or eight years old -- a "low budget", street-level, college student with a major soap opera of a personal life.
I know that's a lot of words to lead this thing off, but I need for you to see where I'm coming from when I talk about this stuff. I can't say I love this strip unconditionally, because as I've mentioned over the past weeks, there are definitely some pretty big duds, especially as the strip goes further into the eighties. But the first half of it or so -- the full John Romita run, the brief Larry Lieber run, and the early Fred Kida stuff -- generally holds up very well. It's a bit simplistic in some ways, to be sure, but even so, it (again) feels right. And, quite honestly, I think I would rather re-read the Spider-Man comic strip of 1977 - 1981 any day over the monthly AMAZING SPIDER-MAN comic book series of that same era.
(I can't say I'd prefer the 1982 strip over the comic, because that's when Roger Stern started writing AMAZING SPIDER-MAN -- but I do include '82 as being part of the strip's heyday.)
But beginning in 1983, the strip is far more uneven than it was previously. The unevenness begins, more or less, a ways into Fred Kida's run, and I have a No-Prize theory for why that might be. It's not a secret that Stan was never big on plotting the strip himself. This is stated in the forewords to a couple of IDW's volumes, in fact. Stan wanted someone else to plot it and an artist to draw it, and he wanted to dialogue it. So Len Wein plotted the very first story arc, with Doctor Doom attacking the U.N. Subsequently, Jim Shooter started plotting the strip. Relatively more recently, Roy Thomas became the plotter around the turn of the century and eventually began ghost-scripting as well.
Shooter has said that as his responsibilities at Marvel increased when he became editor-in-chief, he had to stop providing plots for the strip. his first issues as Marvel's EiC are cover dated around mid-1978, which means he probably stepped into the position in early '78. I don't know if he actually stopped right then, after only a year of plotting, or if he kept it up for a while after his promotion until his workload no longer allowed it, but the point remains that eventually he left. However, John Romita was still on the strip at that time. Romita had worked with Stan on AMAZING for years in the sixties and knew how to plot a Stan Lee comic (he plotted a ton of his AMAZING run, though he never got a formal credit for it like Steve Ditko had), so I wouldn't be surprised if Romita himself did some plotting for a while before he, too, left the strip. It's just a guess, but it seems plausible to me.
After that, Larry Lieber took over art. Lieber also knew how Stan liked comics done, having worked for him at Marvel as a writer and artist (and being his brother!), and he had written and drawn Marvel's Hulk comic strip, a short-lived affair that launched not long after the Spider-Man strip, in 1978. So I wouldn't be surprised if Lieber himself handled the plots for his year on the strip, perhaps even into the period where Kida came on for dailies but Lieber was still drawing Sundays.
All this, if true, would explain why the strip's quality remained consistent for its first five or six years (and also why supporting cast members like Flash Thompson and Harry Osborn remained in circulation for practically that entire time). Then, beginning during Fred Kida's run, the quality begins to vacillate pretty drastically. There's good stuff (in my opinion) in there, like the "Spidey Jeans" arc and the Muffy Ainsworth story -- plots that remain faithful to the strip's style.
But you can also see things starting to change, in subtle ways. Flash and Harry vanishing off the face of the Earth is one of these. Also, Peter becomes more cavalier about his secret identity, performing lots of Spider-feats out of costume when he has "no time" to change. Eventually you get to stuff like the overly long Dar Harat and child abuse story arcs, and dopey ideas like the ATM robberies and such. And even the storylines that feel more in keeping with the earlier strips, like Klud Manson and the amnesia plot, feel different somehow. They come across more "hard boiled", and often end with the death of the antagonist, something that was rare earlier in the strip.
It's clear at this point that someone else is now plotting the strip for Stan; someone with sensibilities far removed from those of the prior plotters. (Or perhaps Stan is even doing it himself; who knows?). The storylines feel more serious somehow; less light-hearted. Less innocent, perhaps? Like Stan and the mystery plotter felt they had Very Important Things to say about the world, and the strip would be their means to do so -- perhaps forgetting that Stan and his collaborators had already used comics to tackle weighty topics in the sixties, but had generally kept them fun and melodramatic, rather than grim and morose.
And I think that's what it comes down to, for me. Stan and John Romita, followed by Larry Lieber, had examined some societal issues in their earlier strips -- terrorism, street crime, cults, and so forth. But they had done it in the Mighty Marvel Manner with lots of soapy melodrama and action. By the mid-eighties, the strip feels way less like a Silver Age Marvel comic and more like (Stan Lee's version of) a grim and gritty 1980s comic. Even when characters are happy, you're waiting for the other shoe to drop. That sort of thing just doesn't appeal to me on a personal level, so I view the eighties, with a few minor exceptions, as a downward spiral for the Spider-Man strip. Perhaps it could never consistently live up to the precedent set by the Lee/Romita run, but it certainly managed to do so for a while with Lieber and Kida aboard.
I've probably blathered on too long about this, but it feels good to get it all out of my system. I suppose in summary, I'm quite happy to own all these years of the Spider-Man strip, and like I said last week, I'll be in for at least one more volume, to get to the Peter/MJ marriage. But there's definitely a case diminishing returns as you get further into the eighties. I suppose the delineation I made up top, between the first five or six years and what comes after, is good enough. The Romita run, the Lieber run, and most of the Kida run are pretty much golden all the way through, covering 1977 into 1983. After that, come 1984, all bets are off and you never know what you're going to get from storyline to storyline -- but regardless of whether a storyline is good or bad, it feels different from the strip's golden years.
I can see myself returning to the Lee/Romita/Lieber/Kida stuff often in the future, but the likelihood I will revisit the storylines after that point seems fairly unlikely.
Next week: well, it turns out we're not quite finished with newspaper Spider-Man after all! Be back here on Monday for one final surprise...
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