Featuring: Spider-Man
Release: June 11, 1963
Cover: September 1963
12 cents
By: Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
21 pages
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|---|---|---|
| Tales of Suspense #45 | Reading order | Fantastic Four #18 |
| Amazing Spider-Man #3 | Amazing Spider-Man | Amazing Spider-Man #5 |
You teen-agers are all alike– You think the world owes you a living! Now go out and get me some shots of Spider-Man, and don’t come back till you do!
The covers so far have mostly been single images. Here, the cover is itself a comic. It’s not a common artistic choice, perhaps because it forces the images to be smaller. But it effectively shows off the range of Sandman’s powers.
Lee and Ditko share the credits for this issue with a simple “By”, rather than breaking up who did the story and who did the art.
In 4 issues, this series has introduced:
- Chameleon
- Vulture
- Tinkerer
- Dr. Octopus
- Sandman
That’s 5 enduring villains, and at least 3 iconic ones.
We get a great opening scene. A common theme of Spider-Man is that he’ll try to do the right thing, but mess up. He sees crooks about to rob a place, so he attacks them. But he should have waited until they robbed the place. Now they just accuse him of assault.
This issue is full of firsts for Spider-Man. Like Spider-Man hanging upside down. As my friend Bret recently put it, “Upside down Spider-Man is the best Spider-Man.”
In the first issue, Jameson was described as the publisher of Now Magazine. By the second, it was the Daily Bugle, a newspaper. This seemed like a mistake. They often reveal something, forget, then reveal something different and the new thing sticks. The Fantastic Four were in Central City before they were in Manhattan. Dr. Blake’s nurse was Jane Nelson before she was Jane Foster. I thought this would be like that and we’d just forget about Now Magazine. But they make it clear they are on top of their internal continuity within this one series at least, and that Jameson is the publisher of both a magazine and a newspaper. This attention to detail is at odds with everything we’ve seen prior to this series.
We have more of the conflict between Spider-Man and Jameson. Jameson is running a whole series of articles: “The Spider-Man Menace!” Spider-Man responds by leaving webbing on his seat.
We meet Jameson’s secretary, Miss Brant. She’ll become important.
The girl I’ve been calling Peter’s blonde classmate finally gets a name: Liz. She’s agreed to a date with Peter because he’s asked her so often. But he has to cancel to go be Spider-Man; she doesn’t take it well.
Liz also happens to remark that Peter has disappeared when Spider-Man shows up. She won’t be the last to notice such a thing. I am certain other characters over the decades have wondered aloud where Clark or Bruce got to as well.
And we meet Sandman. Now, it’s true DC had a superhero named Sandman almost 25 years earlier. That character was so-named because he put people to sleep with gas, like the Sandman of lore. Marvel’s Sandman is so-named because he is a man made of sand. A sand-man, if you will. A much more appropriate character for the name, I think.
How powerful is a man made of sand? Well, punching him would be like punching sand. Your fist would just go right through. And of course the body of a sand-man could reshape itself into anything, even castles. This Sandman has one more advantage: he can harden the sand into something solid. This allows him to punch back and punch back hard.
Sandman seems basically unstoppable. How can Spider-Man defeat him?
Ah, a vacuum.
I think Ant-Man was once trapped similarly.
Spider-Man just has all kinds of problems. His face mask rips, so has to quit the battle.
And we learn what Spider-Man thinks will happen if his secret identity gets exposed.
We’ve come a long way from the larger-than-life godlike superheroes of decades past. Spider-Man can’t fight the Sandman because his mask needs sewing and Aunt May thinks he’s sick.
Before the battle, we got some cool heroism from Peter’s principal on display.
Now, Peter is becoming a serious photojournalist. Who secretly takes pictures of himself. He is walking the line of journalistic ethics and crosses that line here with a pretty serious breach. He did not get any actual photos of Spider-Man fighting Sandman. So he stages them. He deserves to be fired and to never work in journalism again for that. Lucky for him, he doesn’t get caught.
As I have emphasized, this comic is much better than all the other ones we are reading. No matter how you measure it. The villains, the action, the supporting cast, the art… but it’s also the most philosophical. The final panel of the issue again has Peter reflecting on “great power”, a callback to the ending of his first appearance.
Rating: ★★★★☆, 78/100
Significance: ★★★★☆
I read this story in Amazing Spider-Man Epic Collection vol. 1: Great Power. You can also find it through Kindle.
Characters:
- Flint Marko/Sandman
- Peter Parker/Spider-Man
- J. Jonah Jameson
- Aunt May
- Miss Brant
- Flash Thompson
- Liz
- Principal Davis
Story notes:
- Sandman already has a reputation, wanted in many states.
- Spider-Man plays prank on Jameson, leaves webbing on his seat.
- Sandman can turn into sand, can be basically untouchable, can turn his body hard, can change his shape; can turn his finger into a key.
- Sandman knows Spidey’s nickname is “Amazing Spider-Man”.
- Flint Marko inmate at island prison; escaped; hid in atomic devices testing center; caught in nuclear explosion.
- Sandman hides in Peter’s school.
| Previous | #85 | Next |
|---|---|---|
| Tales of Suspense #45 | Reading order | Fantastic Four #18 |
| Amazing Spider-Man #3 | Amazing Spider-Man | Amazing Spider-Man #5 |
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