Featuring: Spider-Man
Release: April 12, 1966
Cover: July 1966
12 cents
Written and edited by Stan Lee
Plotted and drawn by Steve Ditko
Lettered, unfettered by Artie Simek
20 pages
| Previous | #521 | Next |
|---|---|---|
| Strange Tales #146, Story B | Reading order | Avengers #30 |
| Amazing Spider-Man #37 | Amazing Spider-Man | Amazing Spider-Man #39 |
Goodbye, Steve!
We come at last to the final Steve Ditko Spider-Man story. We just saw the final Steve Ditko Dr. Strange story. One thing they have in common is awful covers. My best guess is Ditko had resigned before turning in a cover for either. So like the Dr. Strange cover, this cover is cut and paste from Ditko’s artwork within the issue.
Here are the interior panels the cover cribs from:
I’ve been pretty clear that the saga of the Amazing Spider-Man as told by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko is basically my favorite story ever. I won’t belabor why any further than I have in the posts on the last 37 issues.
I’d also been pretty clear that I thought that story ended extremely well with issue 33. And that these last 5 issues represent a step down in quality, and a story that no longer seems to be going anywhere in particular.
I find it unfortunate that that was not Ditko’s final issue of Spider-Man. As the man says, it’s better to burn out than to fade away. I wish he’d gone out at the top of his game.
That excellent climax of the Spider-Man saga came out the same month as the excellent climax of the Dr. Strange saga in Strange Tales #141. Both series then went at the same time into a phase I’ve described as “spinning their wheels”. Where any of the next 4 months of issues could have been removed with minimal consequence. Ditko had one more great Dr. Strange story in him, a final confrontation between Dormammu and Eternity.
Does he have one more great Spider-Man story in him?
It’s worth nothing that the last several issues have not been bad and they have their charms. Despite the small number, this phase can actually be broken into two subphases. Issues 34-35 pit Spider-Man against returning foes, Kraven and Molten Man respectively. Some minimal advancement to the romantic supblots surrounded by action that is well told, but not adding much to Spider-Man’s previous encounters with these villains.
Issues 36-38 take a different tactic. They all introduce new villains, none of whom will become the iconic villains that the rest of the series had introduced. But all are interesting in their own right, and all have stories that center around them. Spider-Man becomes almost a secondary character, as we get to know the Looter and the Robot Master.
And they’re actually good comics, taken on their own terms, and not compared to the expectation of Spider-Man comics we’d developed over the previous 4 years of stories. Just offbeat tales about some offbeat characters who run into Spider-Man, tales that function more as satire than drama.
This falls into that mold. The story, Ditko’s final Spider-Man story, isn’t really about Spider-Man. It’s about this guy named Joe.
