The Essential Amazing Spider-Man Volume Two

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Essential Amazing Spider-Man (Marvel, 1998).



I suppose that I could be struck, reading this collection, as to how vibrant and wonderful Steve Ditko's art is. This collection of 25 issues of Marvel's Amazing Spider-Man contains the second half of Ditko's run as artist and co-plotter on the series, along with the first six issues of John Romita's run. I suppose that I could also be struck to learn just how steep Romita's learning curve was. Romita has been my favorite Spider-Man artist for as long as I can remember, even, heretically, surpassing the wonderful work of Ditko, but his first two issues are just stiff and awkward. Perhaps it's the inking, by Mike Esposito, not quite in sync with the pencils, but his first two issues look really sloppy and ungainly for one of Marvel's best-known creators.

But no, the main thing that strikes me about reading this collection is how utterly insane teenagers were in the 1960s. Oh, sure, they're insane now, but either scripter and co-plotter Stan Lee was coming up with laughable, flatly unbelievable elements to these stories, or they're reasonably accurate portrayals of deeply, utterly bugnuts, highly-strung freaks that are having complete meltdowns every other month. Oh, yeah, and a kid bit by a radioactive spider beats up on guys who dress like scorpions and rhinos.

You get the usual accounting of completely histrionic women that you expect in boy-targeted comics, just dialed up to eleven. Peter Parker, here aged around 17, has a few suitors, like Daily Bugle employee Betty Brant. Betty, also being wooed by a guy named Ned Leeds, flies completely off the handle, and into Ned's arms, when she learns that one of Peter's elderly neighbors has a niece around Peter's age. I mean, she flips totally out of control just hearing that somebody named Mary Jane Watson might exist. We don't even actually meet Mary Jane for many months, by which time Betty has exited the series, chased out by a possibility.

Then there's Peter's fellow classmates at Empire State, who have way too much time on their hands. During one protracted segment, Peter's Aunt May, not for the first nor the last time, is gravely ill. Peter is so upset by this that he does not talk to anybody about anything, and just goes through the day with his head hung low under a forest of thought balloons. His classmates conclude that Peter's intentionally freezing them out, prompting class hottie Gwen Stacey to alternately come onto him like a va-va-voom girl or an ice queen, with consistently weird results. Nothing anybody does in this comic has any relation to modern teenagers, who, for starters, would be blogging and Facebooking the bejezus out of how bummed they are that their aunt is in the hospital. Hell, my teenage son made a federal case out of his inability to convince his wicked stepmother to drive him twenty miles to an Apple Store. On Easter Sunday, when it was closed.

This is deeply, deeply dated stuff. I have a collection of Archie newspaper strips from twenty years prior to this, and its teen leads might be jealous, easily offended weirdos, but they're more believable than the teen attitudes depicted here. This is a shame, because the superhero stuff is really first-rate, with some impressive plots and even more impressive artwork and fight scenes, but one of the selling points of 1960s Marvel books is supposed to be how they're "realistic," and match the highwire melodrama with issues that normal readers can understand. Unfortunately, everything faced here by Peter Parker is just so utterly ridiculous, and played out with such overbearing hysteria, that it overwhelms everything around it. When it's good - when Ditko gets a dialogue-free page to show Spider-Man and the baddie of the month smacking the daylights out of each other, when Lee depicts a hero who can out-talk and outwit anybody - it is almost transcendent, but when it is ordinary, it is excruciating. Recommended for very patient readers.

Spider-Man Newspaper Strips Volume One

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Spider-Man Newspaper Strips volume one (Marvel, 2009)



When it comes to reviewing books and records and movies, I'd like to think that I got all the nasty negativity out of my system when I was in college, writing for the newspaper as a rawk critic and wishing I was Steve Sutherland or Nick Kent or Swells, somebody like that. Not Bangs, he wasn't British. Those were the days I could legitimately spend a full calendar year wishing that chowderhead Daniel Ash would release just one more record so that I could savage it so well that word'd later get back to me that Professor Fink in the j-school had held my piece up as an example of how to write.

These days, though, I just try to quit reading something I'm not enjoying, and I'd really, really rather not engage in ugly vitriol. Plus, nobody pays me for this. Well, I might try and make a joke every once in a while, but instead of uncapping a poison pen, I'd rather consider what sort of compromises were necessary to get something so completely misguided and ugly as the first volume of Spider-Man Newspaper Strips in print in the first place.

I find it curious that the comic blogsophere has had so little to say about this book. If Marvel Comics promotes a new release on the back of somebody else's promotion, the circles I read explode for two weeks. Similarly, everybody is very keen to hear what IDW and Fantagraphics have to say about their archival reprints of classic newspaper strips, and anything from those companies along those lines is guaranteed to be discussed and debated. Yet when Marvel released a collection last year of their 1970s Spider-Man strip, giving it the full hardcover treatment, with restored artwork by the mighty John Romita (or was he "Jazzy"...?) and some supplemental material, the internet discussion sites were surprisingly muted. Was everybody just being inordinately polite?

I don't know whether the design or the actual strip is the main problem, but the coin came up heads, so here you go: this is one butt-ugly book. It's printed sideways.



The best I can figure is that Marvel uses one printing company for their hardcovers, and they can only do a single trim size, and printing three strips per page would have required that the art be shrunk at least 10%, and the designer didn't want to do that to Jazzy John. That's just a guess, and it's the best I've got. Seriously, nobody planned to come up with something this stupid, did they? Perhaps the designer was told that the book would be in the wide format similar to what IDW and Fantagraphics have popularized and laid out the strips accordingly, and somebody else later decided they wanted to rack it next to the Marvel Masterworks?

That said, it's more than just the stupidly awkward format. The tan background is perhaps a nice notion, to make the art stand out more, but it doesn't really work for me. Adding fussy little spiderwebs and red explosions around the page numbers distracts readers, and makes the product look like a third-party coloring book, even more juvenile than the strip itself. And that's saying something. This strip was for dimwits.

When I was in elementary school, I liked Spider-Man just fine, but I never read this strip, which appeared locally in the evening paper, The Atlanta Journal. The morning Atlanta Constitution ran the competing World's Greatest Superheroes featuring the DC characters. That was a pretty ridiculous guilty pleasure, beloved today by pretty much only me, but even at the age of eight, I knew that goofball mess was miles better than the Marvel offering.

Adventure strips have to use a curious pacing to keep casual readers interested, while not moving so quickly as to confuse people who only see it twice a week. Some writers can do it amazingly well, but Lee's constant rehashing of the same bored tics and tropes just grate, and you'll want to never again read about Peter Parker after the fourth or fifth time he refuses to defend himself out of costume, because he apparently cannot control his super strength and is afraid he'll punch somebody too hard. What the heck? Compilations like this sometimes chafe because older comics would restate certain character traits every month for newcomers, but I swear it seems like Lee was doing it twice every week, especially when the agonizing Aunt May spends day after day worrying about poor, poor, poor Peter. It's like trying to wring sympathy out of Gladys Kravitz; it can't be done.

I'd give Lee some leeway if the storylines were worth the boring, redundant character quirks, but apart from one interesting plot by the Kingpin to get Spidey to work as his lieutenant, they are never more than Spidey Super Stories-level. Doctor Doom somehow manages to be boring in a convoluted scheme to drive Spidey onto the couch of a psychiatrist who's actually a robot, and there's a deeply seventies tale about Flash and Harry Osborn opening a hot new nightclub which is even more ridiculously wish-fulfilling and G-rated than the plot of Xanadu.

But the booby prize has to go to the Mysterio story. In an apparent attempt to promote CBS's oddball Spider-Man TV series of the time, some Hollywood producer decides to make a Spider-Man movie, and Peter decides to go to California to "star" in it by doing the Spidey stunts, and J. Jonah Jameson decides to send Parker out there to cover it, and the special effects guy decides to kill the lead actor. I started counting the things wrong with that, and ran out of fingers.

Perhaps at a lower price, this might make for a cute little curiosity and period piece, the sort of thing that internet comedians like Chris Sims and Kevin Church would enjoy clowning. After all, as the duo behind the monthly Amazing Spider-Man comic in the late sixties, Lee and Romita spun some terrific yarns - I actually, heretically, prefer that period to the original days of Steve Ditko - and their reteaming should have been worth at least a look, even if it turned out so lousy. But to put such mediocre material out there and package it so badly and to charge forty bucks for it, well, I'm not sure who I'm angrier with, Marvel for releasing something so lousy or me for still not learning the expensive lesson to actually have a product in hand to look at before I ask Bizarro Wuxtry to order me a copy.

Oh, wait, this book arrived shrinkwrapped. It's like Marvel knew something we didn't. Not recommended. Avoid.

Bring On the Bad Guys

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Bring on the Bad Guys (Fireside, 1976)



In the 1970s, one of Simon & Schuster's divisions launched an annual collection of Marvel Comics reprints. I guess there were ten of these, reasonably priced samplers of mostly Stan Lee-scripted superhero smash-ups, and they were certainly the gateway drug for millions of kids who'd never seen much of the classic 1960s Marvel work.

These days, these sort of samplers seem pretty quaint and silly in the wake of so much reprinted material available. I found my copy of Bring on the Bad Guys - an extremely nice first edition for $5 - at the old Lakewood Antique Market in 2004, and there's nothing in it that hasn't since been collected in the pages of Marvel's Essential line. Each chapter has one or two stories, or some multi-part adventures, telling the tales of those nefarious nasties Doctor Doom, the Red Skull, Loki, the Green Goblin, Dormammu, the Abomination and Mephisto. These are names that should, if the 4-5 pages of introductory material for each chapter (penned especially and breathlessly for this edition by Smilin' Stan) have done their job, strike fear in the hearts of law-abiding citizens everywhere!

About half the artwork in this book is by Jack Kirby, and honestly, I was never really taken with his earliest work on Fantastic Four. This has got that odd little story where Doom forces our heroes to travel back in time and collect Blackbeard's treasure for him, and while the artwork is better than just about anything in mainstream comics today, it's not a patch on what he'd accomplish in just a couple of years. The sequence where the Red Skull kidnaps and brainwashes Captain America, and the climactic part of Thor's battle with Loki and the Absorbing Man, along with some short "Tales of Asgard" adventures detailing Thor and Loki's long enmity, well, those are jawdropping.

Just about the only thing in 1960s comics to come close would be Dr. Strange's initial, mindblowing battle with Dormammu and those Nameless Ones, which Steve Ditko co-plotted and drew, and it's just amazing stuff. I still think Marvel's criminally missing some sales by not packaging all of the Ditko Dr. Strange stories in a nice hardcover with good paper. There's sort of a bitter irony in that the Spider-Man adventure included here would be the one which Ditko refused to draw, in which the Green Goblin reveals his identity. John Romita drew this adventure in sort of a lackluster Ditko imitation before his own style really manifested, and it ends up, visually, being the weakest thing in the book.

The Abomination story is drawn by Gil Kane, and it's notable for the almost naive take on the Hulk's power, which kept being described in the sixties as limitless, but nobody ever seemed to believe it. I think that's why I prefer the comparatively low-powered 1960s Marvel Universe. One cliffhanger comes when Abomination just smacks Hulk in the head really hard and Rick Jones starts screaming that not even the Hulk could survive a blow like that. These days, I reckon you could split the planet in half and it wouldn't slow him down. Yawn. Finally, John Buscema draws a Silver Surfer adventure, and he draws the hell out of it, but I've always thought that this was the series, among all others, where Stan's dialogue reached its overblown, overwritten pinnacle, and so I just sort of tuned out and enjoyed looking at the pretty pictures.

As a sampler or an introduction, this book's just terrific. It's one of those books that every aunt and uncle in America should have handy for when younguns visit. I mean, really, if an under-ten isn't doing a double-take at the sight of Kirby's Cap beating the hell out of enough Nazis to completely pack a hallway, or Ditko's Strange crossing limbo voids where nobody ever heard of physics, then you need to get that kid checked out. Something's wrong with him. From a collector's standpoint, it's also pretty handy. The next time somebody tells you they're not interested in Essentials because they're in black and white, you can show 'em this and compare the aggravating off-register printing and limited color palate to the nice, unvarnished, untainted Kirby artwork in Essential Thor volume two and settle the argument instantly. Recommended, of course. Now how about putting together some new editions of this and the two Origins books and The Superhero Women and the others, so folks can buy 'em again, Marvel?