Amazing Spider-Man 3: Live and Learn

In a convention charged with psychological significance, superheroes frequently fight distorted mirror images of themselves.

Spider-Man battled other “animal men” from the start, defeating the Chameleon in Amazing Spider-Man 1 and the Vulture in ASM 2. But Dr. Octopus, in the third issue, was the most clearly mirrored of the villains (spiders and octopi both being multi-limbed, somewhat creepy creatures). And Otto Octavius also provided an opportunity for dramatic development unique in superhero comics at the time.

For The Amazing Spider-Man was not just a series but a serial, a soap opera, and at first its teenage protagonist was really too immature to handle the dangerous responsibilities thrust upon him by his guilt over his uncle’s death.

Peter Parker got a lesson in life’s unfairness in the first issue, when after rescuing J. Jonah Jameson’s son from certain death, the Daily Bugle publisher still trashed Spider-Man.

In the second issue, Spider-Man’s challenges escalated from a master of disguise to the Vulture, his first fully super-powered foe. Acquitting himself well in that showdown, Spidey regarded his victory the way many inexperienced young men would.

He became overconfident.

“It’s almost TOO easy,” Spidey mused. “I’ve run out of enemies who can give me any real opposition. I’m too powerful for ANY foe. I almost WISH for an opponent who’d give me a run for my money.”

In ASM 3 (July 1963), Lee and Ditko fulfill Spidey’s wish by confronting him with Dr. Octopus, who gives him a beat-down that shakes his confidence to the core. However, inspired by the Human Torch, a sadder but wiser Spider-Man returns to fight another day…

Comics historian Don Alsafi noted that Dr. Octopus, too, is characterized with subtle sophistication.

“When we first meet Dr. Otto Octavius, he seems a genial sort of man: well-liked, respected by his colleagues, and miraculously unscarred from the trauma of having been named Otto,’” Alasfi wrote. “However, an explosive accident during his atomic research causes the metal arms he uses in his experiments to fuse to his body — and Doctor Octopus is born!

“Although we only get to see Octavius for about a page before his mind becomes deranged, what’s interesting is just how abrupt this change is, and the idea of a man suddenly enslaved by his madness. In an era where most villains were evil just because, the astute reader quickly realizes that this isn’t the way Otto has always been, and the tragedy of that original mind trapped within the broken one is poignant.”

The Hidden Defenders of Steve Ditko

Steve Ditko’s 1950s’ fantasy stories offer examples of one of his running themes: the hidden defender.

Unheralded and unrecognized by the people he protects, the hidden defender is some ordinary-looking person who has access to strange powers that enable him to protect humanity from equally hidden threats. This “unappreciated hero” angle can also seen be in the novels of Ayn Rand, a writer Ditko admires.

In The Old Fool (Charlton’s Tales of the Mysterious Traveler 6, Dec. 1957), Ditko presents us with an old man in the Greek village of Derniani, a silent, self-absorbed character so odd that many villagers talk about having him “put away.”

What they don’t know is that each day the old man sits on a mountainside overlooking the village, meditating and gathering the powers of nature. He uses them to detect and avert various perils — quenching a fire that would have destroyed many houses, calming a runaway horse that would a crushed a little girl. If the contemptuous townspeople ever succeed in having the old man locked away, their village will be plagued by disasters.

In From Out of the Depths (Charlton’s This Magazine Is Haunted 14, Dec. 1957), one of Ditko’s fluid, shadowy creep-things crawls out of the Gulf of Mexico.

A poor peasant named Juan, plagued by drought and at the end of his rope, is the first to see the mysterious horror, which lurches toward the one pathetic crop he has left. In desperation, little Juan channels his fear into anger and charges straight at the giant thing. The very force of his outrage renders the alien being into its constituent elemental gasses, one of which causes rain…

One of my favorite Charlton stories by Ditko is The Human Powerhouse (Strange Suspense Stories 48, July 1960). Accountant George Clinton finds himself mysteriously charged with electrical power, capable of burning down trees and destroying boulders. Then he somehow senses something far out in space, “…a flock of gruesome living entities bearing new and terrible diseases to Earth from another galaxy.” Clinton discharges all his electrical power into the sky, destroying them. Some mysterious natural balance is achieved.

In a broad sense, all superheroes who have secret identities are expressions of this “secret protector” theme. And in a specific sense, so was one of the two most popular characters Ditko ever created. Ordinary people thought of Dr. Stephen Strange as just a Greenwich Village eccentric. They didn’t know that he was the only thing standing between them and unimaginable horrors…

1964: The Return of Marvel's Missing Monster

From March 1963 to October 1964, the Incredible Hulk wandered in the wilderness, both literally and metaphorically.

After his comic book ended with its 6^th issue, he was a monster without a title.

But Stan Lee made skillful use of this tortured former protagonist as an antagonist against the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Thor and Giant-Man, and that move accomplished two purposes. It kept the Hulk alive in the minds of young readers, and it nurtured their growing sense of a vast, interconnected fictional universe, a Marvel universe.

Namor served the same function at the same time.

Rarely out of sight or mind, the Hulk returned in a new feature in Tales to Astonish 60. Drawn again by Steve Ditko, the Hulk was finally established in the form in which most people now know him — as a scientist turned into a monster by stress, anger, the fight-or-flight response.

Shared titles were necessary in Marvel’s expanding universe, and each of them had its own theme. Tales of Suspense featured the out-and-out superheroes, Captain America and Iron Man. Strange Tales featured two characters on the fringes of the superhero world, Nick Fury and Dr. Strange. And once Giant-Man departed, Tales to Astonish featured the Hulk and the Submariner, two super-antiheroes.

Blue Beetle '67: Who Needs Super Powers?

Having walked away from Spider-Man with issue 38 (July 1966), Steve Ditko, at the height of his powers, was in a perfect position to provide us with a pinnacle in the career of a surprisingly long-lived superhero, the Blue Beetle.

“Surprisingly” because the character began as Fox Comics’ rather cheap rip-off of the popular radio hero Green Hornet in Mystery Men Comics 1 (Aug. 1939).

I could understand criminals being afraid of a hornet. But a beetle?

In his debut, the Blue Beetle posed as a criminal mastermind and felled gangsters with gas, just like the Green Hornet. Quickly re-imagined as beat cop Dan Garret (one T), and empowered by an armored costume and Vitamin 2X, the character gained his own title and even had brief exposure in a Jack Kirby newspaper strip and on radio.

Charlton Comics revived the superhero in the 1950s, and revamped him in 1964. This time, the Beetle was archaeologist Dan Garrett (two Ts) who acquired an array of powers — flight, telepathy, strength, the ability to project lightning and who knows what else — from an Egyptian scarab amulet when he pronounces the magic words “Kaji Dha.”

That’s the character Ditko used as a springboard for his own version, an imaginative one that reflected some of his Objectivist philosophical principles.

Introduced in Captain Atom 83 (Nov. 1966), genius millionaire industrialist Ted Kord inherited the identity but not the powers of the Blue Beetle from the dying Garrett. Ditko seemed concerned to demonstrate that a person wouldn’t need super powers to handle whatever menaces appeared, but could rely on his own rationality, ingenuity and training.

Ditko’s story in Captain Atom 85 (March 1967) illustrates that theme. Disabling an enemy sub with his underwater bazooka, Kord fights off frogmen in hand-to-hand combat. And with the help of his versatile “Bug” air-sea craft, the Beetle rescues a falling jet and even fights off a giant octopus. 

Doomed! When Spidey First Faced the FF's Foe

As superhero comic book readers in the 1960s, we did a lot of conscious and unconscious weight-classification, just like prizefighting fans.

We assumed, for example, that a super villain who could give Thor a real run for his Danegeld would be too much for Ant-Man. So stories that challenged those expectations could be particularly exciting.

That’s one reason why Daredevil’s battle with Sub-Mariner in April 1965 was so satisfying. We knew the blind costumed acrobat could not possibly defeat the superman of the seas, and he did not.

Similarly, I was eager to read The Amazing Spider-Man 5 (Oct. 1963). I’d loved the first three issues of the title, with Spidey facing the Chameleon, the Vulture and his multi-limbed opposite number Dr. Octopus. But I’d skipped the fourth issue because the Sandman appeared goofy — dressed like a longshoreman, looking about as sinister as a sandpile.

But the fifth issue brought me back. Spidey was squaring off against Dr. Doom! Oh no! How could Spider-Man survive against an enemy who’d already nearly destroyed the entire Fantastic Four five times?

I couldn’t imagine a more exciting battle — until the Thing went solo against the Incredible Hulk six months later.

Comics historian Don Alsafi remarked, “Over the last year, Stan Lee had been tentatively drawing the connections between all these new superhero creations, and selling the fiction that they all lived in the same world. The first step in that direction had occurred when the Hulk appeared in the pages of the Fantastic Four not just in passing but as the issue’s monster menace du jour, and culminating this same month in the superteam-of-disparate-parts known as the Avengers. So even if Victor Von Doom weren’t the most natural of enemies to face off against a high-school kid, you can understand the intention towards a tighter continuity that Stan Lee was going for. In fact, this is most visible when Doom recounts how he last escaped the Fantastic Four.”

“In addition to inching forward the nascent attraction between Peter Parker and Jameson's secretary, Betty Brant, we get a humorous case of ‘mistaken identity’ shenanigans due to Peter’s main high school tormentor, Flash Thompson,” Alsafi noted. “See, one of the most inspired ideas in these early days is the fact that even though Flash looks down upon the bookish Parker ... he idolizes Spider-Man! So at one point he decides to have a Spider-costume made up, throws it on and lies in wait to jump Parker and give him the scare of his life. Of course, this is exactly when Doctor Doom is scouring the city for Spider-Man, and ends up nabbing this fake Spidey in his stead...”

In this issue, Spidey tried wielding his web like the Human Torch used his flame, making web pillars, throwing web balls and so forth. He was effective enough to prompt Dr. Doom to give us a lesson in how to beat a hasty retreat without losing face or, er, mask.

“I have found your juvenile antics mildly amusing until now,” Doom remarks, on the run. “But now I begin to grow bored, so…”

And with this issue, the title became monthly, on its way to establishing Spider-Man alongside Superman and Batman as one of most famous superheroes in history.

The Propaganda Came from Outer Space

Steve Ditko and Stan Lee’s brief back-of-the-book Marvel tales-with-a-twist were fun. But sometimes, like Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone TV series, they also carried a quietly effective theme about human nature. This one concerns the power and danger of propaganda, a message even more relevant in 2016 than in 1960.

In Tales of Suspense 8 (March 1960), a shape-shifting alien (a direct ancestor of the Skrulls) wreaks havoc until he’s captured because he made the mistake of assuming the form of a beloved astronaut dog who’s in space.

A silly surprise ending, yes, but the real message was slipped in earlier — that beguiling media propaganda can be used not only to dangerously misinform citizens, but even more insidiously to discredit the truth-tellers by spreading suspicion about all news sources.

How Can I Fight You When I Must Save You?

Spider-Man had already fought and thwarted the Chameleon, the Vulture and the Sandman. He’d nearly been beaten by two doctors named Octopus and Doom. He’d fretted about the frailty of Aunt May and fumed about the unfairness of J. Jonah Jameson. But in Amazing Spider-Man 6 (Nov. 1963), the odds against him were stacked even higher.

Now, he had to defeat Dr. Curt Conners, a man who had accidentally transformed himself into the monstrous Lizard while attempting to restore his lost arm. Like the Hulk, Conners could not control his condition, and he had a wife and small son who loved him. So Spidey had to defeat the Lizard and his reptile army while finding a way to avoid hurting a husband and father. His task was heroic indeed, and this Stan Lee/Steve Ditko story set the pattern for Spider-Man movie villains, who always have a sympathetic, damaged and human side to their dangerous rage.

Also, as Don Alsafi noted, “Finally, it’s impressive to see the continued and steady evolution of Peter's character. As mentioned above, early on in the story he’s about to ask out Betty Brant when he's interrupted by another of Jameson's outbursts, and the story ends with Peter phoning up Liz Allan for a date instead. She turns him down — suddenly enamored with that hero Spider-Man who saved her at the museum — but instead of feeling rejected, Peter just shrugs in bemusement at his wry luck. It’s a significant change to see him displaying this kind of cool confidence, something he clearly lacked in his earlier stories.”

A Marvel Tale You Won't Believe

Just before the dawn of the Marvel superheroes, Stan Lee often provided variations on this theme: the monster or alien or ghost or Abominable Snowman turns out to be the protagonist or the victim or the investigator or, for all I know, the reader himself. EC Comics and the Twilight Zone TV show also used the trick. The predictability of the twist did little to detract from the enjoyment of the tale in the hands of artists like Jack Kirby or, here, Steve Ditko. This one’s from Amazing Adult Fantasy 7 (1961).

Steve Ditko's Titans: Destructive and Lovable

I think children are attracted to giant monsters for the same reason they are attracted to superheroes — because small people find it easy to imagine how nice it would be to be much bigger, more colorful and more powerful than all those bossy grown-ups who surround them, eternally barking their strange orders.

But although superheroes essentially founded and sustained the comic book industry, ongoing giant monster characters are pretty much a movie genre. Two of the exceptions were created for Charlton Comics by the great Steve Ditko  — the giant ape Konga (1960-1965) and the amphibious dinosaur Gorgo (1961-1965).

Each ran 23 issues, plus specials — a relatively long run, considering. Loving them both as a child, I didn’t consider how difficult it must have been to write stories for characters who cannot talk and, because of their Brobdingnagian stature, virtually cannot even interact with human beings. Writing tales for Rex the Wonder Dog or the Lone Ranger’s horse Silver must have been a breeze by comparison.

Konga was based on a relatively bad film of the same name, notable for starring Batman butler Michael Gough (it wasn’t his fault). The murderous Konga of the movies was killed off in the first issue, replaced in the rest of the run by a namesake sweet monkey amplified into a sweet but nevertheless formidable giant ape.

Gorgo was based on a relatively good film of the same name, with a plot that lent itself to a sustained comic book series. Gorgo was a giant aquatic reptile captured, like King Kong, for exhibition. What his captors didn’t know was that he was only a child, and that his truly titanic mommy — as big as Big Ben, and therefore 300 feet high — would let nothing stop her in her attempt to rescue him. This was one of those rare giant monsters movies with a happy ending in which the monsters won.

Gorgo was a touching tale of mother love, like Stella Dallas, and Konga was the poignant saga of a lost boy, like Pinocchio. No wonder they worked so well.

The Artist Who was a Powerhouse

I remember being particularly entranced by this tale from Charlton’s Strange Suspense Stories 48 in 1960 because it combined science fiction and super powers and sprang an alien invasion on us at the end. Even at 5, I could recognize and appreciate the distinctive, shadow-loving angularity of the art, although I didn’t know the artist’s identity then. I wouldn’t read the odd name of Steve Ditko until a little later, in Marvel Comics credits.

My First Spidey: The Web of Memory

In 1963, this didn’t make sense.

The Fantastic Four were fighting some weird character named “Spider-Man,” but the comic book wasn’t about them. It was about him!

I had to know what the heck was going on here, so I invested half my 25-cent weekly allowance and hauled Spider-Man No. 1 home from the downtown newsstand in Effingham.

I had missed Spidey’s actual debut in the last issue of Amazing Fantasy months before, but I was already familiar with this then-small and unnamed but distinctive line of superheroes. Only the FF, the Incredible Hulk and the not-yet-costumed Ant-Man had preceded Spidey, and Thor debuted simultaneously with him.

And I was already familiar with the artwork of Steve Ditko, from my favorite Charlton monster titles Gorgo and Konga and from his only previous superhero feature, Charlton’s yellow lamé Captain Atom with his contrail of little atomic symbols.

I didn’t know Ditko’s name, but even at age 8, I knew his work — unpretty and unmistakable, all those angular body positions and strained faces and unique storytelling innovations, like the half-masked face that symbolically underlined a character who had a secret identity.

Couple this with Stan Lee’s storytelling (much better than Charlton’s), and you had a finely wrought lure for a boy. Spider-Man was a skinny kid who nevertheless had formidable super powers. His motives for showing up unannounced at the Baxter Building were mercenary — he demanded the FF’s “top salary.” He was a mysterious-looking figure who was targeted and opposed by another who was equally mysterious, the Chameleon.

And then there was that final plot twist — after the superhero had risked his life to save John Jameson from certain death in his space capsule, he learned in the last panel that Jameson’s father’s newspaper still branded him a menace.

How mean! How unfair! How irresistible!

The Strange Case of Dr. Strange

Marvel’s Dr. Stephen Strange got a mention in the second Captain America movie, and will be starring in his own big screen feature soon.

I have always found Dr. Strange an intriguing concept, but he’s rarely had long runs in his own title. He suffers from two defects that have limited his appeal, I think. He really has no personality to speak of, and his magical powers are so imprecise and unclear to the reader that they are dramatically frustrating. He can always pull some deus ex machina spell out of his ass. Dr. Fate and the Spectre have the same problem.

That said, the early Steve Ditko/Stan Lee stories were a lot of fun, with a wonderful sense of freedom in their fever-dream art and situations that somehow managed to be suspenseful despite what I just said.