Essential Spider-Man

Let me preface this by stating I fought the urge to comment on the weirdly Freudian obsession Peter Parker has with the sepulchral crone-like Aunt May. I thought it was better to be kind. (Aren't I some guy?)

Peter Parker had a helluva time of it, being bitten by a radioactive spider and all. Already a high-school genius by the standards of 1962, he quickly decides that superheroing might just be in the cards. Caught in the web of fate (har har), he stitches together an iconic costume complete with webbed glider wings under the armpits and designs a set of web-shooters no modern laboratory would dare sign off on. Naturally, he then decides to become a television star.

Uncle Ben, married to the—forgive us—wildly hideous Aunt May (who bears a striking resemblance to both the Crypt Keeper and Charles Napier), gets killed by a crook straight out of 1962. Spidey could have easily stopped this killing, or prevented it entirely, if he had just accosted said crook on his way out of a comic-book jewelry heist. (Like, where the EFF was Batman and the Boy Wonder, huh?) Having failed to do this, convinced he was going to utilize the pioneer celebrity skin of televised "reality" then forming in 1962 to become a big, money-making hit influencer, he neglects to stop the killer.

Who then kills Uncle Ben.

Whose BLOOD is now on SPIDEY'S hands!

After this, we get a dizzying array, a gallery of grotesques straight from the horror hall of fame, of super villainous weirdies that slither, slime, and fly about, usually in furtherance of alien invasion plots or the ever-reliable heist, doing battle with the web-crawling teenage lumpenprole turned superhero supergenius. Meanwhile, Peter remains the constant butt of jokes, barbs, and insults from blonde Riverdale reject Flash Thompson, leader of the Spider-Man Fan Club, who somehow fails to realize that "Puny Parker," as he calls him, is in reality old red-and-blue himself.

The rogues arrive at an astonishing pace. Doctor Octopus, Sandman, the Vulture, Electro, the Lizard, Mysterio, Kraven, the Green Goblin, and the Scorpion all show up before most comic-book heroes would have finished introducing themselves. It's enough colorful weirdness to fuel half a century of cartoons, action figures, movies, lunchboxes, and Halloween costumes.

But no supervillain, be it Doc Ock (who, as Stephen King observed in Danse Macabre, appears to have vacuum-cleaner attachments growing from his midsection, and who bears a weird, passing resemblance to 1980s Roy Orbison), Doctor Doom, Kraven the Hunter, the Sandman, the Vulture, or the boogie-boarding Green Goblin, has it out for Spidey the way one crewcut-sporting, cigar-chomping, vaguely Hitlerish newspaper tycoon, J. Jonah Jameson, mysteriously does.

Sporting the kind of venom psychopaths reserve exclusively for their victims, Jameson practically makes an entire career out of trying to "expose" that "web-crawling menace" through the yellow journalism he peddles in the pages of his seedy big-city fishwrap. Every day seems to bring a fresh headline announcing that Spider-Man is a public menace, a criminal, a threat to decent society, or possibly all three.

Unbeknownst to him, however, the photographer he hires to obtain exclusive Spider-Man snapshots is none other than Peter Parker himself.

This means that Peter spends much of the series beating up supervillains, rescuing innocent citizens, saving the city from assorted weirdos, monsters, and mad scientists, then stopping by the Daily Bugle to collect a paycheck from the one man in New York who would probably try to have him deported for doing so.

Of course, there's the usual Teenage Confidential drama between Puny Parker and gals like Betty Brant and the blonde Liz Allan, both of whom would probably feel more at home in the football-swinging arms of Flash Thompson. Parker scarcely has time for romance, however, when even Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, Ben Grimm, and an early incarnation of Daredevil are up his ass and around the corner. (Reed Richards is a little too obsessed, I think, with being Square John All-Around Good Citizen and quietly fuming over Plastic Man muscling in and stretching out across his turf.)

The Hulk makes an appearance in an issue where the Enforcers—a cowboy, a midget, and a hulking lug—are fake actors in a fake movie when the Green Goblin comes flying by on his levitating bat-winged skater-mobile and the Hulk emerges from a cave. It's all probably symbolic of the monster rising from the dark abyss of the Id, but I'll pass on that interpretation since Freud doesn't actually appear in the issue.

Then, in the Annual, the whole unmerry crew of monsters gets together to wipe the floor with Spidey's web-slinging keister. Nevertheless, he follows a bunch of conveniently placed index cards to rescue Betty and Aunt May, who are apparently being served refreshments by Doctor Octopus.

By this point, I was pretty well wiped out myself, and Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's weird, wild world of webheads dissolved before me in a terrific Buddha-smile of Excelsior.

Ramones - Spider-Man

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