Amazing Fantasy #15
Spider-Man
By Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
Villains: The Burglar
Guest Appearances: none
So, What Happens?
Shy and nerdy, Peter Parker is an outcast at High School. Despite his talent for science and the love of his Uncle and Aunt he is unhappy at school and rebuffed by the popular Sally Avril when he asks her to come on a date at an upcoming science exhibit.
Peter goes alone and is bitten by a glowing spider that had just spun through a radioactive ray. The bite burns and leaves Peter feeling extremely woozy.
So woozy in fact that on the way home he stumbles in front of a car and has to leap to safety. He is shocked by how far he leaps and finds himself several meters up and clinging to a sheer wall. By the time he has pulled himself up to the roof above he has realised it must be down to the spider bite and he has soon discovered new found levels of strength and agility.
Determined to use his new powers for financial gain he quickly earns $100 by putting on a mask and not only venturing into the ring with a pro-wrestler but lifting him over his shoulder and leaping around the ring. A watching TV producer promises him a regular job as long as he continues to stay masked for publicity.
At home that night Peter designs himself a spider themed costume and invents a set of web spinners that he can wear on his wrists and shoot webs from.
His career as a TV variety act is a smash hit and, full of himself, Peter chooses not get involved when the TV offices are robbed. He could easily have stopped the criminal but felt it wasn’t his job.
Things are going great for Peter, his Aunt and Uncle buy him a microscope and the TV career remains a hit. However things come to a crashing halt when he returns home one night and learns that his uncle has been murdered in an attempted burglary.
Learning that the criminal is holed up nearby Peter puts on his spider suit and goes after him. He easily manages to capture him but learns to his horror that it is the same thief he let go at the TV show. His guilt over his uncle’s death overwhelms him as he learns that he needs to have the sense of responsibility to go with his great power.
So is it any good?:
It is incredibly familiar from retellings in various media and it can be hard to really evaluate it as a story. Almost everything in it has been expanded in some format or other and this now feels like a very boiled down version of the classic origin.
At the same time it is a story from a failing mystery anthology book and while it obviously introduces Marvel’s premier super hero it isn’t really a super hero story as such.
Peter gets huge gifts from the spider bite, it provides physical power that he had previously lacked, money that his family had been short of and adulation to make up for the taunts of his school mates. However by the end it has all come back to haunt him and he would clearly prefer to turn back the clock and have things back the way they were.
While he displays his super powers here and gets himself a costume, and the ending definitely suggests Stan was planning more stories, Peter is a long way from being a hero and his encounter with the burglar is over in a handful of panels. It is the twist ending of a mystery story not the climax of a super hero tale.
The brief, twelve page, tale introduces a lot of classic aspects of the mythos. We don’t meet any of the classic leading ladies but Sally Avril’s treatment of Peter is much the same as Peter will get from them during the Ditko years.
Flash Thompson is already there as the classic leading guy who has everything Peter will never have in the high school world.
Uncle Ben is only briefly seen but the love between him and Peter is evident in scenes of him ruffling Peter’s hair and buying him the microscope he has always wanted. It’s clear that Ben and May love Peter for the nerdy science geek that he is. Aunt May doesn’t really feature as much as Ben, it has to be his link to Peter that provides the emotional weight here.
Like most of the other silver age titles it actually took a little while for Spider-Man to find its feet. Despite the story containing the seeds of many classic spider-man traits Ditko hasn’t quite worked out what sort of story he is drawing here, everyone is almost drawn in the short hand of a horror or mystery story where a character would only get a panel or two and the reader had to be able to tell everything about their personality instantly.
It’s a long way from the classic soap opera where Peter’s little victories and heartaches would matter so much. This issue instead builds up to that one moment of emotion that would live with Peter forever, every character in the story is really only important for how they drive Peter to that moment. It is Uncle Ben’s death rather than the spider-bite that actually creates spider-man.
This leads to an origin that still packs a punch today, it really is something that Peter should never get over and it clearly is his fault. He may well have made up for it over the years but the heart of the character is the fact that he will never believe that, and to pack that punch this story needed to be a twist ending morality tale and not a classic marvel super hero soap opera.
Are there any goofy moments?
It’s a fairly heavy handed morality tale so some of the dialogue can be a bit strange if you don’t get into the spirit of it.
Peter’s hard luck with girls will obviously be a huge part of the series with a lot of its emotional strength coming from the idea that the girls would probably welcome him if they knew his secret. However it’s hard to really see Peter’s side of things here. A night listening to a lecture on atomic power is hardly a hot date.
Some of the images are a bit weird as well, I’m a big Ditko fan but his first priority when drawing each panel seems to be the overall mood he is trying to convey, it’s very impressionistic and some of the people’s faces, particularly Ben and May, are very strange.
Trivia:
The burglar next appeared in one of the rogues gallery featurettes in Spider-Man annual 1 where he got his own logo much like the costumed villains Spider-Man had faced until that point. He also gained about 15 years and changed his hair colour from his original appearance. The inconsistency is a pity as Ditko’s art in the annual is superbly atmospheric, much better than the burglar’s appearance here.
The Burglar eventually returned in the run up to Amazing Spider-Man 200 which added the detail that he chose to target the Reilly house to search for a gangster’s treasure. Later sources, although generally not the mainstream comics, have also given him a surname, Carradine.
Sally Avril, who here, in her one silver age appearance, turns Peter down in favour of Flash Thompson was briefly the adventurer Bluebird during Kurt Busiek’s Untold Tales of Spider-Man run.
The last caption of this issue promises more Spider-Man in the next issue. Of course this was the final issue of Amazing Fantasy and it would be a number of months before Amazing Spider-Man #1 replaced it. Amazing Fantasy 16 actually arrived in 1995 telling stories set between this one and Spider-Man 1.
Is it a landmark?:
Of course.