Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1: With Great Power… by Stan LeeMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1: With Great Power collects Amazing Fantasy #14 and Amazing Spider-Man 1-10.
I had a beat up Spider-Man Masterworks when I was a teenager but got rid of it during a misguided purge at some point. Michael Cho's covers on the recent Shazam omnibuses were spectacular so I figured it was a good time to reread the earliest adventures of the wall crawler.
The book starts with Spidey's origin and goes into the regular series from there. Speaking of which, it never occurred to me before that Spider-Man's origin story could easily be an EC tale with it's bite you in the ass ending.
A lot of groundwork for future Spider-Man stories is laid in this issues. Betty Brant, Liz Allen, Flash Thompson, J. Jonah Jameson, and Aunt May are all introduced and woven into Peter's life. Bad guys like Doctor Octopus, Electro, The Vulture, the Chameleon, and the Sandman rear their ugly heads for the first time.
Lee and Ditko's Peter Parker is an outcast but also kind of a douche at times. It's fun watching him go from being a wallflower to actually getting some play later in the book. It was also fun to see him hand Flash Thompson his ass in a boxing match.
Lee's dialogue isn't nearly as obnoxious here as it is in other books and the plots are pretty good for 1963. Ditko's Spidey looks more like a refugee from one of his horror stories rather than the romance comic leading man he'd soon become under John Romita's pen.
I'm pleased that Spider-Man's earliest adventures hold up so well after almost eighty years. I'll be getting subsequent volumes in this series. Four out of five stars.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment