Kids love summer for lots of reasons - great weather, no school, they can sleep late - you get the idea. But in those long-ago days when I was a kid, you could also enjoy the Marvel summer annuals. For a hard-earned quarter, you got 72 pages of new material, with no ads except for the inside and back covers.
This first Spider-Man Annual featured a 41-page original story with our hero taking on six of his deadliest foes, and then 31 pages of pin-ups, info pages and the hilarious feature, "How Stan Lee and Steve Ditko Created Spider-Man!" - which should put to rest all those arguments about who did what - it shows Stan writing the stories and Steve drawing them! Wasn't that easy? It also shows us what Ditko looked like in the summer of '64.
The comic itself is just a pure delight. Dr. Octopus, Electro, Sandman, Kraven, the Vulture and Mysterio join forces, conveniently deciding to take on Spidey one at a time.
Of course, Spider-Man has a big problem - he's lost his powers! So how can he take on his most dangerous foes? Well, I'm not telling - that would take away all the fun.
But what a terrific comic! Stan Lee provides a fun, fast-paced story and hilarious comments from Spidey, and Steve Ditko really pulls out the stops, with amazing action sequences, some rare full-page spreads of Spider-Man tackling each foe, and all the back-up features.
This was an issue I read over and over again - it's comics in its most pure, entertaining form. You can pick it up in Masterworks and Essentials reprints, which I highly recommend.
If I could only pick a dozen comics to hang onto, this would be one of them. A great, great comic, and a real classic.
Grade: A+
5 comments:
One thing I loved about this comic (which I first read in the 80's as Marvel Tales no. 150) is that pretty much every major Marvel character makes a cameo at some point. Stan Lee sure had fun with a shared universe.
Pound for pound, a great action-packed adventure, and you're right about those Ditko splash pages, a rare treat.
A+ sounds right to me.
One of the best comics EVER. Picked it up at the VFW Flea Market back in '75 when I was ten. Aaah, the days.
Anon, I forgot to mention the lightning-quick guest appearances of all of Marvel's heroes in the Spidey Annual, each one with a caption like: "Thor appears courtesy of the Journey Into Mystery magazine." Those cameos really set Marvel apart - you never knew who might show up in an issue.
Jim, I'm guessing in '75 you probably got it for a relatively low price (as opposed to today's going rate).
Thanks to the Essential volumes I've recently become a huge Spider-man fan... never really followed the character before but getting huge 500 page chunks of his earliest appearances has really been a treat...
Marvel's Essentials line and DC's Showcase series of reprints have been a boon to comics readers - we really live in the Golden Age of reprints! I'm amazed at some of the things they've collected - I mean, "Elongated Man?" Are they just printing these up for me?
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