Kingpin

Amazing Spider-Man #85 (June, 1970)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In July, 1969, Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Stan Lee announced in his “Stan’s Soapbox” column that the company was instituting a new “no continued stories” policy for all its titles.  Today, that policy (which remained in place for about a year and a half, at least officially) is widely considered to have been not Lee’s own idea, but rather one that was imposed on him by his then-boss, publisher Martin Goodman.  Assuming that’s true, it’s interesting to consider how much Lee flouted the policy in one of the relatively few books he still wrote himself, The Amazing Spider-Man — which, as it happens, was also the company’s best-selling title, and thus probably the one most likely to be noticed by Goodman.  Read More

Amazing Spider-Man #75 (August, 1969)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in October of last year, I wrote a post about Amazing Spider-Man #68, the first installment of the “petrified clay tablet” story arc that would run for a full eight issues (or ten, depending on how you look at it — more about that later).  If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you may remember that I identified this storyline as a major highlight of my early years as a Spider-Man fan, and that I wrote I planned to return to it for at least a couple more posts before we reached the 50th anniversary of its finale.

Well, it’s kind of funny how things go, sometimes.  The fact is, there have been so many other fine comics hitting the half-century mark over the past seven months that Spidey has kept getting squeezed out.  But there’s no way I can let the climactic chapter, issue #75’s “Death Without Warning” pass by without posting about it; and so, here we are.  Read More

Amazing Spider-Man #68 (January, 1969)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As early as 1964 — barely three years into what Marvel Comics’ editor-in-chief Stan Lee had already proclaimed “The Marvel Age of Comics” — it was already evident that the publisher’s output, ostensibly aimed at an audience of children and (maybe) young teens, was rapidly growing in popularity on college campuses.  Besides the missives from readers with university addresses that frequently appeared in Marvel’s letters columns (perhaps somewhat out of proportion to the actual percentage of mail Marvel received from college students, though it’s hard to know for sure),  Lee himself was being invited to speak at such august institutions of higher learning as Bard College.  In September, 1965, both Spider-Man and the Hulk managed to crack Esquire magazine’s list of current college campus heroes, “28 People Who Count”, where they rubbed shoulders with the likes of Bob Dylan and Malcolm X; by the following year, Marvel rated an entire six-page feature article in the magazine’s annual college issue, which reported that as many as 50,000 American college students had joined Marvel’s official fan club, the Merry Marvel Marching Society.  Read More

Amazing Spider-Man #61 (June, 1968)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Today’s blog post features the concluding chapter in the three-part storyline that first introduced me to Marvel Comics’ friendly neighborhood Spider-Man (in comic books, anyway) .  If you missed my posts about the story’s previous installments in issues #59 and #60, feel free to follow the links to get brought up to date.  Or, you can just jump right in and trust in writer Stan Lee’s deft way with in-story exposition to keep you afloat.  Your call, true believer!  Read More

Amazing Spider-Man #60 (May, 1968)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll likely recall last month’s post about my very first issue of Amazing Spider-Man, #59.  That issue featured the first part of a three-part story that continued in the comic book that’s the subject of today’s post.  As you’ll remember, the first chapter of the tale found our hero going up against a mysterious “new” foe called the Brainwasher — who, on the story’s last page, was revealed to be a not-quite-so-new villain after all — namely, the Kingpin.  Read More

Amazing Spider-Man #59 (April, 1968)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As regular readers of this blog may recall, I purchased my very first Marvel comic book, Avengers #45, in August, 1967.  That book was the one with which I finally expanded my comics consumption beyond what had been, for the full first two years that I’d been buying and reading the things, a diet consisting almost exclusively of DC comics.  Still, as I wrote in my post about that issue, five months ago, that first, single excursion into Marvel territory wouldn’t be followed by another one until the fateful day in January, 1968, that I picked up the subject of today’s post, Amazing Spider-Man #59.

I’m not exactly sure why it took me that long to buy my second Marvel book — I do remember liking that Avengers issue, so it wasn’t as though I’d tested the waters and found them wanting.  Probably, it was just a reluctance to change my ingrained buying habits.  But even if I’m not certain why I dragged my feet for another five months, I have little doubt that it would have taken me even longer, if not for this:  Read More