By August, 1968, I’d been buying Amazing Spider-Man regularly for eight months; and if it hadn’t yet become my very favorite comic book, it was awfully close.  I wasn’t quite ready to start investigating his earlier, reprinted adventures in Marvel Tales just yet (perhaps because I wasn’t yet sold on the other Marvel heroes he shared space with in that twenty-five center — Thor and a solo Human Torch — or perhaps because at that time I still thought Steve Ditko’s artwork looked a little strange), but otherwise, I was buying everything your friendly neighborhood arachnid appeared in.

Or I was trying to, anyway.  I know for sure that when the full-age ad shown below had turned up in Marvel’s comics that spring, I’d been pretty darned jazzed, and had had every intention of buying the book:  Read More