Spider-Rama: Amazing Spider-Man #73

Welcome to Spider-Rama! Every day until the end of April, Ben and Duy will look at a Spider-Man issue from the very beginning, in chronological order, and answer questions for various categories, inspired in large part by one of our favorite podcasts, The Rewatchables by The Ringer. Our goal is to make it to Amazing Spider-Man #200. Will we make it? Grab your Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus or crank up your tablet to Marvel Unlimited, and then tune in every Wednesday to find out!

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #73
Spider-Rama
by Stan Lee, John Romita Sr., and Jim Mooney

Crime boss Silvermane hires Man Mountain Marko to retrieve the Petrified Clay Stone Tablet thing!

POINTLESS TRIVIA

BEN: First appearance of Silvermane, an important figure in the Marvel criminal underworld, and future disembodied head on a remote control car.

DUY: First appearance of the man, the myth, the legend; Man Mountain Marko.

BEN: And a million comic nerd jokes were born...

WHAT'S AGED THE BEST?

BEN: I’ve always liked anytime Robbie is in charge and the reporting becomes unbiased and factual.

DUY: I love that the Shocker used to have a girlfriend who bailed him out. In a universe where most villains seem insanely isolated and crazy, the Shocker is just a regular dude who wants to rob banks.

WHAT'S AGED THE WORST?

BEN: "Man Mountain."

DUY:  He was on a next issue blurb in one of the first Spidey comics I ever read and it sounded so dumb that I thought it was just a funny name for the Juggernaut.

BEN: We’ve mentioned this before but the gray coloring on black characters is not only puzzling, it’s distracting. I keep thinking they are zombies.

NITPICKS

BEN: One of my favorite anecdotes about the writers room of classic HBO drama The Wire, was when the room was having trouble getting a character into a specific place they needed him to be believably. A writer suggested the standard “ran into someone” that had omniscient knowledge of a situation they would not have knowledge of, so they could get the character moving in the right direction. David Simon shot it down, saying there’s no way that would ever happen in real life. So yeah, Spider-Man happening upon the Shocker’s girlfriend in New York City directly after getting the tip from Captain Stacy, no way..

DUY: What an anticlimactic cliffhanger.

BEN: C'mon, they kidnapped a biochemist all the way from Florida to decipher hieroglyphics??

FAVORITE PANEL

BEN: We’ll never get anywhere until we recognize who our real enemies are:

DUY: I love that, so I'll go with this entire sequence, which must have been mindblowing in the 60s. The best part about it is Robbie just having a conversation with his son and not talking down to him:

WHO WON THE COMIC?

DUY: Robbie and Randy.

BEN: That's it for Spider-Rama this week.

DUY: Thank you, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko—

BEN: —for telling us we aren't the only ones.

Leave us a comment below or on our Facebook page. See you next Wednesday!