AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #2
by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
Spider-Man battles the Vulture, and prevents an alien invasion led by The Tinkerer.
BEN: Peter sells photos he took as Spider-Man to J Jonah Jameson for the first time.
DUY: First appearance of the Vulture and the Tinkerer.
FAVORITE PANEL
DUY: This entire sequence is kind of a precursor to the stuff Ditko can do with motion.
BEN: Spider-Man using technology to neutralize the villain. Is he the first superhero that didn’t punch his way to victory?
DUY: Also actually, the fact Peter is motivated by money. Everyone thinks the superhero with realistic motivations is a new thing, but it's right here.
BEN: Once again, Spider-Man’s initial primary motivation was making money, not responsibility. He wasn’t even going to attempt to stop the Vulture until he accidentally revealed himself.
DUY: As far as motivations go, there's still nothing on how he could have prevented Uncle Ben's death.
BEN: Spider-Man fighting aliens that were hiding secret spy devices in radios was so off-brand that I’m pretty sure it was explained away many years later.
DUY: It was, by Roger Stern. I forgot until I saw this article that it also made it so that one of the aliens was Mysterio! But I think the fix was forgotten, by which I mean that if someone were to build on the original Lee/Ditko story and forgot the Stern retcon, only the most hardcore fans would bat an eye. But the story is like they had a spare short script lying around for one of their anthologies, or even a leftover Amazing Fantasy story, that they just retooled for Spider-Man.
NITPICKS
BEN: Jonah is identified as the publisher of Now Magazine. It’s not incorrect, we just always associate him with The Daily Bugle.
BEN: Yeah, they always tried to reconcile these little mistakes later on. But Jonah paying a fair price for the photos, and Peter solving his financial worries for a year, is not in line with what comes after.
DUY: Yeah, my nitpick is that there's no way those photos would pay New York rent for a year.
WHO WON THE COMIC?
DUY: I'm just gonna go with the Vulture. It's a decent first appearance.
BEN: He deserves credit for staying active at his age. It’s been noted before how the teenage Spider-Man was pitted exclusively against adults at the beginning here, his elders, adding a subtle extra layer of anti-establishment to the comics. You don’t get much more elderly than the Vulture and Tinkerer. I’m not sure if this was a conscious decision by Stan or Ditko, but it works.
DUY: It works so well that I don't know who came up with it, but even JJJ is old. It's become a key factor as well.
BEN: The only people that like Spider-Man, in-universe, are other teenagers. I can see why college students would list him as a revolutionary icon.
DUY: And he was voted third in terms of being a revolutionary icon in a 1965 issue of Esquire, along with Bob Dylan, Che Guevara, and The Hulk.
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.
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