If The Amazing Spider-Man #3 was all about the hero and the villain, and the thematic dynamics of their respective characterizations, the following two issues (while arguably going sort of hard with the antagonists) drill down on the human behind the mask. There's a lot of character work being done with Peter Parker in these stories, with the super heroing working as a narrative vehicle more than the thematic focus. There's some notably bold moments of flawed characterization that skate surprisingly close to the line of unlikability -- if it wasn't for a tight reversal of those moments framing them as fleeting breaches of integrity, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko might have risked alienating some readers.
The Amazing Spider-Man #4:
"Nothing Can Stop... the Sandman!"
- Writers: Stan Lee & Steve Ditko
- Artists: Steve Ditko
- Editor: Stan Lee
- Publication Date: June 11, 1963
- Cover Date: September 1963
Even with the introduction of Sandman as the new villain, this issue is much more introspective and about Peter than it is about Sandman. Comparing it to the previous issue that was oriented around Doc Ock, here Sandman really just fills the space of the antagonist, but the story itself is barely related to him. This is a story where we see Peter screw up in various ways, starting with jumping the gun on catching the crooks before they break into the jewelry store, losing his chance of a date with Liz, and faking his fight against Sandman for the photos that he forgot to take when it was actually happening.
Even though he also takes a loss in the first fight against Sandman, this story isn’t about that as a failure – we even sort of escape that setup by having him retreat due to his mask breaking, rather than being actually defeated in a fight to the end like with Doc Ock. The failures here aren’t physical, they’re indications that Peter is struggling to keep his life together, and more importantly, he’s constantly making mistakes. The whole purpose of this story seems to be to ground Peter and remind us that he’s not Mister Fantastic, he’s just a kid, and even though he doesn’t know it, he’s not really ready for the kind of life that Spider-Man is tangling him in. This story indulges in the angle of making Peter relatable to the reader, not being a super-successful astronaut, but rather just a kid trying to do his best.
At the same time though, the story is structured as well as the previous one, with the additional flourish of the vacuum cleaner being set up before the final fight scene, where it becomes the solution. The whole trick Peter plays at the end – fooling Sandman into turning to sand by threatening him with the drill, then catching him with the vacuum – is concrete, graspable logic, not some vague gadget or mixture he whips up that just happens to perfectly counter the villain’s power. That would have been entirely possible here – just have him invent a compound that rapidly turns sand into mud – but the fact that we got a simple, real-world solution (albeit a silly one) is pretty refreshing.
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| Art by Steve Ditko. © Marvel Comics. |
One of the big strengths of this issue is how Sandman works perfectly as a monster-of-the-month type super-villain for the traditional comic book story experience, while also taking a back seat as just a functional obstacle for the more profound story revolving around Peter as a person. It's a uniquely impressive balance between the conventional fantasy adventure and the disruptive Marvel tale of a person taking on the role of a super hero.
The Amazing Spider-Man #5:
"Marked for Destruction by Dr. Doom!"
- Writers: Stan Lee & Steve Ditko
- Artists: Steve Ditko
- Editor: Stan Lee
- Publication Date: July 9, 1963
- Cover Date: October 1963
This issue is still operating with the angle of Peter, not Spider-Man, being the pivotal character – and what’s impressive is that we’re not just doing the same thing again, but rather finding new ways to approach the concept of Peter as a real person with real problems.
The plot itself is part nonsense, part goofy shenanigans – Dr. Doom’s plan makes less sense the more you think about it. He wants to lure the Fantastic Four into a trap by learning Spider-Man’s identity and then using him as bait, but he ends up not even looking under the mask when he captures Flash Thompson by mistake. Also why does the bait need to be Spider-Man, and not some actually defenseless innocent civilian? In any case, it’s a fun little comic villain caper that smacks of cross-marketing anyway, so it would have been shocking if we had gotten a profoundly dynamic story with Dr. Doom.
A detail I appreciate here is that the story was trying to maintain a degree of consistency when it comes to power levels – Spider-Man ends up not beating Doom, and in fact he would have lost if the FF hadn’t arrived just in time. We established that Spider-Man can beat the FF in #1, at least as long as they’re trying to not really hurt him, but FF has struggled to defeat Doom in the past, so we’re dealing with relatively comparable power levels between the three (though eventually I feel like Doom becomes immensely more powerful, which I sort of like for one of the main villains of the Marvel mythology).
This issue deals more with Aunt May, as well as some other supporting characters – we start establishing Betty Brant as a romantic interest, Flash becomes an actual character rather than an interchangeable bully, Liz makes a repeat appearance defining her as a recurring character (I don’t know why she would call Peter about Flash being captured though, other than the plot just needing Peter to know it’s Flash in the suit), and J. Jonah Jameson is also solidifying as a staple in Peter’s life. This was an important component of what made Spider-Man special: a relatable personality will only get you so far, if you don't exist in a social environment that feels real.
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| Art by Steve Ditko. © Marvel Comics. |
While issue 4 dealt with external pressures and struggles in Peter's life, here we zoom in on flaws and weaknesses in him as a person: when Doom offers co-operation against the Fantastic Four, there’s a brief second when he seems to be considering it -- not that seriously, but he does halt for just a moment before rejecting the offer.
More importantly, we later have a moment where Peter learns Doom has captured Flash thinking he’s Spider-Man, and here he legitimately entertains the thought of ignoring the situation and being rid of Flash for good. That impulse is immediately overtaken by his sense of responsibility, of course, but it’s there – he’s still a kid whose morals aren’t quite as solidified yet as they would later be. I imagine that’s not necessarily the conscious point Stan and Steve were making – I doubt they were planning Peter to have the character development to no longer have conflicting thoughts about saving people years down the line – but it works in the context of later stories not bothering to keep dwelling on this same conflict, but rather having the morality be built into Peter’s identity.
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| Art by Steve Ditko. © Marvel Comics. |
What I find interesting is that the story is flirting with the risk of making Peter unlikable, and this is the closest we’ve gone to crossing that line. Having him lose to Doc Ock and his confidence break was already a sort of daring turn for a hero, and now we’re giving him an internal monologue about letting his schoolmate die just because they don't get along. If it wasn’t for the immediate reversal and confirmation that he can’t actually bring himself to do that, there might have been some readers who would’ve found the flaws in this character a little too much – this wasn’t the 90s when people would readily root for deeply selfish or utilitarian antiheroes.
For an issue that borrows such a big-deal villain as Doom, the story really isn’t about Doom even a little bit – much like with the Sandman issue, the villain is just there to stir the pot of Peter’s personal life in unorthodox ways. The difference compared to the mechanical Sandman, and also to the thematically intense Doctor Octopus, is that Doom provides a kind of moral check for Peter: this isn't about dealing with defeat anymore, or even withstanding the pressure of a life spinning out of control, but rather the temptation of the opportunity for personal gain. Doom offers Peter not one but two chances to take advantage of a situation, both of which he ultimately rejects, reinforcing his ethical identity.
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| Art by Steve Ditko. © Marvel Comics. |
The "real person with real problems" angle was what made Marvel's characters stand out in the first place, and that was Marvel's whole identity at the time. The context might be lost to casual readers nowadays, but in the 1960s, DC Comics was the king of comics, and everything else identified itself in relation to what they were doing. DC's characters were the classic kind of super heroes: they were idealized, inspirational, and for all intents and purposes, could do no wrong. In that conventional perspective, what's even the point of a super hero if not to be the best that a person could possibly be?
What Marvel (at the time Atlas Comics) did, however, here in the emergence of what would be the Silver Age, was invert the entire premise of the super hero. If DC's characters were heroes first, Marvel's were people thrust into being heroes; if DC's stories were plots and puzzles, Marvel's were character studies. That's admittedly a little generous and selective for the comics like Lee and Ditko were writing at this time, but only if you ignore that DC was the gold standard, and what Fantastic Four and especially Spider-Man were doing went directly against that current.
These two issues are a classic example of how it was done: the character is constantly pushing up against the risk of looking weak, incompetent, overwhelmed, or selfish, but he never actually crosses it. He displays the moments readers would identify with from their own experience, and then choose the path that the reader recognizes as the ideal one. If DC was selling the fantasy of the perfect hero, Spider-Man became the identifiable one, who still does the right thing even though he's flawed to the core.
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| Art by Steve Ditko. © Marvel Comics. |
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