Out of the entire Spider-Man rogues’ gallery, and possibly the whole catalogue of Marvel bad guys, probably no one enjoys the status of running joke quite like the Enforcers. They’re commonly known as the dumbest, least interesting, and most generic bunch of antagonists imaginable, more often than not used as a punchline, so much so that later writers almost certainly have taken it as a challenge to write a story using Fancy Dan, Ox, and Montana and try to make it compelling.
For this reason more than anything, The Amazing Spider-Man #10 occasionally suffers from a reputation as one of the more expendable issues of the early era. Even though the main villain of the story is the Big Man, and the Enforcers are there only to make the action scenes seem meaningful and to give the crowd of bad guys an identity, the terrible threesome seems to eclipse the rest of the book’s narrative identity in casual conversation.
The Amazing Spider-Man #10:
"The Enforcers!"
- Writers: Stan Lee
- Artists: Steve Ditko
- Editor: Stan Lee
- Publication Date: December 9, 1963
- Cover Date: March 1964
It's unfortunate, for the simple reason that issue #10 is actually really good – it experiments with a crime noir mystery story, doubles down on Peter the person as the main character instead of Spider-Man the super-hero, pulls even more mileage out of Betty Brant’s backstory introduced in the previous issue, and manages to land a relatively layered plot without making any significant part of it feel gratuitous or arbitrary. The Amazing Spider-Man #10 is one of the most underrated early issues in the series, and it distinguishes itself both in its ambition and mechanical soundness.
The issue begins with a scene introducing the Big Man, a gangster in a spooky mask. Using his goons and some nifty equipment, he tricks Spider-Man into publicly failing to catch a burglar; in its simplicity and reliance on Spider-Man acting without thinking, it works surprisingly well to sell the hero’s humiliation. There’s no next step of the plan involving Spider-Man – the Big Man’s entire goal here was to prove his competence in order to strong-arm the city’s underworld under his control. It feels like a missed opportunity at first, but the story goes down a direction that’s stronger for Spidey not being a fixation for the villain, but rather only a pawn in his greater plan.
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| Art by Steve Ditko. © Marvel Comics. |
After taking the loss from Big Man’s trick, Peter visits Aunt May in the hospital, where the doctor informs him that his elderly aunt, while recovering well from her surgery, will need a blood transfusion. Peter freaks out about the implications of giving his blood, which was altered by the radioactive spider bite that gave him his powers. Liz Allen and Flash Thompson are also there for no other reason but to give Peter’s reluctance to donate his blood to save his aunt some more melodramatic punch.
In a somewhat disappointing turn, Peter donates blood anyway, and concludes that it’s probably going to be fine. You’d think that introducing the conflict would have some sort of payoff, especially when the setup is so strong and rooted in existing internal logic, but here we ignore the potential without Peter even doing anything to make sure it will work – he just plays a hunch, and lucks out.
The blood transfusion bit is also almost unnecessary, because afterwards Aunt May just gets better and leaves with some neighbors to go to Florida – this is an early example of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko just coming up with an excuse to get rid of the old lady for a while, probably to avoid complicating a later moment where Peter publicly asks for trouble and gets captured. But the transfusion does serve a purpose, in an early instance of another Spidey trope: the loss of blood weakens him, and explains why he doesn’t just steamroll the villains who have no superpowers. In later issues, especially with returning villains who have already been schooled by Spider-Man in the past, similar tricks would be used to de-power him in order to give the fights renewed stakes.
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| Art by Steve Ditko. © Marvel Comics. |
The Big Man, with the entire city’s criminal network in his command, launches an unprecedented crime wave. The police can only snatch low-ranking thugs, and any informants are too scared of the Enforcers to talk. The villain’s identity becomes an explicit question: this is Spider-Man’s first go at a story involving a bad guy’s secret true persona, later applied somewhat more ambitiously to the Green Goblin.
The story props up J. Jonah Jameson as Peter’s prime suspect, and artist Steve Ditko does a good job illustrating the two characters in ways that suggest they could be the same person. The true identity, that of Daily Bugle writer Frederick Foswell, seems a little telegraphed by the character being introduced in this same issue, but it’s far from a dead giveaway – Foswell could have just been a red herring, or an organic expansion of the supporting cast.
Jameson is really the only proper distraction, though there’s moments that play with the eager reader’s observations like having Flash Thompson act slightly out of character. There were more opportunities here to play up the riddle, but if you don’t know the Big Man’s identity ahead of time, there is a delightful tension of uncertainty hovering over the story in any case. It’s a well-crafted little mystery that could have benefited from not being resolved in a single issue.
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| Art by Steve Ditko. © Marvel Comics. |
Peter finds the Enforcers threatening Betty Brant outside the Daily Bugle. We learn that Betty is in some sort of financial trouble, and has borrowed some money from shady parties. She refuses to explain her situation to Peter, fearing he would get involved and suffer the consequences. We still don’t get the details of what Betty’s troubles are actually about, which is delightfully restrained – she’s a supporting character, and a female one at that, and we’re left wondering about the nature of her difficulties for several issues. That kind of long play storytelling was very rare in this era.
Betty's behavior and internal monologue are a little melodramatic, particularly in how intensely she seems to feel about Peter, but it does support the implication that something is really wrong, and that something really bad happened in Betty’s history. It’s an interesting method of storytelling where we go hard with the emotional fallout instead of teasing it with subtle hints, yet withholding the backstory itself makes the reader infuriatingly curious.
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| Art by Steve Ditko. © Marvel Comics. |
Spider-Man tries his best to counter the threat of the Big Man, but he has no more luck than the police in finding the mysterious leader of the newly formed crime monolith. In a move that displays both youthfully stupid courage and admirably clever problem-solving ability, he decides to spread the word that he – Peter, not Spider-Man – has figured out the Big Man’s identity. The Enforcers find and capture him, just as he had planned, and lock him up to wait for the Big Man’s judgement. He changes into his super-hero persona, breaks out, and an extensive fight scene against the entire New York City underworld ensues.
This fight scene is one of Steve Ditko’s best so far, and it hinges almost exclusively on Spider-Man’s physicality. He’s fighting regular people, mostly generic gangsters, but he moves in ways that utilize his agility and awareness. The paneling is meticulously planned to make his movements readable – you can follow his athletic efforts from panel to panel, and actually imagine the sequence in motion. The Enforcers mix up the choreography by forcing him to counter their particular strengths – Montana’s lasso is especially effective, prompting Spidey to perform acrobatic flips and maneuvers to slip out of the rope’s grasp. Fancy Dan’s judo ability tests Spider-Man’s speed, and Ox is a hard-hitting fortress calling for smarts instead of strength.
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| Art by Steve Ditko. © Marvel Comics. |
The Big Man manages to slip away, and Spider-Man returns to the Daily Bugle, following his suspicion about J. Jonah Jameson. By luck, the police arrest Foswell in Jameson’s office at the same time. It’s an interesting choice to cut out Spider-Man from the conclusion – he never actually figures out Foswell is the Big Man, but the police he alerted to his location while fighting the gangsters did. It’s something of a Ditko special, both to subvert the emotional payoff of the villain reveal, and to place the police in a key role wrapping up the case. It deflates the mystery a little, but it’s still a satisfying resolution because Spider-Man was the key figure in making it happen, and the plot climaxed at the preceding fight scene anyway.
There are some minor plot holes regarding this reveal: it’s established earlier in the story that the Big Man is supposedly wealthy, because he can afford his big crime operations, which is one of the clues that lead Peter to suspect the financially successful Jameson. But we never get an actual acknowledgement that Foswell the columnist doesn’t seem like a rich person. It’s a small enough problem to not really trip up the ending, but it does represent a small inconsistency that honestly could have been fixed just by cleaning up the dialogue to not call attention to it.
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| Art by Steve Ditko. © Marvel Comics. |
At the end of the story, there’s a scene where J. Jonah Jameson monologues to himself about the real reasons for his dislike of Spider-Man: he feels morally threatened by a man who won’t take money for his heroics. This is a good character beat, believable and humanizing, but it’s undercut by how it’s shoved into a corner of the last page – a more natural delivery, with some subtlety and time to breathe, would have made this moment hit extremely hard. It’s still a cool moment of depth for Jameson, just a little rushed.
Issue #10 of The Amazing Spider-Man is a tightly-plotted, clever little crime mystery that emphasizes the importance of smart thinking instead of just punching harder. The villains aren’t super-powered, yet Big Man gives Spider-Man a run for his money just by being smart enough to play him for a fool. The resolution isn’t the result of physical power either, but rather Peter coming up with a clever plan to make the villains do his work for him in finding the crime boss.
Admittedly, the Enforcers as characters aren’t very exciting. But in this story, they’re not really characters anyway, they’re just the mini-bosses to give the fight scenes some personality and complexity, and that purpose they serve entirely well.
Perhaps the folly was introducing them as named characters at all, calling attention to them and setting expectations filtered through previous antagonists like Electro and Doctor Octopus. Readers miss the quality of the plot and the character moments, being too busy shaking their heads in amused disbelief at the absurdity of Fancy Dan and his goofy friends, a saddening disservice to a story with one of the stronger plots we’ve had in The Amazing Spider-Man so far.
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| Art by Steve Ditko. © Marvel Comics. |
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