Spider-Man Newspaper Strips -Volume 1 by John Romita

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was a fun volume containing the first volume of Spider-man newspaper strips. Stan Lee takes care of the scripting after taking a six-year break from the character in the comic books. This first collection covers the first couple years of the script.

The stories themselves are great with Spider-man tangling with Dr. Doom, Dr. Octopus, the Kingpin, and Kraven: The Hunter. In addition, the comic strip introduces a unique villain in the Rattler.

These are a blast of 1970s Spider-man. They can be somewhat dated but I prefer to look at them as retro with reference to 1970s pop culture and one strip series that has Peter working at a disco for Norman Osborne and Flash Thompson.

Spider-man's lovel life is put on hold as he and Mary Jane have a tiff and then Mary Jane goes off to Florida with Kraven the Hunter. Spider-man himself navigates a moral dilemma as he needs to provide some help to his ailing aunt May and in a moment of weakness allies himself with the Kingpin's mayoral campaign, but breaks off when he finds Kingpin breaking his word and hurting people.

In addition to the tremendous vintage comic strips, the book includes interviews with the great Stan Lee and John Romita on the development of the strip. On the written page, Stan Lee comes off as very humble saying that he doesn't take ownership of the Spider-man stories as he can't keep up with all the books and that when he does read a story, he always has the thought of, "Gee, that's a great story, I wish I'd thought of that." I've had thoughts quite a bit less charitable. :)

The only thing that's a bit of a challenge to get used to is three-to-a page format of the strips which is a minor issue in such a great collection of Spider-man by Stan Lee. I can't wait for Volume 2 to arrive via Interlibary loan.



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