WHEREVER THERE'S A HANG UP [548]

Art by Steve Ditko from "The Amazing Spider-Man" #5 (1963)

I will freely admit ignorance to anything that isn’t important so, to that end, I didn’t know what “Spidey Sense” was, despite having been a reader of comic books for over twenty years.

This apparent revelation came about due to the release of the new film “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”, the fourth film in the franchise with Tom Holland in the title role, the ninth made by Sony under Columbia Pictures and officially the thirty-eighth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

I have read the Spider-Man stories I want to read, and the same would go for Marvel Comics as a whole. I am more a fan of DC Comics, but I haven’t really watched their films either for the same reason. Comics are already their own form of visual storytelling, and don’t have to become storyboards for another medium, even if you are trying to increase exposure to the characters and their stories.

Despite all this, it appears I hadn’t been reading the Spider-Man stories closely enough. I have mostly read the 1960s and 70s run of “The Amazing Spider-Man”, mostly written or co-plotted by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, and Marv Wolfman among others, plus some of the 2000s run from J Michael Straczynski. However, they are Marvel comics, led by action, and Spider-Man is a character that demands to be drawn dynamically, as demonstrated by co-creator Steve Ditko to John Romita, both senior and junior, to Ross Andru and Sal Buscema’s run on the companion book “The Spectacular Spider-Man” in the 1980s. All the posing, the composition of frames, the economy of the storytelling as average page counts for the main story declined across the industry during the 1970s, but I should have been paying more attention to some wavy lines.

The story apparently goes that, when reviewing the pencilled artwork for the first issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man” Stan Lee, in his other capacity as editor, had asked Steve Ditko how Spider-Man knew the story’s villain, the Chameleon, was in the same room as them. Ditko drew lines around the hero’s head, explaining that Spider-Man had “spider senses”, much like a bat can use echolocation. Similar lines were drawn around the character, both as Spider-Man and as Peter Parker, in earlier scenes to add credence to the device.

Now, what I had apparently done was think of these lines as acting like a visual approximation of being startled, like you had just been woken up to the presence of something. You don’t see speed lines or the energy of a “Kirby Krackle” in real life either, so I thought this was just the way the story depicted being startled. Upon realising my omission, the next thing is whether “Spidey Sense” – I am too self-effacing to call Spider-Man “Spidey” – is a “sixth sense” or some sort of precognition, and depending on its use in a particular story, the answer is yes, it is.

If it hadn’t been for two other people being in the same room as me when I said I didn’t know what “Spidey Sense” really was, I would have been given no more reason to think about it. Yes, superheroes lead our current folk tales, or at least those from the United States, but no, not everyone knows these characters inside out. I am still more of a reader of Daredevil, the only Marvel Comics character whose book I pick up each month, and to be honest, his powers are easier to remember: the toxic incident this time around made him blind, but heightened his other senses, so anything about strength is down to training. As far as I know, that’s it.

ALL THE STRANGERS CAME TODAY [398]

Watching television coverage of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, I thought to myself, “is crypto like tulips?” The 1634-37 speculator bubble surrounding tulip bulbs is considered the first recorded example of the value of one type of product far outstripping its usual price, relative to similar types – I don’t think sunflowers have experienced a similar boom. Likewise, as the innovation and novelty of NFTs caused their explosion in value from 2021 [link], this has largely reversed for reasons including their loss of that novelty value.

I then remembered I previously benefitted from the bust that had followed the end of a speculative boom, one that happened over a decade earlier. 

I think it was in the late 2000s, surely before 2010, that I saw piles of American comic books appearing in branches of the discount bookstore The Works. I had only been reading American comic books for a few years, but I already knew enough to know what I was looking at: the first issue of the “X-Men” (volume 2) from 1991, written by Chris Claremont, and illustrated by Jim Lee and Scott Williams. The pile contained the four different covers that made this first issue into a collector’s item at the time, and the fifth that turned them into a gatefold tetraptych. This last version sold for £2.50 in 1991, but here it was three or four copies for £1 – I got the gatefold issue and one of the others, for the story told inside was the same.

Like the value of first edition novels, the values of particular comic books had boomed by 1991, most notably the first appearances of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk. This was translated special “collectors’ edition” first issues of further new series, featuring higher-quality paper stock, card covers, foil covers, glow-in-the-dark covers, die-cut covers, and so on, all at a premium price compared with a standard book, and seen as an investment by those not necessarily there to read the story inside.

“X-Men” #1 is recognised as the biggest-selling comic of all time, but the 8.1 million copies sold were pre-orders made by comic book stores and newsagents – only half of these were actually sold to customers in 1991, and what I saw must have been the remaining stock being emptied from a warehouse. This continued for some time: I bought two copies of “Superman” #75 from 1992, “The Death of Superman”, one where I opened the black and red bag containing the black armband, trading card and stickers, leaving the other unopened; many issues from the beginning of Image Comics, like “Youngblood”, “Chapel” and “Shadowhawk”, with lots of cross-hatched art and gaudy colours; and various issues of “Spider-Man 2099”, “Punisher 2099”, “Ravage 2099” and so on, more new series and more ways to grab your attention. 

The comics speculator bubble had largely burst by the mid-1990s, leaving readers to carry on as before. Even though Marvel Comics came out of this period worst, having entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1996, this also came after a stock market flotation and buying a distributor, but the bubble affected the whole industry. Of course, this was all before the true value was found, by Hollywood, in comic book characters and their stories, over the paper they were printed on.