{"id":84427,"date":"2025-10-19T09:03:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T09:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/84427\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T09:03:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T09:03:08","slug":"torn-plays-off-the-promise-of-1960s-spider-man-comics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/84427\/","title":{"rendered":"Torn Plays Off the Promise of 1960s Spider-Man Comics"},"content":{"rendered":"

In September 1966, Esquire magazine had an article about Marvel Comics, and specifically the popularity the comics had with college kids. It read (courtesy of Barry Pearl transcribing it<\/a>): <\/p>\n

Early this year, the author of Marvel Comics received a letter from William David Sherman, an English teacher at State University of New York at Buffalo. “Enclosed you will find a money order for three dollars,” he wrote. “Please send me twenty-five copies of issue number 46 (`Those Who Would Destroy Us’); I wish to use them in my course on contemporary American Literature….I know the class will dig them, and I hope that in them they will see various archetypal and mytho\u00adlogical patterns at work which would give them better insight to where things are today.” There is evidence that college students are already digging them.<\/p>\n

The Princeton Debating Society invited Stan Lee, author of Marvel’s ten super-hero comics, to speak in a lecture series that also included Hubert Humphrey, William Scranton and Wayne Morse. Other talks were given at Bard (where he drew a bigger audience than President Eisenhower), N.Y.U. and Columbia. Some fifty thousand American college students, paying a dollar a head, belong to Merry Marvel Marching Societies and wear “I Belong” buttons on more than a hundred campuses. Bundles of mail pour into Marvel’s offices every day from more than 225 colleges. Twenty-four disc jockeys are loyal M.M.M.S. members and never let their listeners forget it. And in the fall, at least twenty-five television stations will carry animated Marvel cartoons. Should anybody still suspect that children are the only Marvel readers, it might be pointed out that the company has sold 50,000 printed T-shirts and 30,000 sweat shirts, and it has run out of adult sizes of both. Why all the furious enthusiasm? <\/p>\n

As one Ivy Leaguer told Stan Lee. “We think of Marvel Comics as the twentieth-century mythology and you as this generation’s Homer.” At this stage of the game it is not yet clear whether the profound impact of Marvel Comics on the campus reveals more about the comics or the campus. Perhaps a clue can be found on the following page; you figure it out.<\/p>\n

The Gimmick: Marvel’s super-heroes, in spite of their super-powers, all have human problems. And that’s why your college buddies are flipping over them. Spider-Man, in real life a college student named Peter Parker, is guilt-ridden, money-conscious, socially insecure, and gets blamed for things he didn’t do.<\/p>\n

The Fantastic Four are always quarreling among themselves. Thor’s father won’t let him marry the girl he loves, and the Hulk is totally alienated. This, plus a tongue-in-cheek approach, which takes more than a third-grade education to appreciate, is Marvel’s appeal. For example: in one issue, Spider-Man is desperately fighting the Looter as they both float high above the city suspended from a helium balloon. As the Looter fries to kick him in the face, Spidey asks, “Have you ever considered medical help because of your antisocial tendencies?” And then, “Why is it that everyone I fight is overflowing with neurotic hostility?” The Looter, hip to the absurdity of Spidey’s chatter, counters with, “You must be mad\u2014talking that way while you battle for your life!” Now, where else could you find stuff like that? Certainly not in your Brand Ecchs comic books. Nosiree.<\/p>\n

This, of course, is referencing the Spider-Man comics of 1963-1966, which were by Steve Ditko, John Romita, and Stan Lee. Those comics were fantastic. I have written about them repeatedly<\/a>, and how great they were<\/a>. However, let’s face it, they were very much OF the time. They’re outstanding comic books, but they were written for the era. What is interesting, then, is to see great writers take the original concepts, and do them in a modern style. Kurt Busiek famously did a wonderful job on Spidey’s high school era in Untold Tales of Spider-Man<\/a>, and now, J. Michael Straczynski is doing the same for Spider-Man’s college years<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"The
\n Image via Marvel<\/p>\n

Amazing Spider-Man: Torn<\/a> #1 is from writer J. Michael Straczynski, artist Pere P\u00e9rez, colorist Guru-eFX, and letterer Joe Caramagna, and is set during Spider-Man’s college years, when something goes terribly wrong, unleashing a horrific new villain. <\/p>\n

How does Straczynski handle the era? <\/p>\n

The main thing that Straczynski does with this series is what Busiek did with Untold Tales of Spider-Man. The original stories were excellent, but if they lacked anything, they lacked a bit of character depth, as that was simply the style of the comics of the era. Ditko, Romita, and Lee were aiming their comics mostly at a very young audience, so while there was a good deal more depth in a standard issue of Amazing Spider-Man than there was in OTHER comic books, that pales compared to the depths that writers typically get into now. Again, this is just a difference in era, and HOW the stories were written. It is not that Steve Ditko didn’t know how to go deeper, as OF COURSE he did, it just wasn’t the style of the era. <\/p>\n

In Untold Tales of Spider-Man, by setting his stories within the pages of those earlier stories, the best thing Kurt Busiek could do was take established concepts and just drill deeper into them. For instance, he famously developed Peter Parker’s mostly nameless classmates, giving them personalities, hopes, dreams, etc (one of them even tragically became an ill-fated superhero<\/a>). Here, Straczynski does a similar thing, digging deeper into things like Peter Parker’s experiences in classes that he doesn’t know back and forth like his science classes. <\/p>\n

Logistically, it’s difficult to be an active superhero AND do all of your German homework, and Peter’s German teacher really lays into him for what the teacher sees as a lack of responsibility in Peter. Can you imagine PETER PARKER hearing about a lack of responsibility? And yet, how else do you really explain how Peter acts all the time? He surely acts like a guy who’s up all night, he just can’t explain WHY he is up all night. <\/p>\n

Plus, the more modern approach of Straczynski is cool in the edgier scenes in the comic. Pere P\u00e9rez and Gur-eFX do a wonderful action sequence where Spider-Man takes some some terrorists, and they’re shocked by his lack of quips, and he explains that their hostages are already so terrified, he’s not going to do anything to make their rescue take any longer than it absolute has to. That’s an awesome bit. <\/p>\n

How does Straczynski handle the group dynamics of the era?<\/p>\n

\"Peter
\n Image via Marvel<\/p>\n

As good as Pere P\u00e9rez is at the action scenes, I almost like him BETTER on the character scenes. We see Peter, Harry Osborn, Gwen Stacy, and Mary Jane go to a “beach thingie” together, and they talk about their lives, and what they hope their futures will be like.<\/p>\n

This allows Straczynski to really dial down into each character’s motivations from the era in a way that we never really got to see from the comic books in the 1960s, because, again, who was doing that sort of thing in the 1960s? <\/p>\n

The end result is a comic book that both serves as a tribute to the great comic books of the 1960s, but also as a way to take the promise of those comics, and take them to a more modern level, and give us a more meaningful reading experience that is really a delight. <\/p>\n

All of this, and a horrific demonic creature as a new villain, too (also an example of putting the Spider-Man of the 1960s into a situation where he has to deal with a more modern-style threat, and to see how he handles such a contrast. It’s really cool, and Pere P\u00e9rez designed a heck of a demonic villain). <\/p>\n

Source: Marvel<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In September 1966, Esquire magazine had an article about Marvel Comics, and specifically the popularity the comics had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84428,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-84427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84427\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}