SPIDER-MAN: THE ICON - EXCERPT TWO

[MattBrady]

<img src="http://www.newsarama.com/TitanBooks/Spiderman_Icon_t.jpg" border="0" align="right">We continue this week (with thanks to Titan Books) with our series of excerpts from Spider-Man: The Icon - The Life and Times of a Pop Culture Phenomenon by Steve Saffel.

The 320 page coffee table book tracks Spider-Man through the ages, from his start in Amazing Fantasy #15 up to the beginning of One More Day, focusing not only on the adventures and times of Spider-Man, but also upon how Spider-Man has made an impact upon culture, and how the character created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko has been embraced by popular culture.

This week's excerpt - drugs!

As Saffel sets the scene for this week's pages:

By the early 1970s comics began to receive more and more press coverage in publications as widespread as Rolling Stone, The New York Herald Tribune, Creem, and Esquire. One issue of Esquire featured original artwork by Jack Kirby and Marie Severin, and John Romita's cover for Creem features one of the most famous Spider-Man poses .

Perhaps the most famous piece appeared in the May 2, 1971 issue New York Times Magazine. The article, appearing under a Joe Kubert cover illustration, was titled "Shazam! Here Comes Captain Relevant," and it discussed at length the famous drug abuse issues of The Amazing Spider-Man--issues which changed the code and proved the power comics wielded.

As important as that storyline was, it didn't receive universal praise--especially from Marvel's fellow publishers, and the men who enforced the Comics Code Authority. As you will read in this excerpt, their response has to be seen to be believed.

Click here (http://www.newsarama.com/TitanBooks/2/ExcerptTwo.html) for the excerpt.

[cookepuss]

Even though I remember seeing a special on the topic before (History or Discovery Channel I think), it was still a great read. Love that old photo of Stan in the PDF. Wouldn't even recognize him if it weren't for the caption. :)

[TheToileteer]

Yet Captain America takes the equivalent of steriods, and likes it! Heh heh, "fanon" says the black kid was a young Luke Cage!

Trivia: Stan Lee apparently didn't actually do drugs, despite living in the 1960's, and didn't know which drugs did what. So he purposefully left it vague, which drugs the kid was doing. (Not so with Marvel's 1990's-era anti-drug inserts, where Spidey saves his younger collegue from the LSD-like effects of pot.)

I bet Steve Ditko knew the difference, though.

[cookepuss]

I bet Steve Ditko knew the difference, though.
Ditko... The guy who created Speedball, a hero who's constantly surrounded by psychedelic balls of mult-colored light. Yeah. I'm pretty sure he knew the difference. :)

[Steve Saffel]

What gets me is how the web-slinger changed so much between the '70s and the '90s. We have a terrific cover for Creem magazine, a rock-and-roll magazine from 1973, with Spider-Man at a rock festival, art by John Romita. Not 20 years later there was a cover to a Marvel Entertainment quarterly report, also by Romita with Spidey swinging through the New York Stock Exchange.

When you think about it, that's a snapshot of the United States. The '70s were immediately post-Vietnam, and the '90s were the decade of the dot-coms.

It was also cool to be able to show a three-page comics-style vignette from the '90s, Jazzy John again, featuring Stan Lee and Spider-Man discussing Marvel's financial statement for the quarter.