Did Stan and Steve deliberately soften Spider-Man’s origin?

Posted by: Scott    Tags:  , , , ,     Posted date:  July 6, 2012  |  9 Comments


We all remember why Peter Parker decided that with great power came great responsibility, right? It’s because way back during his first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15, Spider-Man decided that “from now on I just look out for Number One,” and let a common criminal get away …

… resulting in … well … you know how that decision turned out. Bye bye, Uncle Ben!

And it was all Peter’s fault.

But if you’d first encountered Spider-Man via his second appearance, you would have found a subtly different origin path.

Because instead of being directly responsible for the criminal who killed Uncle Ben still being on the loose, Spider-Man was only guilty of being “too late to save him” …

… and of being too “busy showing off.”

Good thing he “soon caught the killer, and turned him over to the police,” eh?

So the most central tenet of Spider-Man’s existence vanished between Amazing Fantasy #15 (August 1962) and Spider-Man #1 (March 1963), and I have no idea how long it took to be restored, because I hadn’t realized it had gone away (I’m very embarrassed to say) until last night, when I reread the latter issue for the first time in a long while after downloading it via the Marvel iPad app.

Either a conscious decision was made that Spider-Man’s selfish action was too harsh a plot point to be allowed to stand and so it was deliberately ignored (only to be reintroduced later), or else it was simply too complicated to delve into during a brief recap. Whichever the case, this makes a big difference in Spidey’s superhero motivation, and coming across the abyss of its absence as the character began adventuring in his own title was startling.

What do you think? A deliberate choice or an unconscious omission? Let me know.

And if you do, could you also tell me whether everybody else already knows this? (Please tell me no, or else I’ll feel even more foolish that I do now.)





9 Comments for Did Stan and Steve deliberately soften Spider-Man’s origin?


James

It’s sort of like there being two stories of how women were created in Genesis. The first is that God made everything in twos, male and female. Us included. Then he was partying with the lads in the band, forgot, and made women again out of Adam’s rib.

This completely explains why Stan and Steve are almost divine in their abilities. And, fails to explain why women don’t taste lie BBQ sauce.

    Scott

    Maybe the women YOU know don’t taste like BBQ sauce, but as for me … yum!

Doug Dandridge

Never realized that, thought of course I was six years old when I read those comics. I do know from reading through all those years of Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four and others that consistency was not the byword of comics. And that includes the comics from the competitor. Batman’s damned cave kept changing in all the annual issues to the point where it wasn’t the same cave.

Ray Radlein

I’m pretty sure that Mephisto erased his origin. Yeah, that’s it. Mephisto.

Shiai

Maybe the thinking between the two appearances was that the first origin worked for AMAZING FANTASY (which was, theoretically, a comic geared toward more mature readers), but the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN book was being pitched toward the typical 9-12 year old comic book reader. So yes, it could well have been soft-pedaled.

And like you, I had never noticed the subtle change in his origin.

    Tim Roll-Pickering

    Except that all the indications are that that story was originally created for Amazing Fantasy #16 but then put on file when the title was axed. So it’s most likely an excessive summarisation for the second appearance, which was intended to come just a month later.

    Looking at those panels I suddenly realised that this is the first time May is shown to have witnessed Ben’s death, which I thought hadn’t been established for definite until Amazing Spider-Man #200 (and then retconned in the JMS era to Ben walking out after an argument and getting shot in the street). The idea that Peter’s inaction also put May through the horror of seeing her husband killed before her eyes hasn’t been explored so much but it adds well to the sense of guilt and why Peter could never tell her.

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