Look Out! Here Comes The Spider-Man!

It's a miserable morning, damp and grey. I can't quite fathom how a week has passed since I was back home on my twice-annual visit to the motherland. Public transport hasn't improved since I was a teenager: train to EK, bus to Strathaven, a two-hour wait at lunchtime. The town seems to be thriving, happily.

Looking down at Barn St from the war memorial. You can see the swanky, white house that used to be the John Hastie Museum, middle left.

The boating pond in the George Allan park had been drained. My mum once said they did that to dance there at the end of WWII but I assumed it was for maintenance, out of "season".

I enjoyed a coffee and cinnamon shortbread at the Crib and the warm scent of the Waterside Bakery takes me right back to childhood.
I then decided to take the bus to Hamilton, and walked up to Peacock Cross, and the Equi restaurant my dad occasionally took us to on payday; past the site of the other Bell, Book and Candle, ( where I used to truant) opposite the county buildings on Almada Street, then went into the stately library on Cadzow Street, where I worked on my senior school assignments, forty years ago.

Hamilton is quite badly affected by a decade of  red-and-blue Tory austerity and online shopping but nothing like Ayr.
 The wind was frigid and the journey last Sunday was very long. The bus from and to Giffnock is used as a local service, so it stopped everywhere. I hadn't been in the town since the spring of 2017, although I'd changed trains at the station as recently as last summer and I was shocked by the deprivation and decay. Whole streets virtually derelict and people sleeping rough and begging.

 I went to see pals at the Gaiety panto ( an attractive theatre and my first -ever visit for a show). I got a shout out at the walk down, which made me squirm with delight but it was a sad experience, by and large. The owner of the Fast Forward comic shop, near the station, said the town's retail sector was experiencing an "extinction level event"

I always associate Ayr with buying Marvel and DC comics at the bus station, so on a hopefully more positive note, I want to write about a couple of Marvel collections I read over the Xmas holidays.

For several years now, I've been buying the 70s Fireside collections of classic Marvel stories, with chatty, huckster forewords by Stan the Man. This Xmas, forty years on, it was the turn of the Amazing Spider-Man.The first three stories are by John Romita Sr. I was struck by his character design for John Jameson- you can tell immediately he's Jonah's son in Birth of a Super Hero. I wonder why he didn't get an alias- I imagine Stan might've dubbed him Spore Man or Astro Man.
I recently re-read Jameson Jr's appearances as Man-Wolf; Gil Kane and Romita make him look more generic and ginger, basically.

The next story helps us get to know Mary Jane better and reveals the origins of the Rhino, a character I knew best from the cartoons .Poor Peter is too guilty about Aunt May to pursue his dreams of independent living. Things become worse in the next story; during his first battle with the Kangaroo ( another favourite of mine), Peter spun a web-dummy which gave Aunt May a terrible shock. Now he has to face Electro ( no pun intended) in a tv studio. I'm not a great fan of Jim Mooney's work here or on Supergirl, Ms.Marvel or Son of Satan.

The final trio of stories are the legendary drug issues by Stan and Gil Kane. Despite Peter's comical "hippy threads" and his soliloquies about "Gwendy", these stories are still quite effective. The second return of the Goblin has an increasing sense of dread and Harry Osborn's pill addiction is quite upsetting.Peter's confrontation with the Pusherman and his goons isn't quite as important as the social commentary by Randy Robertson, pointing out that drugs are reviled in the black community. This three-parter is possibly overshadowed by the nightmarish Conway-Kane Goblin/Gwen story but it was interesting to revisit it.

By chance, I picked up the digest sized War of the Reptile Men here in the library. The eponymous Wein-Andru stories comprise a seasonal adventure but the other stories are of interest.They're not as macabre and neurotic as the Conway- Jackal-Clone years but they tie up threads from that period. A little unconvincingly perhaps, as JJJ easily buys Peter's story that the clone photos were a ploy of Harry Osborn.

The first two-parter features The Nightcrawler, written by his co-creator Wein as a sales booster for the All-New X-Men. It's also, I think, the third appearance of the Punisher and introduces Jigsaw, a grotesquely mutilated criminal who wouldn't be out of place in Batman.
Next,the Kingpin steals Spidey's life energy to revive his son (formerly the Schemer and Supreme Hydra). This confrontation ends with the Kingpin plunging into the water at the Broolyn Navy Yard.

Stegron makes his second appearance with a batty master plan to animate dinosaur skeletons at Christmas.The Lizard returns again to combat this saurian upstart, who ends up frozen in Central Park, in a Universal movie homage. Stegron the Dinosaur Man strikes me as a ridiculous and redundant character. I was also surprised he wasn't a Conway creation like Firestorm the Nuclear Man, Steel the Indestructible Man or Drom the Backwards Man.

Marla Madison is introduced, designing a fourth Spider-Slayer robot and the ethereal avenger Will-o'-the-Wisp dissipates over Times Square. I always thought this intangible anti-hero would've been a bigger star and would've made an interesting Avenger or Defender.

Amusingly, Spidey mistakes corpulent manipulator and Kirby Kreation Dr. Faustus for the Kingpin in the final story, a Bondian story of vaccines and mind control. Having survived Goldfinger's movie fate in an infamous Frank Robbins CA story, Faustus makes a suitable opponent for Spidey, although he's using Mysterio's "phantom foes" gimmick.

This collection concludes with what I think is JR Jr's first Spidey short from the 1977 US Spidey annual. It's a slight thing about fraud committed by an unsuccessful Coffee Bean Barn folkie. It rather ties Spidey and his cast to the Greenwich Village Sixties scene, which surprised me in a late Seventies story.

I enjoyed both collections for their strengths. Wein's humorous "Decorate Peter's Pad Party" was more entertaining to me than all the miserable soul-searching of the Stan stories but the art was Silver and Bronze Age gold.

 I got a beautiful copy of Steranko's History of Comics vol. 2 in the post today, so I might post about that in future. Next time, probably Spyfall and the BBC Dracula.

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