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thebibliomancer · 7 years

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100 Days of Comics! 069/100: Spider-Man: Chapter One #1 (1998)

We start at the end and end at the beginning. Today’s selection from the box of mystery is the first issue of Spider-Man: Chapter One! Lets retell Spider-Man’s origin again again again!

So the first difference between 1962 and 1998 is that in 1998 the name Peter Parker gets a (TM) on the cover and Spider-Man gets both a hyphen and a (R).

We start with Spider-Man crying into his mask as he swings above the city. See, this is end of the issue Spider-Man, recapping his origin to himself as he thinks about how he fucked up.

If you know Spider-Man you know the drill. Left with his uncle and aunt by his parents who went off and died on him. Was spoiled and pampered by his Uncle Ben and Aunt May. Shunned in school for being an uncool nerd and never invited to Rolling Stones concerts. But he kept trying to make friends. Which leaves me wondering if he was the only smart kid in school. Wasn’t there a chess club or something?

Because apparently nobody in school likes him. Nobody.

Maybe its because he kept trying to invite them to radiation experiments.

Peter’s honestly sort of frightening pledge to one day make them all sorry is softened to a “but some day I’ll be a famous scientist like Reed Richards or Stephen Hawking... then they’ll all be sorry they didn’t want to be my friends!”

Anyway, he goes to the Otto Octavius radiation experiment at General Techtronics Labs.

Unlike the unsafe open air radiation experiments from the 60s, John Byrne has reconceptualized everything to be more realistic and modern. Here, the radiation experiment is sealed behind lead glass shields but will violently explode if there’s a spider in the chamber.

Hey, guess what happens?

There was a spider in the chamber and it violently explodes. And while Peter lies in the rubble of the lab, probably exposed to a lethal amount of radiation - the dying radioactive spider comes over and bites him. Which at this point seems like overkill.

This is one of the more contentious changes. Because of the spider bite, Peter survives and recovers while others caught in the lab accident died or were left with crippling injuries. The doctors even want to do a DNA scan to see if there’s anything special about Peter.

Critics have argued that surviving a lab accident that killed so many makes Peter stand out too much. And it was a very public accident.

While Peter recovers, Uncle Ben decides to buy him a new computer and the future-burglar helps him carry the box to the car. A police officer confronts future-burglar about there having been several second story jobs in the neighborhood over the last few weeks but its nothing he can hang on the future-burglar.

Peter is released from the the hospital by the end of the week and then has that thing happen to him where someone almost runs him over and he jumps out of the way and discovers he can climb walls and crush pipes.

And he realizes that the radioactive spider altered his DNA.

So what to do with this? Historically, super powered people have either turned to evil or fighting it... maybe the Fantastic Four could use a new member? WAIT I COULD EARN A THOUSAND BUCKS BY WRESTLING A DUDE? I’M DO THAT INSTEAD.

So he embarrasses Crusher Hogan in the ring (partially maybe because Aunt May wants someone to put ‘those dreadful wrestlers' in their place. Aunt May does not care for most things), earns that thousand, and makes a deal with a talent agent to enter show-biz as THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN!

Good thing Aunt May had him take those art classes including lessons on making spandex costumes and silk screens. And good thing he coincidentally had invented a polymer extrusion system last fall just for fun.

So montage of Spider-Man becoming a hit in show biz. Which is an aspect I think should come up more often. Just imagine the first time Spider-Man helped save the planet and you have some guy remembering seeing him on a morning show webbing a girl up.

Peter is making so much money. But he opened a bank account under the name Spider-Man and is having his checks made out to Spider-Man which will come back to bite him in the ass big time, apparently.

And to his amusement, his classmates are going ga-ga over Spider-Man. But girls still won’t date him, even if he promises to get them tickets to Spider-Man’s show. In a rage he rips off his locker door. What’s the use of being Spider-Man if you can’t get girls to date you, he seems about to ask.

But he has a big show to do so he makes an excuse about having a test tomorrow and heads to bed early, only to sneak out. His spider-sense activates just in time to tell him someone saw him sneaking from the window and no, it was not Mary Jane. It was the Burglar! But Spider-Man is like new number who dis and ignores the tingles.

Then a montage of people reacting to Spider-Man’s show. Including Aunt May hating on him for being a show off (she doesn’t care for most things). The Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Dr. Strange, Bruce Banner and Rick Jones. The X-Men thinks Spider-Man might be a mutant. And Bruce Banner is just like “PRAY THEY WALK AN EASIER PATH THAN THE ONE FATE HAS CHOSEN FOR ME!”

And then after the show, the Burglar runs by and asks Spider-Man’s help ditching a cop as a fellow second story man.

Peter is like wah? But doesn’t stop him. The cop yells at Spider-Man but he’s like hey you do your job and I’ll do mine.

But a few hours later when Peter returns home, he discovers that Uncle Ben was shot. Some guy broke into the house waving a gun around and saying he was looking for Spider-Man.

Peter runs off and changes into his costume to get the burglar at the old Acme Warehouse.

But when he shows up, the guy is thrilled to see Spider-Man and pulls his mask off to reveal himself as the guy Peter didn’t stop after the show.

The dude says he went back to the Forest Hills house looking for Spider-Man. They could be partners!

Spider-Man beats the guy unconscious yelling about Uncle Ben. And then leaves him webbed up for the police.

And then takes his mask off to cry that Uncle Ben is dead because of him and walks sadly away from the camera reflecting that with great power must also come great responsibility. And the next time box promises that more misery for Peter next month because that’s what Spider-Man is all about. “Peter Parker finds the world is not yet done playing its cruel jokes on him.”

So the burglar going to Peter’s house specifically to find Spider-Man was also a contentious change. It doubles down on Peter’s responsibility for Uncle Ben’s death. But John Byrne thought that the Burglar traveling from midtown Manhattan to rob a house in Queens never quite worked as well as it could have. As he says in his essay at the end of the issue explaining why Chapter One.

So, the dude spotting Spider-Man coming out of the Forest Hills house, presumably following him to the show, having a good feeling about Spider-Man not stopping him for the police, and traveling back to Forest Hills to meet him there again but breaking inside the house and threatening people with a gun instead of staking out the outside.

Yup. That probably works so much better.

Or at least as well as the explanation the main continuity eventually gave that the guy was after a cash stash another criminal left in the house.

But probably not as well as the original intention that it was never supposed to be realistic. It was always a little abstract. Peter goofed up slightly by not being responsible 100% of the time and the consequences were immediate and personal. The world is a cruel place when co-run by Steve Ditko.

#100 Days of Comics!#Spider Man #Spider Man Chapter One

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