LAST TIME, I looked at the first few Spider-Man stories and how they set the agenda for the whole of the character's future. But it wasn't until issue 3, when the full-length stories began, that Amazing Spider-Man really took off as a title. The Doctor Octopus in ASM3 story was reprinted in MCIC1 just two and a half years after it first appeared. This may well have been in response to the volume of letters the Bullpen was receiving asking for back issues of the Marvel titles. The first time I would have come across the story from ASM3 would have been in reprint form in Marvel Collectors' Item Classics 1 in late 1965, or possibly early 1966. "The Strangest Foe of All Time - Doctor Octopus" was a genuine milestone for the character, as the increased page count opened up story opportunities that hadn't been possible in the earlier 14- and ten-page episodes. The first page of the story (this is the reprint from Marvel Collectors' Item Classics 1 ),...
BACK IN LATE 1965 , while my reading interests were firmly focussed on Stan Lee's burgeoning Marvel Comics line, there were other distractions for a typical eleven-year-old like myself. The prevailing cultural phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic was the spy craze, kickstarted primarily by the movie adaptations of Ian Fleming's James Bond books, which began in 1963 with Dr No . The first Bond movie I saw was Goldfinger , released in September 1964 in the UK. This movie introduced several concepts that would go on to be genre staples - the cool sports car with in-built ordnance, the laser death-ray and the exotic murder techniques, like death by hat and execution by paint. The iconic poster for Goldfinger . Inset: Bond discovers the body of Jill Masterson, while Oddjob prepares for some millinery mayhem. It really didn't matter that these plot devices were absurd, because when you're 11, you don't care about stuff like that. It turns out that covering someone in...