Screw It, We"re Just Gonna Talk About Comics

Spidey meets Marvel’s most notorious villain --- the very unsubtly named Doctor Doom! An exciting idea that leads to a just okay story! But even a sub-par Doom story has all that great/ridiculous Doctor Doom dialogue! Never has a villain referred to himself in the third person like Doctor Doom! The issues also features a favorite trope: bully Flash Thompson getting humiliated!

Another major villain debuts: The Sandman! A man gets the power to separate himself into millions of tiny sentient beings and he uses it to…. Get big bags of money! Come on, Spidey still specializes in THUGS, no matter how powerful! Also: Spidey shows off in front of his high school classmates! Peter almost gets a date! Sandman can’t stop saying his own name! And MORE!

The debut of Doctor Octopus, one of the greatest Spidey villains of all time! Fittingly, this is the first truly great issue of Spider-Man! Great characters, moody beautiful art, terrific action and a great story! We can’t stop raving about this one!

We meet the first classic Spider-Man villain: The Vulture. Like all great Ditko villains, he seems created just for the cool visuals. He looks distinct and cool (or at least intriguingly odd), he's smart, he's mean, and he will be back.  And... there's also a second story! The tale of the Tinkerer. It is... an ungood story. Seems left over from the old Amazing Fantasy bin. But the art is great, and it gave future writers a good challenge to try to retroactively make this story fit into the

For his second appearance, Spider-Man gets his own comic that contains two -- really THREE -- stories! He meets J. Jonah Jameson, the perpetually angry newspaper publisher who uses his media empire to paint Spider-Man as a MENACE! He meets the FF, who reject him as a member, for many reasons including that he basically breaks in to their headquarters and tries to show off! He meets the Chameleon, one of the dumbest villains in all comicdom!

Amazing Adult Fantasy was an anthology comics series that featured stand-alone sci-fi and fantasy stories. They were short, dark, weird and often had twist endings. Think Twilight Zone, but five page comics stories. But this issue -- the series' last issue -- broke from its pattern in a few important ways. One, it changed its title to just "Amazing Fantasy." And two, it introduced Spider-Man.

In this podcast, we will discuss all 41 of the original Spider-Man comics done by the original creative team of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko! But before we do, we wanted to give a background on both the character and us! So we talk about the history behind the creation of Spider-Man, and what he came to mean to the world of comics and beyond.