I had previously extolled the virtues of taking a data-based approach to understanding Spider-Man comics. I’d like to take this a step further by focusing on the period when Spider-Man was a teenager in high school. This period is central to a governing ideology within Marvel that Spider-Man is about “youth” especially as articulated by Tom Brevoort in his Manifesto that I covered in part 1 of this series. While I addressed and rebutted this claim before, I now wish to dig deeper. Go back and look at the Lee-Ditko era of High School Stories and go panel-by-panel and pose the question: how much and how often was High School featured back then? By what metric do we judge it? In the post below, I discuss my methods and approach, present a Datasheet showing the numbers of panel appearances different aspects of Spider-Man made in the Lee-Ditko High School period, and from there I make observations and inferences. The result in my view is that the Data will shed light on the following questions:

Was Spider-Man presented mainly or essentially as a Teenage Superhero?
What does the Data reveal about the Work-Process of the creators, and especially Steve Ditko, given the nature of the Marvel Method?

In short, this post brings home the receipts.

Before we proceed let me clarify that a quant-based approach is useful in only providing a technical foundation. It is not a substitute for reading and interpretation. By themselves, numbers put below or elsewhere don’t prove anything without context. That context is based on the questions and observations one makes. In other words, I do not want this to be mistaken or supposed to be an attempt at objectively resolving a question or debate. The numbers below are not subjective and they are facts, but they are tied to a context and survey that is by nature conditional, selective, and based on the researcher (in this case, me) and their viewpoints and their biases. I ask that readers separate my opinions from the facts provided below. I welcome any who wish to correct me to post so in the comments section.

WHICH NUMBERS COUNT?

Taking a quant-based approached to comics is somewhat new. I had mentioned before Jonathan Deman who compiled datasheets for The Claremont Run which covers parameters such as “Character Behaviour, Cover Logging, and Issue Setting” , “Character Visualization and Speech” , “Uncanny X-men Bechdel Test Results” , “Bechdel Test Comparators” [1]. So there’s work on this front in approaches to other serialized comics.

But a quant based approach runs into the problem: not only who counts the numbers, but how it is to be counted, and the biggest question of them all, which numbers count?

With serialized comics, it’s possible to examine a single issue and go over it panel by panel but for a serialized comics run where we are looking at not one comic but an extended series of comics which flow from one book to the next, the hard part is deciding what the story is. Do we focus on the single story-arc, either a two or a three-parter? Do we focus on the single standalone issue? Now that comics are collected in a set as omnibuses or Marvel Masterworks editions, we can study the “full comic run” which in some cases gives the illusion of a unified story without divergences when in fact these divergences exist far more than continuity even within a single creative team. I had pointed out in my post on the development of J. Jonah Jameson that Amazing Fantasy #15 differed substantially from Amazing Spider-Man 01 and the issues that followed in several significant ways.

Further complicating this is that in the case of ’60s Marvel Comics, the comics were intensely serialized where it wasn’t just that one plot that flowed into the next. An issue will introduce a subplot or idea, and this subplot will often be independent of the main action, and then return to it in a later issue, but there was little attempt to bridge gaps between these episodic slices. Reader familiarity and engagement was assumed and expected.

One example is the “Mary Jane Watson subplot” in the Lee-Ditko run. In Amazing Spider-Man #15 we have Aunt May announce to Peter that she wants him to go on a date with Mary Jane Watson. The actual story which features the first appearance of Kraven the Hunter is entirely separate from this story. Aunt May mentions Mary Jane to Peter a few more times in follow-up issues. In ASM#25, while Peter is upto shenanigans with the Spider-Slayers, we follow Betty Brant (his girlfriend), Liz Allan (who has a crush on Peter) as they pay a visit to Peter’s house only to find Peter missing but Aunt May present and what turns out to be the first “appearance” of Mary Jane Watson whose face is covered by objects but who we can tell from Liz and Betty’s reactions and thought bubbles is a very beautiful woman. Now if you read ASM#25 as your inaugural issue you have a story of Spider-Man battling robots but then you follow a subplot with peripheral supporting characters concerning a third character whose face you can’t see. To fully get the effect of this scene you would have had to read the previous ten issues before to get the build-up and tease of who Mary Jane is and the suspense if and when Peter meets her. Because ASM#25 gives you no clues or “previously recaps” about who this character is supposed to be and why she’s a potential big deal.

So this layered subplot and intense serialization means we need to look at things issue-by-issue, and sometimes panel by panel. As Scott McCloud among others pointed out a given comic page is divided into small blocks called “panels” because of their resemblance to a display on a storeroom. Each panel is divided from another by small spaces called “gutters” arrayed on a grid. The grid can be 4-9 Panels and sometimes even further, though higher than 9 is rare. A 9 Panel grid is somewhat rare as well but it was used quite often by Steve Ditko in his time working on Marvel.

In my previous post, I pointed out that character appearances and their recurrences provide consistent patterns for understanding the broad trajectory of a comics’ publication history. However, this is inadequate when we consider the claim that Spider-Man being a teenager was central to his original run, and that Spider-Man being a teenager was a defining aspect of the character. One can of course argue strongly on subjective grounds but that will basically come down to a debate without clarity. It’s important to bring something substantially new to the table.

I believe I have.

Rather than refuting this claim with a single two or three paragraph response, I thought it might be interesting to ask oneself, “if this were true what kind of evidence could conceivably exist that would convince me?” I realized that if Spider-Man was essentially about youth, from Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962) to his graduation in Amazing Spider-Man #28 (1965), then his aspect of being a teenage hero ought to have left visible traces. For one thing, the majority of the action across all the issues ought to have featured the superhero mainly among teenagers in a teenage setting and not in a setting that was adult, like say a job or a workplace. So that meant that it was important to find the receipts.

NARRATIVE VECTORS

Following my quant based approach, I thought it best to survey the Spider-Man period from AF#15 to ASM#28 which also includes ASM Annual #01 (making for 30 issues in total). This time I am not surveying character appearance per issue, but character appearance per panel within the issue. Now I can list every character’s appearance per panel by page, list every single setting per panel by page but that would be too intensive and arcane to draw any kind of conclusion and observation. Instead it’s important to group characters and settings into vectors. Fortunately, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko have already identified these vectors for me.

At the end of Steve Ditko and Stan Lee’s Amazing Spider-Man Annual 01 (whose main story featured the Sinister Six), we are presented an image gallery outlining different aspects of Spider-Man’s world (attached to bullet points below) all of them grouped in pairs.

So the vectors below, as attested by image, were identified by the creators themselves and cannot be dismissed as presets conceived to fit my bias:

TEENAGE SETTING
Characters: Flash Thompson, Liz Allan, Teachers, Principal, High School Student Extras.
Setting: Midtown High School, Hallways, Classrooms, Labs.
DAILY BUGLE SETTING
Characters: J. Jonah Jameson, Betty Brant, Ned Leeds, Frederick Foswell, Extras.
Setting: The Daily Bugle offices, building.
HOME SETTING
Characters: Aunt May, Neighbors (Anna Watson, Mary Jane Watson, Extras, Doctors).
Setting: Forest Hills Home, Hospital.
ACTION SETTING
Characters: All of Spider-Man’s supervillains, ordinary thugs, policemen, Superhero Guest Stars
Setting: Wherever Supervillains dwell, wherever Spider-Man fights bad guys, any scene where Spider-Man is swinging around the city.

Vectors combine characters and backgrounds. So for example Peter Parker sitting alone in classroom without teenagers would qualify under the High School Vector. Panels of Peter Parker at his house in Forest Hills would fall under the Home Vector. Spider-Man/Peter is the needle through which the stories are stitched together. Peter is at High School where he meets Flash and Liz Allan. He works for Jameson where he meets Jonah, Betty Brant, Ned Leeds, Frederick Foswell. Because he lives with his Aunt May, he sometimes meets neighbor Anna Watson, whose niece Mary Jane his Aunt is insistent he go on a date with. Because he’s Spider-Man he occasionally steps outside the vectors that is more common and connected to Peter, and fight villains on rooftops and city streets.

These Vectors provide us a context to process data. And the data this time is the literal building blocks of comics – panels, which become the units of measurement. Any given panel is composed, penciled, colored, and inked. Each panel contains information. In a single issue of Spider-Man, if you count the pages of a given issue, and then the number of panels in that issue, and then count how many times and how often each of the vectors show up in a given issue, it might be possible – to use a phrase with resonance in Spider-Man lore – to hit the jackpot.

A better way to understand this, in a given issue of Spider-Man, you can say Flash Thompson, Liz Allan, Jonah Jameson, Aunt May, Betty Brant all make appearances. Beyond the cast-list it wouldn’t tell us anything. But if I say, that in this issue [x] character appeared in far more panels than [y] character, that would tell us a considerable deal. If I say that characters [x] and [y] aligned with this Vector A far more than Vector B that would tell us a significant deal and so Vector A showed up more than Vector B, that would tell us far more.

Now if I catalogued all the issues in a certain interval…say From AF#15 to ASM#28 when Peter graduates High School or take it further up to ASM#30 (just before he goes to college), that would tell me precisely how often did the High School Setting feature in the Spider-Man comics in the period he was a teenager.

THE DATA TABLE

Below I’ve uploaded a scan of the Excel Sheet on which I jotted down the data. A data table isn’t always easy reading, although I have made it as comprehensible as possible, I would have preferred uploading the actual file but security and privacy reasons, as well as WordPress functionality have prevented me from doing so.

Here are quick guide notes.

The table is divided into 9 COLUMNS (i.e. Vertical Tables), and 33 ROWS (i.e. Horizontal Tables).
Each row lists the happenings of one issue of Lee-Ditko’s Spider-Man’s run.
I have covered the period of Peter Parker in High School, and his High School Cast.
The Columns Represent
ISSUE – Actual issue number
PAGES – Number of Pages in an Issue
PANELS – Total Number of Panels within that Issue.
AVERAGE – Average Number of Panels/Issue
[HS] – Number of Panels showing High School Vector in that issue.
[DB] – Number of Panels showing the Daily Bugle Vector in that issue.
[H] – Number of Panels showing the Home Vector in that issue.
COVER – Which vector shows up in the cover of that particular issue?
NOTES – Small research notes that highlight points of consideration about that issue.

When listing the Vectors above, I mentioned 4 but in this sheet I have listed three. The fourth vector (Action) is self-explanatory because Spider-Man is a superhero adventure story and as such it is all together proper and fitting that most of the panels focus largely on action which tends to overlap with the other vectors.

The fact is that the debate on the Lee-Ditko run is centered on the primacy of the teenage experience above all. Ideally we should, or we could, engage with this as “both/and” rather than “yes/no” but that’s not what is at stake in the Spider-Man discourse right now. When the day comes when Spider-Man comics are in danger of no longer being superhero genre stories but realistic stories centered on protagonists without powers and abilities, then it would be worthwhile to draw a new column and outline the obvious fact that yes the Action Vector was greater than all the rest.

And here’s the table.

Personally Compiled Datasheet showing Panel Appearances of Different Narrative Vectors in Lee-Ditko’s *Amazing Spider-Man* from Amazing Fantasy #15 to ASM#30 including 2 annuals.

I present the above table to any reader who wishes to pull up a particular issue or two of Lee-Ditko’s run and wishes to measure and fact-check my data. Since I did this data by myself without assistants to run through it, I confess there might be errors and quibbles, a spot missed here and there. However, I have double checked the data myself, so even if there might be errors, I do not believe my data will be off significantly.

OBSERVATIONS

Limiting oneself to the period of Peter Parker’s graduation from High School, the period when Peter Parker was truly a “teenager” the claim that Lee-Ditko’s run featured Peter primarily or essentially as a teenager is not completely borne out by the data.

The numbers are not close:

1) The Daily Bugle (Jameson, Brant, Foswell, Leeds, the Building):
774 Panels until Peter graduated.

2) Teenage Setting (Flash, Liz, Professors, Principal, Instructors, Extras, Classroom):
536 Panels until Peter graduated.

3) Home Setting (Aunt May, Neighbors, Hospital, Doctors)
328 Panels until Peter graduated.

Bugle leads over 2nd place by more than 200 panels, and more than 400 over third place.
The vast majority of panels in Steve Ditko and Stan Lee’s run on Spider-Man focus on him as a freelance employee at the Daily Bugle. They focus on Peter Parker as an employee dealing with working adults who treat him as an equal and peer. His first major romance and relationship is with Betty Brant, Jameson’s secretary. As such the Lee-Ditko run can mainly be said to center on the Daily Bugle and not High School or Teenage life.
There are more issues without High School panels (4) than there are issues without the Daily Bugle (3) and even then one must factor that the Bugle made its debut in ASM#1 unlike the High School Vector which appeared from the outset with AF#15. Paradoxically there’s just 1 issue without the Home Vector, which means that the Daily Bugle achieved a significantly greater footprint with fewer footsteps than Peter Parker’s Household Vector.
The average panel/issue rate shows that Ditko’s run in his first 30 issues oscillated mostly around a 6 panel grid or a 7 panel grid. The lowest is 5 Panels (the first story of ASM#01), the highest is 8 Panels. There are occasions when the [HS], [DB], [H] vectors all fall below the issues average panel/page rate. And here’s the frequency (excluding the issues with zero appearances) of how often that happens:

High School: 7 issues below average panel rate.
Daily Bugle: 4 issues below average panel rate.
Home: 8 issues below average panel rate.

In other words, the High School and Home vectors even when featured were more often dealt with more cursorily and distantly than the Daily Bugle setting was in the Lee-Ditko run.
Jameson as I argued before is the centrifugal character of the Lee-Ditko run, and yet there are instances such as ASM#11 where Jameson doesn’t appear but Betty Brant does. Some might argue that Betty Brant qualifies as a separate romance vector but the fact is that Betty was introduced as Jameson’s secretary and Peter-Betty’s relationship has the earmarks of an office romance, especially since Peter competes with Ned Leeds, another coworker, for her affections. Betty Brant isn’t Peter’s high school friend, she represents someone outside the school world that Peter dislikes and she becomes not only his first girlfriend but also his first friend. Likewise as in the character showcase in Annual 01 featured above, Lee and Ditko themselves grouped Betty Brant alongside Jameson and not separately.
At the same time, from ASM#11-12, Lee-Ditko convert Liz Allan originally Flash Thompson’s girlfriend into a rival for Betty Brant and introduce a love triangle between Liz and Betty which on the whole is not so very different from the more celebrated Peter-MJ-Gwen love triangle that would follow in the succeeding John Romita Sr. era. Liz Allan as I note in my closing thoughts is the lodestone of the High School era, because unlike the other supporting characters who accompany Peter as he ages (Flash goes to the same college as Peter on football scholarship), Liz Allan makes her final appearance in ASM#30 and then drops from the continuity until Gerry Conway’s run in ASM#132. That means there’s a complete block and demarcation of her character and the interim period that followed the Lee-Ditko era, the Lee-Romita era, and the first 22 issues of Gerry Conway’s run. If one wishes to locate a single character who signifies the entire high school teenage phase of Peter Parker and nothing but that, then it would be Liz Allan.
Even in the High School Vector, it must be noted that the majority of action shows group scenes outside class. There are essentially 9 Panels (or 8 Panels and 1 Opening Splash Page) that shows Peter behind a desk in the entire course of Ditko’s run, amounting to about 2 pages of content. Here’s all of them in no particular order, from several different issues.

So even when featuring Spider-Man as a teenager, Lee-Ditko hardly ever showed him as a student.

NOT SO FAST (QUALIFICATIONS)

Detail from the cover of ASM#08, “Special Tribute-To-Teenagers Issue” (by Ditko)

I obviously, as my previous posts have made clear, have a stake in proving that Spider-Man is about growth and not about youth. Yet the data that I have produced is data independent of my feelings.

To demonstrate, I will point out that while Teenage Spider-Man isn’t the most featured setting, it is in second place. As such those who argue that Spider-Man was originally featured or centered around teenage experience while incorrect in centering it at the top, are still correct in giving it prominence.

Spider-Man the Teenager wasn’t the single-most prominent aspect, but it was certainly a prominent aspect of the Lee-Ditko run and it was an aspect they emphasized more than the connection to Aunt May.

It is indisputable that the first ten issues of ASM feature far more panels with Teenage Spider-Man as a vector than with the Daily Bugle, having a lead of 272 to 232, or 40 Panels. It’s certainly true that the High School featured in Amazing Fantasy #15 before Jonah’s introduction but even if we shave off the head start that [HS] had over [DB], five panels removed from AF#15 isn’t going to make [HS] sweat. The prominence given to the high school era in the first 10 issues certainly bears the truth of Tom Brevoort’s observation that his passion for the high school teenage Spider-Man was based on his exposure to the early Steve Ditko issues. As he said, “It wasn’t until I read a paperback collection of the really early Lee and Ditko stories that the character clicked for me, and I could see what a terrific creation he was” [3]. His impression of Spider-Man being about youth tied to the “early Lee and Ditko stories” is certainly an accurate one.
Of course this only makes the slump that the [HS] had over [DB] and [DB]’s ultimate dominance more jawdropping. In the next 18 issues until Peter Parker graduated, the Daily Bugle would go from 232 to 774, while High School would go from 272 to 536. To put that it math terms, the Daily Bugle would make 542 appearances between ASM#11-ASM#228, which is greater than the total High School Vector across 28 issues. That’s the equivalent of the second place driver overtaking the guy in the lead in the first 10 laps and then overlapping the former first place guy twice in the next 20 laps of a 30 lap race.
One could argue that the first 10 issues of ASM given that it had to establish so much of the title and its serialization and given that it was the task of these 10 issues to retain and build word of mouth so as to lay the foundation for the title’s success, that these 10 issues are more equal than those that followed. I disagree but the fact is if one wants to make a claim for the primacy of the first 10 ASM issues over what followed, the data is there to support it.
Of course it is issues 11-20 that introduced villains like Mysterio, Green Goblin, Kraven the Hunter, The Scorpion, The Spider-Slayers who are all prominent aspects of the Spider-Man franchise. Green Goblin as I established in my previous post, ultimately became the Spider-Man rogue with the most appearances and the first supervillain in the first Spider-Man film by Sam Raimi. He also ended the Lee-Ditko run as the villain with the most appearances which he achieved over his second place, Doctor Octopus, who appeared 10 issues before. And certainly the major iconic stories of the Lee-Ditko run happen after ASM#10 and not in the first 10. If one wants to limit ASM or L-D Spider-Man to the first 10 issues, you would have to subtract the Sinister Six Annual, the Master-Planner Saga, Mary Jane Watson, Harry Osborn, Gwen Stacy, and many other elements that appeared after the first 10 issues. It’s also important to note that Lee-Ditko’s run was a word-of-mouth success that grew steadily and the later issues of his sold far more than his earlier issues.
The High School setting is the only one to have an entire story take place there, and that’s the first story “the Living Brain” in ASM#08 (one of three anthology comics in ASM, not including Annual 02 which features reprints alongside an original story). The cover of this issue also features Peter Parker without mask (though with the Spider-Man half-shadow) for the first time. In general the covers of Spider-Man comics always featured him in costume and in action, rarely featuring the supporting cast, bit-players and subplots that the data of this page has focused on. The Daily Bugle would ultimately surpass HS on covers too though. And even then it’s only featured in a single story of an issue promoted as “Special Teenager’s Issue” and not in a full-length serial story.
The first time a supervillain attacks one of the settings is at the High School in ASM#04 when the Sandman attacks the place in his debut. The Daily Bugle would face its first attack in ASM#07 when the Vulture (the first recurring villain of the rogues gallery) attacks the building. The Bugle would face two more attacks thanks to the Scorpion and in ASM#25 after Peter overreaches and convinces Jameson to back the Spider-Slayers, it is from the Bugle office that Jameson pilots the robot to hunt down Spider-Man.

OVERLAPPING VECTORS

Fundamentally, Lee-Ditko’s run is more interesting for the fact that it features a character with so many vectors. The “both/and” approach is more favorable and closer to the truth. It’s most interesting, when all three are above average in the same issue, which happened in 9 issues across ASM.

Of the lot, the most balanced are:

ASM#05 when Spider-Man fights Doctor Doom. In this issue [HS] makes 19 panels, [DB] makes 10, [H] makes 13 panels. The opening splash pages do a good job in representing the supporting characters featuring in the issue.
ASM#17 [33-18-13]and ASM#18 [27-21-39], the Two-Part story where Spider-Man fights the Goblin at High School and then quits before deciding to comeback in the following issue. This issue’s cover is the only time both the High School and Daily Bugle cast feature on the cover.
ASM ANNUAL 01 where Spider-Man fights the Sinister Six. High School only has 8 panels but Daily Bugle and Home have a perfect ratio of 34 panels each, not coincidentally a result of both Aunt May and Betty Brant being kidnapped.
ASM #25 [41-91-16] with the Daily Bugle having the grand lead no doubt helped by a Robot piloted with Jameson with his face on a display screen. This issue also has Mary Jane’s first appearance though we don’t see her face. It’s also the first issue on which Steve Ditko had plotting credit. The splash image with this threaded spheres chaining together actually captures the overlapping vectors inside this issue very well. It also spoofs the composition of “Flash of Two Worlds”, the iconic Silver Age Flash comic. That said, Stan Lee’s condescending caption about Steve “coming up with the plot” does take some of the good cheer out of it.

There are of course overlaps on multiple levels each issue, even when one or other vectors don’t feature. But these above issues represent the ensemble quality of Spider-Man as a comic, one which contrary to belief, we should credit to Steve Ditko far more than Stan Lee.

INFERENCE ON AUTHORSHIP

Now what are the inferences one can make from this data?

I’d argue that first and foremost, it provides insight into the most controversial aspect of Marvel Comics. The so-called “Marvel Method”. In general most comics are normally written the way one assumes scripts for Theater, Radio, TV, Movies are written. Someone writes a script, this is handed to other departments who follow the script, and then the final product emerges after collaboration. There are differences and changes made at later stages and so on, but generally what’s written down on paper most of the time ends up inside the final product.

In the 1960s and onwards, Stan Lee was quite proud of boasting that he practiced the “Marvel Method”. Whereby, he came up with the basic plot and handed it to the artists who then drew the comic based on Stan Lee’s plot and return him the pencils and then have him fill the dialogues (often at the artist’s suggestions).

The way Stan Lee practiced it was defined well by Abraham Riesman. As he noted in an interview in 2021 elaborating on his controversial biography of Stan Lee:

“There was no story prior to the writer-artist sitting down and actually doing it. There were just keywords, or maybe a vague narrative outline as best as we can tell, because Stan wasn’t writing scripts. He wasn’t writing down treatments. He was having these brief conversations, the nature of which we don’t know. And then, even if he was contributing a lot of ideas, at the end of the day he’s not the person writing the comic.”
Abraham Riesman, Interview with Games Radar [2]

So that has created an issue of authorship – who should we regard as Spider-Man’s true author-creator, or to use a term from film studies, the auteur. Who exactly was the one making decisions about Spider-Man in terms of his characterization, in terms of his story, in terms of his world-building?

But for the purposes of this essay, let’s just assume at face value Stan Lee’s claim that he came up with the plot and left it to Ditko to draw up the comic and breakdown the story. That would still mean that the panels-per-page and the information inside those panels, the number of panels dedicated to each vector; those decisions — per the mechanics of production — were made by Steve Ditko, primarily and essentially. As Marvel’s EIC and dialogue writer, Stan Lee, forced by distributors (which at the time dictated terms to Marvel rather than vice-versa) might have a say on the number of pages, but it was Steve Ditko who decided on the number of panels per page, and how the action and plots and subplots converted into layouts and images, and made the final decision on how many panels each character and each vector got.

The datasheet above, with the numbers breaking down, how often comics featured High School, Daily Bugle, Home; that’s the labor of Steve Ditko, look upon it ye mighty and despair!

Furthermore, given that the first 10 issues of ASM feature more High School Panels than the next 20, it can be categorically argued that the decision to down-grade the High School setting in place of the Daily Bugle was Steve Ditko’s doing and not Stan Lee’s. We can do this because multiple sources have noted that Steve Ditko objected to many of Stan Lee’s ideas in the early period of ASM’s publication and sought for, and ultimately won, more freedom to plot his stories away from Lee.

“Aside from bringing his idiosyncratic visuals, characterizations and costume designs, Ditko became the first work-for-hire artist of his generation to create and control the narrative arc of his series … Instrumental to the success of The Amazing Spider-Man over the past 45 years was Ditko’s initial insistence that the strip be grounded in the civilian life of Peter Parker. Ditko battled to maintain this element during his tenure, believing Peter must have matching “screen time” with the costumed hero to resonate beyond comics’ prepubescent demographic.”
Blake Bell, Strange and Stranger [3]

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Amazing_Spider-Man_Annual_Vol_1_2.jpg — ASM ANNUAL 02

True to form, look at the data and you will note that there are basically just two stories in the entire Lee-Ditko run where we see Spider-Man in costume and no Peter Parker. The first instance is a backup story to the ASM#08 aka “The Tribute-To-Teenagers” issue which incidentally is the first ASM story not by Ditko, since it’s drawn by (and we can assume plotted) by Jack Kirby. The other is ASM Annual 02 which is the Spider-Man/Doctor Strange teamup by Lee and Ditko. The Annual dubbed “King-Sized” on the cover for 72 pages is flagrant false advertising because it has just one new 20-page story with the rest being reprints of earlier issues. As Ditko noted, “Stan liked, wanted, to see Spider-Man in action on every page as soon as possible as often as possible” and Ditko only gave way to a Peter Parker-free story in rare occasions. [3]

Furthermore, as Blake Bell attests, Steve Ditko’s conflicts with Stan Lee was at its strongest in the first 10 issues where Ditko repeatedly sought to maintain realism while Stan Lee wanted more formulaic plots objecting to Spider-Man intervening at a space launch in his first issue, and especially to The Tinkerer being an alien being [subsequently retconned by Roger Stern years later]. [3] It was the character of the Green Goblin that drove Ditko to make his power play for control of plotting since Stan Lee’s original concept was an Egyptian Sarcophagus disturbed during a movie production which Ditko converted into a mad scientist because as he noted, “A mythological demon made the whole Peter Parker/Spider-Man world a place where nothing is metaphysically impossible” a statement that given the events of 2007-2008 is hilariously prophetic.

So we can see that Steve Ditko as an artist-plotter, dissented far more with the first 10 issues of ASM than the later issues and as he found greater control over the plotting, Ditko was losing greater and greater interest in Spider-Man as a high school student and teenager and wished to age him up. This explains his retrospective essay:

When doing [Spider-Man], [Doctor Strange], I always wrote down any ideas that came to me about the supporting characters, any possible, usable story idea…I remember I once asked Flo to ask Stan if he still wanted P. Parker to graduate from high school and go to college. We had discussed different ideas, potentials, for S-M when we collaborated: fans had complained about a too ugly, too old Aunt May so some beautifying, even dying or killing her was considered; Peter Parker as a reporter ala Clark Kent on JJJ’s paper; graduating was one idea. At some point, Flo said, ‘Yes’.
Steve Ditko “Why I Quit S-M” (Source: Ditko, 2015) [4]

It was Steve Ditko who made the decision to remind Stan Lee of aging up and graduating Peter Parker, who brought it to Flo Steinberg, and got the ‘okay’. If Ditko truly believed that the High School Setting was essential for one thing it would have been reflected in the data above in retaining its significantly high panel count after ASM#10. If Ditko had objections, he could have stepped down then and there, or alternatively given Stan Lee’s hands-off approach, simply chosen to not remind the Boss and continued along for the rest of his run. The decision to age up Spider-Man might have been made by the writing team after Ditko and Marvel Editorial would have more grounds to claim legitimacy for its regressive editorial policies.

As such, a data-driven approach informs and reveals, clearly, how the artist-plotter Ditko actually wrote and directed the story in fundamental ways. If Ditko determines how many panels a character and setting feature in a given issue, he far more fundamentally shapes the nature of that story than Stan Lee’s dialogues can conceivably achieve.

CONCLUSION

My fear is great that I’ve made a mess of explaining my case and my argument, that the datasheet above isn’t clear and legible, and that I’ve occluded my main argument by several paragraphs of verbiage. Still I believe the use of data is the most fruitful means we have to understanding the nuts and bolts of comics storytelling in general, and serialized comics storytelling in particular. It provides you an intricate look into the micro-choices made in the storytelling, and properly contextualized, it can give insight into the intentions of the creators which were otherwise unexpressed or unrecorded.

However, let me reiterate my point at the start. Data is data but the ways of interpreting that data remains human, subjective, and contingent. As always context is crucial. All this is to say that if people still define Spider-Man’s time as high school as the most meaningful and representative aspect of the Steve Ditko run that’s still a valid reaction, no matter what the data above says. Ultimately the bean-counting of numbers of panels and images while important in some ways are inessential in other ways. There’s this old saying in theater, “there are no small parts, only small actors”. Which is to say that even if an actor had a single scene or line of dialogue, they can still find a way to make that small time into something memorable and unique, and theater and cinema abounds in examples of such scene-stealers and one scene wonders. Will Eisner in the 1940s wrote The Spirit, a newspaper strip, which was nominally a superhero story, but are mainly remembered and treasured not for the adventures of the title hero or villains, but for its brief one issue supporting and peripheral characters such as Gerhard Shnobble, or the Sniper, or Wild Rice among others.

Still, while data doesn’t nullify interpretation, it does push for more nuanced and careful reading. It does point out that one can overreach when one attempts to define and fence a particular idea on a set path. It cautions us against our impressions and memories, and reminds us that a so-called ‘classic work’ remains elusive and mysterious even a character as popular and famous as Spider-Man in a genre of superhero comics that are fundamentally commercial and surface-level in appeal.

I think information, supplemented with hard data, can enhance the discourse and understanding of Spider-Man, and answer exactly how Spider-Man aged and developed in the Lee-Ditko run and continued to do so long after Ditko stepped away.

SOURCES

Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Marvel Masterworks: Amazing Spider-Man Vol.1. (Includes Amazing Fantasy #15 and Amazing Spider-Man 01-10). Published in September 2003.
Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Marvel Masterworks: Amazing Spider-Man Vol.2. (Includes Amazing Spider-Man 11-19 and Annual 01). Published in June 2009.
Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Marvel Masterworks: Amazing Spider-Man Vol.3. (Includes Amazing Spider-Man 20-30 and Annual 02). Published in October 2003.

REFERENCES

The Claremont Run. Project Data
http://www.claremontrun.com/Data.html
“Who really was Stan ‘The Man’ Lee? A biographer tries to find out”. Zack Smith. Gamesradar. February 16, 2021
https://www.gamesradar.com/who-really-was-stan-the-man-lee-a-biographer-tries-to-find-out/
Blake Bell. Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko. Fantagraphic Books. 2008. Pages 56-58.
“Why I Quit S-M”
Steve Ditko. Four Page Series #9. 2015.
The Complete Four-Page Series And Other Essays (Ditko Complains)

2 thoughts on “Re-Examining Spider-Man 02 – How Teenage was Teen Spidey Really?”

Aaron Cobbs says:

September 13, 2021 at 6:50 pm

Bravo, Jack! This is incredibly well-researched and interestingly in-depth. I’m impressed! I personally love Peter’s adult years way more than his high school years, but i recognize the importance of others’ interpretations. I’m glad you do, too!

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1. Jack Elving says:
  
  September 14, 2021 at 9:12 am
  
  Thanks Aaron, I appreciate that. I personally would favor a “both/and” approach to understanding Spider-Man as a character, in that he’s both about “youth” and “growth” rather than one over the other.
  
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