Lee-Ditko era nostalgia

[phantom1592]

For me, I like the Lee-Ditko years because they were FIRST. First peter Parker... First Doc Ock… First Lizard.. All those iconic stories where we first met the villains and saw their origins and first encounters. Nothing really beats that. Any modern retcon or reboot or reimagining or modernizing doesn't really have that same creativity as the First appearances.

That said.. Romita was a much better Artist and Spider-man really shone under him. I honestly never cared for EITHER Ditko or Kirby's artwork. It just seemed so flat or remedial. I'm sure it was awesome at the time... but going back to those silver and golden age books, just look ugly to me. GREAT designs... but bad artwork. I've always been amazed when I see people criticize artwork in the 90's as being as anatomically wrong or misproportioned… then praise Kirby or Ditko who have arms and legs splayed all over the place. I've always chalked it up to artists getting paid by the page and being under a deadline to get as many pages done as they could as quickly as they could... but I still can't praise their art.

[Jekyll]

I was actually talking about this to my middle school film class yesterday. Spider-Man is important, particularly in the Lee & Ditko era because he was the first teenage superhero that wasn't a sidekick. Not only that, but he wasn't popular in school, he wasn't rich, and Peter Parker was just as interesting as Spider-Man. This made Peter an extremely realatable character to people.
I am currently making my way through the Lee & Ditko Spidey era and it's just a fun read. Sure not every issue is a masterpiece, but overall it's a fun read and interesting to see how all of these characters have grown over time.

However, I am also reading through Lee & Kirby's FF run as well and I actually think I would place it above Lee's Spider-Man run

[CrazyOldHermit]

There are many reasons I love the run.

For starters, it's just the inherent energy of something being created. It's the thrill you get from a story when the writers are making up new ****, and in the case of Lee-Ditko they made up a lot of really iconic ****. Even something as simple as the first ever "my spider sense is tingling" is fun. It's pop culture being created before your eyes.

Getting into the actual meat of the story, I love how Lee and Ditko build Spider-Man as the anti-superhero, not only by spending so much time on Peter's civilian identity but through all of the bullshit Spider-Man himself goes through that would never happen to someone like Superman.

There's also a real feeling of progression. Character is as important as plot, and once they find their footing and get into a hot streak (ASM #9, IMO) they're off to the races creating storylines that run through multiple issues, usually involving the Peter Parker side of things (the Spider-Man side is usually episodic, often introducing a legendary villain). The stories and characters build and build, growing and changing and evolving.

The artistic abilities of Lee and Ditko come into their own over the course of the run. The two counter-balance each other perfectly. Ditko's plotting and art is gritty and moody and weird, almost dark, which is pepped up by Stan's ultra-fun melodrama and humor, qualities that on their own would feel a little shallow. It's a comic that has absolutely everything going for it, told with two very distinct voices.

Is it dated? It's obviously of its era, but the content of the stories is strong enough to stack up to anything I see on the stands today.

[gregpersons]

The original Spider-Man is sort of like a satirical version of Superman in a lot of ways, updated for the 1960s with a more irreverent attitude -- appropriate for an era of both wide-eyed optimism and rebelliousness to the ideas of the past.

Kind of like how Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles began as a parody of 1980s Frank Miller era Daredevil and X-Men comics but at the same time was its own thing, more than the sum of its parts.

There is such a joy of discovery present in the original Stan Lee stories... you get the feeling these aren't too labored over, they are relatively simple stories, but it's clear from Lee's writing that he's having a great time doing this.

Reading the newspaper strip version of Spider-Man -- which is a continuation of the Stan Lee vision for the character -- he always kind of maintains that "parody superhero" element about him. In a lot of ways, he's a more wholesome and moral Deadpool before Deadpool.