Hello,This Monster!

It seems that every decade or so I have to buy a new version of this comic. Spectacular Spider-Man: Lo, This Monster reprints two distinctive Marvel classics, the first two attempts to take Spider-Man beyond the confines of his regular comic (if you don't count the annuals) and bring him to a broader audience, one which didn't look for reading on the spinner racks but on the magazine shelves. The experiment was worthy, but since there are only two issues, one can only conclude it was insufficient. Both are reprinted in this latest volume from Marvel Comics,  but I'm only interested today in the first one.

I didn't dredge up a copy of the original thirty-five cent magazine for many years, but I was hyper aware of it for all my time as a Marvelite.

The iconic cover image of Spider-Man captured in a spotlight as drawn by Johnny Romita and painted by Harry Rosenbaum is a classic.

It was actually the ads which fired my boyhood imagination, seeing the raw Romita artwork and the promise of grand new adventures beyond the four-colored universe.

The story Richard Raleigh, an infinitely corrupt politician running for mayor of New York City and at the same time engineering his own crime wave to make himself the hero for stopping it seems so outlandish. But now as an adult, weary with news, I know only too well that politicians use fear of crime and other acts of terror to gain footholds from which they can wield power. Richard Raleigh is not just a corrupt politician but a truly evil, likely unhinged man who will stop at nothing to get what he wants and if that means killing someone like Gwen Stacey's father, then so be it. He uses as his instrument of terror, a thug who has been transformed by science into the titular "Monster", but as in any decent Frankenstien-like yarn he falls victim to his own creation.

Weirdly that didn't stop Raleigh from making another appearance in a Marvel Comic, specifically Daredevil #42 in which he enlists the Jester to attack Franklin "Foggy" Nelson. But the Jester's attack is stalled by Daredevil of course and before a second scheme can be hatched, Jester finds what remains of Raleigh as a consequence of the events in Spectacular Spider-Man. It's a nifty little crossover, the kind of think Marvel excelled in.

Many moons later Marvel took the bones of the story and reworked it for the regular Amazing Spider-Man comic, changing names where necessary and replacing the already deceased Captain Stacey with Robbie Robertson. They have to add pages, alter dialogue to make the old story cohere to the Spidey mythos of the day, and Raleigh gets a new identity as "The Disruptor" and his man-monster is dubbed "The Smasher". No Jester as far as I can recall.

This story was reprinted about a decade or so ago in its original magazine format and I have it lurking around here in the bowels of my collection somewhere. Now I have to see if I can find that. Wish me luck.

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