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A review by sonofatreus
Marvel Masterworks: The Amazing Spider-Man, Vol. 1 by Stan Lee
4.0
Obviously what Lee/Ditko started here is unimpeachable. Spider-Man is a great character almost from the jump. There are some great villains, even early on, and the side characters are all pretty fun. Flash is a classic mid-century bully; J. Jonah Jameson presaged an Alex Jones-type eerily well. The art is all pretty well great. Some characters get a little less detail, like the Lizard, but the colors do enough to make it all pop. It's also really fun to see them work their way into who and what Spider-Man will be. He suddenly has new abilities that are quickly explained into existence, and he uses gadgets in fun, sometimes weird ways (like a Spider-Light to alert criminals that he's arrived).
That said, I always forget how wordy these early comics can be. With Spider-Man already doing a lot of internal monologuing and joking, it makes for a slow, sometimes tedious read. And not all the villains are good in this first collection. The Enforcers, in the last issue of the bunch, are particularly bad (they include Fancy Dan, an expert in Judo, and Montana, who has a lasso).
This collection made me re-appreciate the various film adaptations, particularly the Raimi ones which lean on the first few issues pretty heavily. They newest ones draw from these early comics too in some ways, like Flash being a big part of the stories, but they've also modernized the stories the most.
That said, I always forget how wordy these early comics can be. With Spider-Man already doing a lot of internal monologuing and joking, it makes for a slow, sometimes tedious read. And not all the villains are good in this first collection. The Enforcers, in the last issue of the bunch, are particularly bad (they include Fancy Dan, an expert in Judo, and Montana, who has a lasso).
This collection made me re-appreciate the various film adaptations, particularly the Raimi ones which lean on the first few issues pretty heavily. They newest ones draw from these early comics too in some ways, like Flash being a big part of the stories, but they've also modernized the stories the most.