By Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Artie Simek
So this issue’s villain is The Cat. He’s a cat burglar. I couldn’t find anything on Wikipedia about
him, but I get the feeling that his origin isn’t exactly as full of emotional turmoil as Victor Von Doom’s origin.
 |
| Things that make you go hurm. Sorry. |
I’ll be brief, Rorschach never met his father. The Cat looks like Rorschach, and of course
he’d be a cat thief. It made me enjoy
this issue much more when I thought of it that way.
So The Cat rob’s JJJ, and around the time that Jameson finds
out, there is an attempted robbery on an armored Stark Industries truck, which
Spidey breaks up. I always enjoy those
tiny crossovers in the early Marvel Universe, they are norm nowadays, but it’s
neat to watch the first stages of world-building.
JJJ puts out a reward to get back the stock papers and
other important goods that the Cat stole from his safe. Spider-Man decides to try and get the money
from JJJ himself, not so much to help his ailing aunt, but to be a complete
dick to his boss. So Spider-Man swings
into JJJ’s office to inform of this, which pretty much gives JJJ a panic
attack, which in turn gives us the best expressions of JJJ in this issue by
far.
As an aside, the visual of Spider-Man with teeth over his
mask is remarkably creepy. I wonder ifTodd McFarlane took visual cues for this when creating Venom?
Spider-Man eventually captures the cat, but not before
the police can get there first so the reward is void, and Jameson breathes a
sigh of relief. I was relieved too, I
actually felt bad for him in this issue, the way Parker was treating him, and
to make matters worse he ends up giving Peter a bit of the reward money for his
photos. Pete looks pretty guilty about the whole thing, although he never says it aloud or in a thought balloon.
Not much to say about the big fight itself, but we do get an incredibly awesome Ditko panel that could have easily been much larger. I wish I had a poster of this single panel (which was crammed in with six other panels):
The b-story consists of Peter’s usual girl troubles. Betty has PTSD from The Scorpion's attack last issue,
and she tells Peter she can’t hang with someone who lives such a dangerous life
like Spider-Man, which is a pretty reasonable statement to say for most people,
but Peter acts insufferable to her most of the time, and mopes about his
behavior in word balloons the rest of the time.
Also in this issue, Peter ran into Liz Allen. Liz told him that she was scared that Flash
Thompson was stalking her, so Peter prevented him from following her by
knocking him. Not a good issue for the
male characters. Then he jumps up to
save a guy from being killed by a disgruntled employee and he voices his disappointment
with the fact that the guy wasn’t the cat burglar.
There were a pair of pop-cultural references that jumped out
at me. Peter remarked that Aunt May’s
apple pie was “the most!” and he tells
the guy he saved from the workplace rampage “Don’t waste that story on me! Send it to a confession magazine!”
A lot of stuff happened, but the story was scattershot, the subplots intersected in really nonsensical ways. The art was great as usual, but the story didn't do much for me overall. Peter being a jerk didn't help much either.
But—HEY LOOK, IT'S BRUNO SAMMARTINO!
If Spider-Man took on Bruno instead of that jobber Crusher Hogan, he'd still be eating food out of a straw!
Okay, I have to go drop this disc off with Sean now.
