I caught Sam Raimi’s SPIDER-MAN on TV the other night, and enjoyed once more the way Willem DaFoe and James Franco perfectly captured the fractured relationship between Norman Osborn (secretly Spider-Man’s arch-enemy the Green Goblin) and his son Harry, Peter Parker’s best friend and roommate. I was recently inspired to go back and take a […]
Spider-Man faces a host of entertaining villains, but he didn’t necessarily meet all of them face to face. In “The Reprehensible Riddle of the Sorcerer,” originally published in Marvel Super Heroes #14, he fights the Sorcerer. However, he doesn’t realize it because the Sorcerer is controlling him from afar. The story written by Stan Lee […]
It’s time for a new episode of The Landing Pad! This week, as we close out “Spidey-Villain Month,” Harley talks about the one and only Doc Ock!
I thought it would be a good time to hop into the Wayback machine to a time when AMAZING SPIDER-MAN wasn’t afraid to serve up some goofy fun. Like what, you ask? How about Spidey fighting dinosaurs and Kraven the Hunter in the Savage Land alongside a bikini-clad Gwen Stacy? How did this come about, […]
Our next Spidey-villain actually made his debut elsewhere, but quickly settled into a steady gig serving as a minor but persistent annoyance to Spider-Man for the next couple of decades. The Beetle made his premiere Spidey appearance in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #21, in “Where Flies the Beetle…!” by Lee and Ditko. The Beetle, a.k.a. disgruntled master […]
It’s currently one of the most interesting times to be a Marvel reader. Thanks to the success of Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye, Marvel seems to be allowing its creative teams to get far more experimental with their company-owned characters. At the moment, books like Charles Soule’s She-Hulk, G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel, Al […]
The rogues gallery of Batman and Spider-Man share some interesting features. Among them is the sheer number of insane members of a rogues gallery. Batman has the Joker, Riddler, Penguin, Mad Hatter, Two-Face, and others. Spider-Man has the various Goblins, the Lizard, the Iguana, the Jackal, and others. Both have had classic villains. Spider-Man has […]
John Romita first tackled Doc Ock in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #53 (October 1967), in “Enter: Dr. Octopus,” written, of course, by Stan Lee. Here Doc Ock attacks a science exposition, where he attempts to steal the Nullifier, a new revolutionary piece of defense technology that can nullify the homing devices of enemy missiles. Unfortunately for […]
For Those Who Came In Late: Last week, we began our much-requested examination of what’s probably the best Rogues’ Gallery to be found in the pages of Marvel Comics, Spider-Man’s various villainous adversaries. Having already discussed such nefarious ne’er-do-wells as the Chameleon, the Vulture, the Sandman and the Lizard, today we’ll start with that high-voltage […]
When I open the pages of a Spider-Man comic, I don’t expect to find horror. That changed when I read “Kraven’s Last Hunt.” The six part story by J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Zeck spread across the Web of Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Spectacular Spider-Man in 1987, and it’s the kind of story that […]
After the mammoth success of Sam Raimi’s first SPIDER-MAN film in 2002, a sequel was a foregone conclusion. Even before the second film had been officially announced, speculation was running rampant about who the villain would be for SPIDEY 2. All kinds of rumors were flying around, everybody from old-school originals like the Lizard and […]
Much has been made about Batman having the best “Rogue’s Gallery” of villains in comics, and I’ll admit, it’s right up there. However, I’d have to put Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man in very close competition, as Spidey creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, and later Spidey writers and artists like John Romita, Gil Kane, Ross Andru, […]
I think it was an issue of New Avengers where Spider-Man lamented that the villainous force behind their latest struggles was “one of his.” I can’t for the life of me remember which issue it was, or even which villain, but the idea struck me pretty hard then. Heroes in the Marvel Universe do, in […]
