While Stan Lee and Steve Ditko codified a lot of super hero conventions, those early issues of The Amazing Spider-Man are very much the product of another time. Many of those familiar with Spider-Man weren’t even alive at that point. However, those initial issues were written during the sixties. However, that initial run set down all the tropes and rules and conventions that we expect from a Spider-Man story, no matter in what medium or from what writer. Mary Jane Watson wouldn’t be introduced until after Ditko left, and Gwen Stacy would die under writer Gerry Conway. Sure, there would be influential runs that followed, and they would contain big events. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko wrote thirty-eight issues of The Amazing Spider-Man together, and those thirty-eight issues pretty much laid a blueprint for the iconic web-crawling super hero. Untold Tales of Spider-Man has an interesting premise. That old-fashioned Spider-Man still packs a punch after all this time… Busiek’s Avengers felt like a conscious throwback to earlier days, but Untold Tales of Spider-Man is probably a very good example of this sort of nostalgia. Comic books became, arguably, even more reflective (and reflexive) than they every had been before. In response to disasters like The Crossing, both companies leaned gradually towards safer old-fashioned approaches, revisiting classic set-ups and old stories. Old concepts that had been brushed aside at Marvel or DC were reintroduced and reintegrated into continuity. Marvels fostered a market in nostalgia in mainstream comic books, for better or worse.

Marvels demonstrated that stories drawing on the earliest days of those fictional universes could still attract fans and still be well written, and that it was not necessary to tear down or deconstruct classic superheroes in order to engage readers. I can’t help but wonder how much that collaboration with Alex Ross shaped the comic book industry we have today – it certainly fostered a movement towards nostalgia, firmly opposed against the somewhat radical reinvention that took place at the major companies during the nineties. I think the author has contributed one of the most thoughtful, clever and influential mainstream comic books in his Marvels miniseries. Busiek is generally, and rightly, regarded as a king of continuity.

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