‘Four Color Memories’ By K. Patrick Glover – Installment The Fifth, In Which We Meet The Three Kings

‘Four Color Memories’ by K. Patrick Glover

K. Patrick Glover is the writer of the upcoming webcomic The Invisible Skein, which is being illustrated by Amanda Hayes, and the first chapter of the story is set to appear on the web on December 14th.

‘Four Color Memories’ is a column about the comics of our youth, full of nostalgia for the days when heroes were heroes and villains were villains, before the Avengers were DARK and before the Lanterns were BLACK.

To see a directory of previous installments of the column, please click here!

In this week’s column we take a look at ground-breaking work of Gerry Conway, Len Wein, and Marv Wolfman on The Amazing Spider-Man!

Installment The Fourth,

In Which We Meet The Three Kings

There are three men who are directly responsible for my life long love of comics. Three men who wrote stories that captured my imagination in a way that no one had before. Those three men are Gerry Conway, Len Wein and Marv Wolfman and between them they are responsible for a large part of the Spider-Man comics written in the seventies. Three back to back runs on Amazing Spider-man that carried the book for nearly 10 years and almost 100 issues, not to mention runs in Marvel Team-Up and Spectacular Spider-man.

Of course these three men are responsible for a lot more than just Spider-man. In his career, Gerry has written, well, damn near everything. For Marvel he scripted The Avengers, The Defenders, The Fantastic Four, Captain America, Iron Man and The Hulk. He created Werewolf By Night and Ms. Marvel. At DC he wrote Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and The Justice League. For them he created Firestorm and Killer Croc.

Len’s credits look much the same. He had extensive runs on many titles for Marvel, including Hulk, Thor and The Fantastic Four. He created a few characters you may have heard of, notably Wolverine, Storm, Colossus and Nightcrawler. At DC he had a long run on Batman and a spectacular run on Green Lantern. He also created The Human Target.

And Marv’s Resume? Equally impressive. At Marvel he wrote The Fantastic Four, Doctor Strange and, of course, the epic Tomb of Dracula. Blade was born in that series. Over in the pages of Daredevil, he created one of the most enduring villains at the House of Ideas, the killer known as Bullseye. At DC he recreated the New Teen Titans and gave them their first hit book in years. He followed that up with Crisis On Infinite Earths, which remains the textbook example of how to do a major crossover.

So, with such an amazing body of work amongst them, what is it about that decade worth of Spider-Man that still captivates me? What’s so special about those issues? Let’s take a look.

We start with a Doctor Octopus story, one where Ock puts the moves on Aunt May and Gerry introduces us to Hammerhead. Spidey takes a trip to Canada and dukes it out with the Hulk and the Green Goblin ups the stakes by killing Gwen Stacy. That’s followed by the death of Norman Osborn, which held for a lot of years before being retconned. Then Gerry adds some more new faces to Spidey’s rogues’ gallery, faces like the Man-Wolf, The Jackal and The Tarantula. Oh, and some guy called The Punisher. I wonder what ever happened to him.

Gerry put Harry Osborn in the Goblin costume for the first time. He brought back Mysterio, The Scorpion and The Molten Man. He also gave us the original clone saga, long before the word clone became a “bad thing”.

Len stepped in and stepped up. We got a fantastic arc with Dock Ock and the ghost of Hammerhead. Spidey met Nightcrawler and Nova, had one of his toughest fights with the Kingpin, and had to handle not just one reptile, but two. He gave us the Rocket Racer and Will-O-The-Wisp and the third Green Goblin, in a five-part epic that would see Harry return as a hero.

When Marv takes over, he finally lets Peter graduate college before he starts throwing the villains at him hard and heavy. Jigsaw, Electro, Man-Wolf, Mysterio and The Kingpin all take the webslinger on. The Black Cat makes her first appearance during Marv’s tenure and Aunt May appears to die for the first time. Oh, and remember that Burglar from way back in Amazing Fantasy #15? Yeah, he comes back.

A spectacular run by a spectacular trio of gentlemen. Gentlemen who are still active in comics, by the way. Gerry just did The Last Days of Animal Man for DC, Len is writing The Justice League and Marv just finished a run on Vigilante and is currently hard at work on a Teen Titans graphic novel with George Perez.

I met one of these gentlemen at a comic show once, probably twenty-five years ago. I wish I could tell you which one, but the years have taken their toll on my memory and these men are so intertwined in my mind as the heart and soul of Marvel, that I can’t be sure. I think it was Gerry, but my memory plays tricks on me these days.

At any rate, I still remember a lot about that day. What I remember more than anything, is the advice that gentleman gave me when I told him that I wanted to write comics someday. He didn’t brush me off, he didn’t feed me a stock answer like work hard and keep trying. He didn’t condescend to me because I was just a teenager.

He said that comics were a collaborative medium and to never forget that. He said to make sure that I always allowed my artist the room to tell the story their way, that they would bring things to the story that I hadn’t even thought of and the end product would be better for it.

It’s something I never forgot and it’s advice that, twenty-five years later, I can say I’m happily using, to great result.

The Spider-Man stories I mention above can all be found in the Essential Spider-man series of trades, notably in volumes 6 through 9. These gentlemen have far more than that in print, though, and a selection of each can be found by clicking the links below.