Sacred Cow Tipping #1: Take a load off, Spidey

"The Final Chapter!" from Amazing Spider-Man #33 (February 1966) is the appropriately-named conclusion to a three-part story arc that served as a pivotal moment in the title character's Lee-and-Ditko-produced Bildungsroman. In order to save his beloved Aunt May from a severe recurrence of chronic Pestilentia Melodramatica, Peter Parker suits up as Spider-Man and goes toe to toe with Doctor Octopus in order to retrieve the serum that could cure his ailing aunt. Things take a turn for the crappy, however, when Doc Ock's undersea lair collapses, trapping poor Spidey beneath a couple dozen tons of junked machinery with the vital cure just out of the hard-luck hero's reach -- which is where "The Final Chapter!" begins.

Spidey's struggles in the story to find the inner strength to free himself and save Aunt May is considered, rightly, to be one of the finest moments in Marvel's Silver Age output, even by folks who usually cast a jaundiced eye at the superheroic material. In a genre predicated on the illusion of change, the story offers the genuine article -- Peter's transformation from a well-intentioned teen playing at being a hero into an adult who understands and accepts what the job actually entails. It is a work of importance, albeit parochial to the genre, certainly deserving its designation as a "classic" story, and yet....

...once you get past the mythic aura of reverence, what it comes down to is a bunch of pages of Spidey pontificating in eight shades of purple from his pulpit in the rubble, padding out the scene until its foregone conclusion.

Here's the Andrew-edited abridged version:


SPOILER ALERT: He eventually summons the inner strength to free himself, which is why the title of the series didn't change to the Amazing Spider-Man's Decomposing Corpse with issue #34. (Fandom would have to wait four decades and for a hot trend needing flogging in order to witness how that premise would play out.)

Interestingly enough, while the predictably pedestrian (or as the high-brows are fond of saying "like something from a comic book") catalyst for the character's evolution gets the lion's share of attention, the effects of the transfomation don't actually manifest until the end of the story, when a bruised Peter blows off semi-girlfriend Betty Brant's concerns about his safety then proceeds to stand up to J. Jonah Jameson's bullying. These inversions of the standard Spider-Man tropes are the true crucial moments of the story arc, and their effectiveness surpasses the "I can't lift the rubble! I must lift the rubble! I can't lift the rubble! I'll lift the rubble!" hijinx it took to get there.