Spider-Man in 1968
Spider-Man suffers amnesia toward the beginning of the year, and Doc Ock convinced him that SM is his lackey. Not a fan of the amnesia trope in any media or genre. It’s a hackneyed device. Speaking of hackneyed devices, Smythe outfits Jameson with another spider slayer suit and sends him after SM.
Just want to also note that amnesia in the real world is exceedingly rare. To go as far as to forget every aspect of your life is referred to as dissociative fugue. The rate of that occurrence is approximately 0.2%. But this is a superhero comic we’re talking about, and a heroic level of suspension-of-disbelief is the name of the game. Anyway…
Rolling in from amnesia, we go right into mind control cameras. Mary Jane gets a job as a go go dancer and photographer, and is given a hypnotic camera. What in the world? She snaps some photos of political figures, including Gwen Stacy’s father, retired police captain George Stacy. This puts them all in the thrall of Kingpin, who is working with one of Norman Osborne’s underlings. Osborne, in this stage, is getting perilously close to regaining his memory of his Green Goblin days. See this budding fixation on memory during this era?
But the battle between old Vulture and new Vulture was fun, as was SM’s follow-up fight against Toomes (old Vulture). Romita has a dynamite way of rendering aerial city battles. As for the other stuff? Not quite as strong this year, but better than some of the alternatives in 1968.
