Celebrate the 1,000th issue of ‘Amazing Spider

Celebrate the 1000th issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man” at Mutiny Comics and Coffee.

Spider-Man, Spider-Man…does whatever a spider can…

And apparently, what a spider can do is last for 1,000 issues over 63 years…and counting. “Amazing Spider-Man” #1000 hits shelves on Wednesday, Sept. 30, with 30 different celebratory covers by some of the hottest artists in the medium. To mark the occasion, your friendly neighborhood Mutiny Comics and Coffee will be partying all day long, with spectacular sales, amazing action figures, a webalicious free giveaway drawing, and Spidey stuff galore, celebrating all the web-spinning (any size) and the many thieves caught just like flies.

“Here at Mutiny, we take pride in the comic book medium,” says “Professor” Jeff Foster, who runs the comics side of Mutiny. “We wanted to make sure that such an historic event is celebrated. We have lots of events like this during the year — Free Comic Book Day on the first Saturday in May, Batman Day, last year’s Summer of Superman. But this is special — it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to honor Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s iconic creation that’s come to be recognized worldwide.”

Is he strong? Listen, bud! He’s got radioactive blood.

Spider-Man was strong enough to bust out of his debut series back in 1962, that’s for certain. It was in one of the last planned issues of a failing weird-tales series called Amazing Fantasy; with flagging sales on the anthology title, and a limited number of books the just-starting small publisher Marvel could put on spinner racks, it was actually the last issue Stan Lee planned to offer. So he went with an idea that he’d had about a down-on-his-luck kid who suddenly finds himself with strange powers due to a scientific mishap involving radiation. It was a story idea that Lee’s boss Martin Goodman had already rejected: No one, said Goodman, wanted to read about a hero with personal problems, let alone a kid. Kids were sidekicks, not heroes. And anyway, everyone hates spiders.

In that, Goodman was 0-3. Stan Lee snuck his Spider-Man story into that last issue of Amazing Fantasy simply because why not? That turned out to be one of the best gambles of the 20th century.

Can he swing from a thread? Take a look overhead.

Spider-Man took off quickly, selling out at newsstands, with fan mail flooding in. Spider-Man was a hit, and readers were clamoring for more. To his credit, Goodman was no fool. He green-lit a title just for Spider-Man, adding the adjective “Amazing,” perhaps as a nod to the title of the book in which good ol’ Peter Parker first appeared.

Amazing Spider-Man #1 was quickly pushed into production, featuring Marvel’s newest hero — soon to become its top star, and sometime face of the company itself — meeting up with the publisher’s other smash-hit in sales, the Fantastic Four. In that book, among other things, Spidey breaks into the Baxter Building, the FF’s headquarters, in an audition of sorts to join the team and make some money…only to find out that the FF don’t get paid either, so Spider-Man books it. Maybe not the most heroic of starts for everyone’s favorite wall-crawler, but hey, good ol’ Pete’s got to pay for that web fluid somehow.

Hey there, there goes the Spider-man!

Fast forward some six decades and change, and Spider-Man is still swinging. In the chill of night, at the scene of a crime, he’s there, with a quip and a thwip! Like a streak of light, he arrives just in time…usually. The ol’ Parker luck means that sometimes — might be safe to say most times — Spider-Man loses. It’s that old great power/great responsibility thing.

Spider-Man was born out of one bad choice — not stopping a burglar when he had the chance. That burglar killed his Uncle Ben; his guilt from that is what got him into the hero business, and his awareness of his duty to society is what keeps him going. It’s one of the things that the Marvel Cinematic Universe nailed: Pete’s philosophy. “When you can do the things that I can, but you don’t,” he says to Tony Stark at the outset of “Captain America: Civil War,” “and then the bad things happen…they happen because of you.” Power and responsibility, not fortune and glory.

Wealth and fame he’s ignored. Action is his reward.

Good ol’ Peter Parker is rarely rolling in dough, but that’s not what drives him. That’s one of the lessons he’s learned over and over again over the storylines from the last 60-plus years. Maybe it’s ironic that Spider-Man couldn’t even come close to being able to afford a copy of his own debut in comics. The last Near-Mint copy of “Amazing Fantasy #15” sold at a 2021 auction for $3.6 million dollars, beating even Superman’s debut in “Action Comics #1,” which had sold earlier in the year for $3.25 million.

No, the sale at Mutiny Comics won’t have an “Amazing Fantasy #15” for sale, or even a “Spider-Man #1” (though reprints of those books just might be). But Foster says that they will have tons of goodies and surprises, many of them Spider-Man-themed and some just expressing the love for comics as a medium itself. “We’re even going to set up a dark area in the basement to show off some 1970s Marvel black light posters,” Foster says. It will be, as ’70s Spidey might say, a super-groovy shindig.

To him, life is a great big bang-up. Whenever there’s a hang-up, you’ll find the Spider-Man!

The lyrics from the 1960s Spider-Man cartoon might be old-school. They might sound a little outdated, maybe feel a little cheesy. But that’s the sort of thing fans expect from a character that’s become legendary for being a teenager (and later young adult) for six decades. Had Peter Parker aged along with the world around him, he’d be pushing 80 — just like his oldest fans. Where will you find Spider-Man? At Mutiny Comics on Wednesday, Sept. 30, sure. But also in the pages of Marvel Comics — and here’s hoping for another thousand issues.

Listen, bud.Mutiny Comics and Coffee, 3483 S. Broadway in Englewood, is open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 30, and will be celebrating Spidey all day. For more information, see the Mutiny Comics website.

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