Episode 1769 Talkback - Micro-Spotlight on Amazing Spider-Man (Vol. 1) #68-75
Adam_Murdough
Posts: 506
Our second Micro-Spotlight shines straight and true from the waist of the Web-Slinger, as we discuss the 1969 classic Amazing Spider-Man (Vol. 1) #68-75, a.k.a. 'The Clay Tablet Saga'! It's Spider-Man and half the New York Underworld in a mad scramble to secure the Mighty Marvel McGuffin known as the Lifeline Tablet, in a story stuffed with suspense, slugfests, pseudo-science, social commentary, and several surprises! Featuring scintillating Spider-sayings from our expert guest-panelist, Dan Gvozden of the Amazing Spider-Talk podcast! (2:25:32)
Listen here, frantic ones!
Listen here, frantic ones!
Comments
-chris
Completely agree that Into the Spider-verse is absolutely the best Spider-Man movie out there, and if not the best superhero movie overall (I'd have to think about it more), it’s gotta be at least in the top two or three.
Re: Robbie discussing the death of his then-six-month-old son with Peter, Stan and Joan lost a child a few days after her birth in 1953. Most writers are at their best when they can instill their personal experiences into their characters, and Stan was no exception.
I wanted to mention one thing. Just as many of you said, I have always seen the ESU campus as a fictional NYU. However, in this case it's clearly borrowing a great deal from Columbia University. ASM 68 was released in January, 1969 (according to Mike's Amazing World of Comics). Only nine months earlier, students at Columbia occupied Hamilton Hall and some other areas of campus in part to protest the Vietnam War, but also to protest the building of a "segregated gymnasium" by Columbia in an area just off-campus.
In January 1969, Mark Rudd, one of the activists from Columbia, spoke at the University of Kansas. The Kansas City Star on January 8, 1969 reported the following:
He charged that the university practiced racism by seeking to "clean up" the residential area near Columbia by displacing the Negroes. This way, he said, a protective shield would guard the "beautiful" campus.
"Columbia followed a racist policy by worsening the situation of minority groups in Harlem," he said. "By contributing to the construction of a segregated gymnasium, the university perpetrated a plot to steal from the less fortunate Negroes." ...
"We found out that Columbia was controlled by the trustees, not the students ..."
Though the protest story in ASM 68 may now seem vanilla and milquetoast through the lens of history (a feeling I also had when reading these issues), it may not have been all that far off from what happened.