The Amazing Spider-Man: Mayhem in Manhattan

By: Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Marvel

Narrated by: Tristan Wright

STUPENDOUS!

Of course it's stupendous. It's ol' Spidey himself in his first - yes, first - full-length novel.

SINISTER!

When a baddie drops out of a sky-high window (Did he jump - heh heh - or was he pushed?), Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson wants Spider-Man to take the rap. Has the wall-crawler come to the end of his rope? Does his life hang by a slender thread?

GLOBAL!

To swing clear of this one, he's got to snoop on an international oil conference. There's blackmail! Radioactivity! And a welcoming committee of death-dealing arch-villains!

DIABOLICAL!

Who's behind it all? Think hard, ‘cause we're not telling. But it just might be that too much tendril looms large in Spider's formidable future!

©2019 Marvel (P)2019 Marvel

Volume balance issue

A pretty basic, decently told Spider-Man story. I get the Jameson is supposed to be loud but he doesn't need to be five times as loud as everyone else. By the time I'm done turning it down so he's something I can listen to without physical pain, I can't hear anybody else.

This book is okay

My real star rating would be more like 3.5. What we have here is the very first Marvel novel from 1978. I would say that this book is fine, but rather uninspired. The main villain’s plot is dull and uncharacteristically banal. Considering the bad guy is a classic Spidey foe, I expected better.

Spider-Man is written well, as are JJJ and Robbie. Everyone else is just sort of there.

Anyway, this book is fine. But you shouldn’t expect to be blown away by it.

Loose prose adaptation of old Spider-Man story

So, a caveat - I bought and read this when it was released in the 1970s. It has a few moments that time has dimmed. Today, a rise in the price of petroleum and oil of 15 cents a gallon is fairly trivial; in the late 1970s, it represented something like a 10-15% bump, which might have deserved a somewhat bigger reaction than it got. And I had to look up NYC mayors to confirm that Ed Koch’s run started in the late 1970s; I had wondered if it had gotten some sort of a brush-up at some point to “modernize” it.

The story is, in broad strokes at least, a prose rewrite of a Spider-Man story by Stan Lee and Steven Ditko from the mid-1960s. I’m not going to spoil things, but people familiar with that story will know the true identity of the bad guy as soon as they hear the name he’s using for this plot. The details may well be different (the scheme itself plays into the 1970s far more naturally than the 1960s), but certain basic beats remain the same, including an adaptation of a famous scene where the main character’s struggling to escape out from under a massive pile of of debris coming from the collapse of part of a building. (Honestly, the art is what made that scene famous - much of its power is lost without that).

All told, the story is OK (of a length that was still typical in the 1970s, few books are quite this short these days, unless sold as novellas). Performance is good - no major complaints, but not good enough to elevate the material.

Just OK

Decent prose, but contains all the clunky dialog from the comics. The narrators voices were great, but several words were mispronounced. And the last chapter is duplicated from the beginning.