Heading:
Author:
Title: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN No. 8
Place Published:
Publisher:Marvel [Indicia: Non-Pareil Publishing Group]
Date Published: January, 1964
Description:

CGC certified: G/VG (3.0). Off-white to white pages. Not cleaned and pressed. Cover: Steve Ditko pencils and inks, Stan Goldberg colors. Story: Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Art: Steve Ditko (back-up feature penciled by Jack Kirby and inked by Ditko). Colors: Stan Goldberg, Sam Rosen. Lettering: Artie Simek. GPAnalysis: A 3.0 sold for $372 in 7/22.

Some say the "Tribute-to-Teen-Agers" ish is pure filler, but in terms of certain aspects of Peter Parker's character development, it's a key ish. Ditko uses Pete's schoolboy tussle with Flash, in which Pete's specs are smashed, as a way to show how being Spidey has changed Peter Parker's personality:

"I've HAD it! I'm THROUGH pretending to be a pantywaist to conceal my real identity! I don't NEED those specs anyway!" – Peter Parker.

Rilstone rates this development highly: "This is an astonishing outburst. Parker now thinks of Spider-Man as his real self, and himself as the assumed identity. He sees his glasses as a disguise to make himself appear weak (using the borderline homophobic term 'pantywaist'). And he is going to throw away the glasses and abandon the disguise.



"But the Peter Parker we met in the first pages of Amazing Fantasy #15 was weak. At any rate, he was shy, studious and non-athletic. This wasn't an assumed role: it was who he was. The mask and the spider-powers may have enabled him to express a different... side to his personality... but Peter Parker is not a constructed identity, as Clark Kent arguably is. When he says that he is going to stop pretending to be weak, he means that he is going to start integrating the two roles." – Andrew Rilstone, Listen Bud: The First Great Graphic Novel in American Literature. Unpublished manuscript, pp. 103-104.

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