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Author:
Title: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN No. 38
Place Published:
Publisher:Marvel [Indicia: Non-Pareil Publishing Group]
Date Published: July, 1966
Description:

CGC certified: Fine (6.0). White pages. Not cleaned and pressed. Cover: Steve Ditko pencils and inks, Stan Goldberg colors. Story: Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Art: Steve Ditko. Colors: Stan Goldberg? Lettering: Artie Simek. GPAnalysis: GPAnalysis: A 6.0 sold for $145 in 3/22.

Ditko's last ish of Amazing Spider-Man. The enigmatic artist walked away from Spidey with a puzzlingly anticlimactic episode featuring "a guy named Joe" as antagonist. Why did Ditko leave Marvel and return to Charlton, for whom he drew in the 1950s? We may never know, but Andrew Rilstone's insights are worth considering:

"Steve Ditko believed that heroes should be paragons: people to whom we look up; people we aspire to be. They shouldn't be overly burdened by human weaknesses and foibles. After he left Marvel, Steve Ditko wrote and drew the reassuringly one-dimensional Captain Atom for Charlton; and moved on to do The Question and Mr. A, whose only superpowers were their moral clarity. He could cope with Peter Parker's whinging and insecurities as long as he was a schoolboy. He was telling the story of how Peter grew up. But he couldn't stomach the idea of him remaining a neurotic nerd forever....



"I don't know if I buy the whole story. But it is clear that the first great graphic novel in American literature tells the story of how the weak and dislikable boy from Amazing Fantasy #15 turned into the admirable young man from Amazing Spider-Man #33. 'The Final Chapter' was meant to be the final chapter: Ditko couldn't go on telling the story of Spider-Man because, so far as he was concerned, the story of Spider-Man was finished." – Andrew Rilstone, Listen Bud: The First Great Graphic Novel in American Literature. Unpublished manuscript, p. 451.

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