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Author:
Title: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN No. 43
Place Published:
Publisher:Marvel [Indicia: Non-Pareil Publishing Group]
Date Published: December, 1966
Description:

CGC certified: VG (4.0). Off-white to white pages. Not cleaned and pressed. Cover: John Romita pencils and inks, Stan Goldberg colors. Story: Stan Lee and John Romita. Art: John Romita. Lettering: Artie Simek. GPAnalysis: A 4.0 sold for $185 in 5/22.

Spidey fights the Rhino; Pete and MJ make the scene on Pete's new motorcycle. Romita, tasked with drawing like Ditko, has instead "made a more or less decent stab at drawing Spider-Man as Kirby might have drawn him." – Rilstone. All the fascinating psychosexual baggage that gave weight to Ditko's renderings has vanished, though. It's only been five issues since Ditko's departure, but in some ways it feels like a million years.

The letter column is full of praise for Romita, with nary a sigh for the loss of Ditko, no pleas for his return. Romita's slick, glammed-up style made Spidey far more accessible to "the pantin' public," as Stan Lee called Marvel's rabid readership, and ASM soon eclipsed Fantastic Four as Marvel's top-selling mag.

One letter writer, rattled by Pete's recent high school graduation, pleads with Stan to make Peter Parker a Peter Pan: "Spider-Man must never grow up! ...Spider-Man is a symbol of teenage youth – our energy, our arrogance, our idealism, our confusion... He is the one super-hero we can really identify with. Apart from that he's nothing special." Stan offers a No-prize to any reader who can solve the crisis: "If Spidey does stop aging, won't we then have to do the same with all of our other characters... and where will it all end?"

Marvel postponed the problem, but it would eventually have to be reckoned with. The eventual solution was "Marvel Time," a sliding timeline designed to keep the heroes young. As Tom Breevort wrote in a 2013 blog post: "[In the 1980s] the 'seven year rule' was first devised, which postulated that it had been perhaps seven years since FANTASTIC FOUR #1 in story time, regardless of how many real-world years had passed."

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