There are a handful of moments in the Bronze Age that irreparably altered comics. Speedy’s heroin addiction, Jean Grey’s apparent corruption at the hands of the Phoenix Force, and Gwen Stacy’s death shifted the reader’s understanding of the sorts of stories that could be told in comics. A sea change occurred, leading to a more mature form of writing and emotional depth. The easy days were over, and now our heroes had to have gravity.
What modern readers sometimes forget about these moments, however, is how little actually changed in the comics themselves. While those major moments shook the reader and the larger industry, they rarely altered the trajectory of the characters experiencing them. Comics had to keep coming out every month; this was a business, after all, and we couldn’t take time off for Speedy to be in rehab. Or, as is the case in Man-Wolf at Midnight, for Peter Parker to experience grief and process his mourning.
Beginning with issue #124 of Amazing Spider-Man, this Epic Collection opens only three issues after Gwen Stacy died, and while Peter is occasionally haunted by her memory, the gravity of the event is never addressed. In fact, it’s fair to say that Peter’s peers—primarily Mary Jane and Flash Thompson—are almost ghoulish in their complete disregard for a woman’s life.
Marvel Comics
Reading Man-Wolf, it becomes a sort of darkly hilarious game of spotting moments of characters being cruelly unsupportive in what is unquestionably Peter’s worst moment.
Marvel Comics
Over the course of the book, writer Gerry Conway shuffles Peter into his relationship with Mary Jane almost wordlessly—their ‘dating’ status is stated in one throwaway line (right before Peter and MJ are blown up by a bomb, obviously). This, of course, is due to the famous ‘Illusion of Change’ edict passed on to Marvel’s creatives by Stan Lee, who was working hard at this point to cross the characters over into Hollywood media.
Marvel Comics
By 1973, Spidey was already everywhere. You could pick up a cup at 711, you could catch reruns of his famously bad cartoon, and you could buy his MEGO action figure. The work in Man-Wolf, by Spidey legends Ross Andru, Gil Kane, and (especially) John Romita exemplifies that iconic era of Spidey illustration. These were the comics they were pulling images from; these were the artists knocking out promo image after promo image.
On top of that, Man-Wolf contains some incredibly iconic moments, like Doc Ock’s attempted marriage to Aunt May, the first appearance of The Punisher, and the reveal of Harry Osbourne as the second Green Goblin. That these comics function in a way particular to the Bronze Age—episodic, barely contingent upon their sequential issues—means that they somehow provide the most iconic single-issue example of the era and provide a somewhat unsatisfying (and ultimately inconsequential) read as a whole.
This is the curse of the Bronze Age, in which astounding things can happen while nothing happens at all. If you want a sample of the greatest hits, Man-Wolf at Midnight isn’t the book for you; if you want an incredible sampling of villains, on the other hand, the volume delivers (there are, by my count, nine different animal-themed villains here). It’s a book that highlights how important the big moments of the era were amongst all the average books around them.
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