‘Amazing Spider-Man Epic Collection: The Secret of the Petrified Tablet’ shows Stan Lee relaxing his grip on the Marvel Universe

A strange balance of arrested motion and creative freedom.

March 6, 2024

The early Marvel Universe work of Stan Lee can present, for some readers, a bit of a challenge. Prone to extensive exposition, insistent on overlong recap pages, and guilty of self-aggrandizing hucksterism within the narrative body of stories, nobody could accuse Stan of brevity. To the modern ear, the dawn of Lee’s Mighty Marvel Universe can sound stilted, overwrought, and abuzz with overt melodrama. Early issues of The Amazing Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four occasionally feature panels more dialogue balloon than artwork as Stan squeezed every inch to establish the growing foundations of a burgeoning universe.

As the issues collected in Amazing Spider-Man Epic Collection: The Secret of the Petrified Tablet show, however, Stan had reined in some of his wordier impulses by the fifth year of that book. The reasons for this could be myriad – Stan’s focus had, by 1968, begun to shift toward the exploitation of other forms of media, merchandising, and the hopes of a much more stable media empire. Stan’s original collaborator on the character, Steve Ditko, had departed not just the book but the company, and with him had gone the moody, cramped nine- to twelve-grid pages, replaced by the larger format four- to six-grid pages of John Romita, Sr and John Buscema. Those panels offered space for bolder, more dynamic action, almost ready-made for reproduction in promotion and merchandise materials; it may have seemed a shame to cover all that dynamism up the way Ditko’s slumped and slender Spidey often was.

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Though the accounts of Lee’s overt smothering of Jack Kirby’s creativity in The Fantastic Four (particularly over the story of the Silver Surfer) in the early days are well documented, by the end of the decade Stan had begun to lean more heavily on his visual collaborators on Spider-Man. Romita and Buscema were plotting the issues with their action shots, and Stan seems to have afforded them great freedom to do so.

So willing to cede narrative control to his collaborators, in fact, that Romita’s then 13-year-old son (future comics superstar John Romita, Jr) created The Petrified Tablet’s most exciting creative highlight: the Prowler, who debuted in The Amazing Spider-Man #78. JRJR drew the character, and his father inserted him into a book that was primarily staid in its narrative content.

And Peter skipped his dose of chill pills.
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Stan’s famous ‘illusion of change’ proclamation was very much in effect. Despite incredible work from Romita and Buscema (as well as Larry Leiber and the great Marie Severin), there are very few new developments in the Spider-Man narrative roster – Gwen Stacy is still Peter’s romantic interest, Aunt May continues to be infirm, and Spider-Man’s foes are primarily reruns; the book features the second appearance of the Chameleon and return engagements by Kingpin, Shocker, Silvermane, and the Lizard.

Hire a punch-up writer, guys. That chant stinks.
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Narrative stillness aside, the book was making other, more foundational shifts away from Ditko’s grumpy conservatism; Peter Parker’s politics had begun to skew much more liberal and proactive. Peter ostensibly supports a group of Black students who are protesting decisions made by their college’s administration, aligning himself (however vaguely) as a civil rights advocate and agent of change. Near the end of the book, Peter questions the deep instability of the Vietnam War, illustrating an understanding of the pointlessness of the conflict—a stance that was by no means uncommon at the time, but which hadn’t seeped into the superhero stories over at the Distinguished Competition.

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The Secret of the Petrified Tablet offers a strange balance of arrested motion and creative freedom, balancing on the precipice between the Stan Lee-led 1960s and the rich creative oddities of the 1970s. It’s Spider-Man at the very end of his first era, and at the end of Stan’s stylistic imposition on the Marvel Universe.