EP0010: Essential Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-man, Volume 3 (Part One)

Travel back to the early 1980s as we look at what made Spider-man's third series a worthwhile read in Essential Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-man, Volume 3 collecting Issues 54-74 and Annual #3.
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Transcript:
Grab your web shooters and get ready for a trip back in time to the '80s as we take a look today at Essential Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man Volume Three.

Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.
Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast, and today we take our first look at the Essential line for Marvel with Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man Volume Three. And this book collects Twenty-One issues of Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, Issues Fifty-Four to Seventy-Four, and Annual Number Three which featured cover dates from May of 1981 to January of 1983. Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man was actually the third Spider-Man series. Of course, Amazing Spider Man was the flagship of the Spider-Man line and then Marvel Team Up came along in 1972. And that was so successful that we got a third Spider-Man book in 1976. Generally when you've had multiple Spider-Man or multiple Batman books, when you get beyond two you begin to have some dodgy quality, but I don't think that was the case on Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man. I got the trades because they were not particularly expensive and I didn't know quite what I was going to get. I would actually have been pleasantly surprised by the quality overall.
I should mention that this Marvel Essential book, like all of the Essential Marvel books are in black and white. This was one of the earliest wholesale reprinting of series via trade paperbacks. The Essential line launched in the 1990s and continued up till 2013. DC had a counterpart Showcase Presents that essentially did the same thing, and when you go on Amazon to look at a review you invariably find one or two people who will say these are all in black and white. But they were also relatively inexpensive. Throughout the run of the Essential books the price tag varied from $14.99 to $19.99, and you got sometimes five hundred pages upwards to perhaps even six hundred in a larger collection. You got all of the stories and the penciling and inking – just not the colouring, which is what made it affordable. Since then there have been other lines: Marvel's got its Epic Collection and DC is doing its omnibuses that are a bit more expensive but cheaper than some of the prior larger collections. But I still like the Essentials because they collect some series that are quite as popular and they are able to sell at the lower price point, and you still…they've started to do the Marvel Master Works with Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, but they have not gotten nearest far into the series as The Essentials did.
The book is written by two different writers: Roger Stern who would be promoted up to Amazing Spider-Man and write that series until Issue 250 and have a pretty celebrated run there, and also end up writing for Superman at DC Comics; and then there's Bill Mantlow who's a pretty underrated writer, particularly on Spider-Man. True, he didn't write too much on Amazing Spider-Man, but he wrote a lot of Marvel Team Up and he began his second long-term run on Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man. There are tons of artists who worked on this book and it varied from month to month who would be penciling it. John Byrne, the famous Superman writer-artist did do one issue of this and Jim Shooter did the art on a couple of issues. Beyond that, these are some of the lesser known names in comics that rotated on and off this project. Probably the most distinctive and interesting was Ed Hannigan who really did a very stylistic title page which is j...