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Today, we look at how the Spider-Man storyline that brought the Sinister Six back to comics also paid subtle homage to the original introduction of the Sinister Six!
In Meta-Messages, I explore the context behind (using reader danjack’s term) “meta-messages.” A meta-message is where a comic book creator comments on/references the work of another comic book/comic book creator (or sometimes even themselves) in their comic. Each time around, I’ll give you the context behind one such “meta-message.”
This was a tricky one. I wrote on Twitter about whether this would be considered an “Easter Egg” or a “Meta-Message” (while not completely explaining what I was talking about so as to not spoil it) and people, in general, seemed to think it was a Meta-Message, so here we are!
As I mentioned the last time I talked about the introduction of the Sinister Six, back issues were practically nonexistent in the 1950s and 1960s, especially for your average comic book reader. Back issues obviously existed in the 1960s, but they were very hard to find unless you just happened to live near a place that sold them. So comic book companies would take advantage of the fact to do special reprint issues to let fans revisit classic stories. These would be known as Annuals. They sold very well. The problem for Marvel in the 1960s, though, is that they did not yet really have enough material to warrant doing an annual filled with reprints right away, so Marvel came up with an alternative approach. When the company started doing annuals, the original annuals would be filled with MAJOR stories. The first three Fantastic Four Annuals were Atlantis declaring war on the surface world and invading New York, the origin of Doctor Doom and the wedding of Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Girl. Similarly, the only two Amazing Spider-Man Annuals of Steve Ditko’s tenure on the series were a team-up of Ditko’s two most famous heroes (Spider-Man and Doctor Strange) in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #2 and in the first Amazing Spider-Man Annual (by Ditko an Stan Lee), six of Spider-Man’s greatest villains teaming up to fight Spider-Man as the Sinister Six!
Amusingly, by the time Spidey got his first annual, Marvel HAD finally done a reprint annual as Marvel Tales #1 and it reprinted the origins of Spider-Man, Hulk, Ant-Man, Thor, Iron Man and Sgt. Fury (so Spider-Man’s first annual actually references his origin as it was recounted in the much more easily accessible Marvel Tales Annual #1, as opposed to citing Amazing Fantasy #15).
Anyhow, one of the interesting aspects of Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 is how Ditko and Lee used it to also promote the Marvel Universe as a whole. Throughout the story (at least before Spider-Man has it out with the Sinister Six in the early parts of the story), Spider-Man and his supporting cast just keep running into characters from the rest of the Marvel Universe, including literally running into Doctor Strange here…
Here’s the Fantastic Four (fascinating to see them referenced as being in a “feature-length” comic, right? As most superheroes at Marvel at the time were sharing anthology books)…
Well, I noticed a fun bit that David Michelinie and Erik Larsen did with their return of the Sinister Six storyline almost thirty years later (it really seems like more of a Larsen sort of an idea, but I have no idea who came up with it), as the return of the Sinister Six also came with their own version of the Ditko/Lee “have the Marvel Universe guest star throughout the story” approach.
It started in Amazing Spider-Man #334, when Iron Man drops off some machinery at Peter Parker’s university (there’s a great bit where Peter is jealous over how excited everyone is to see Iron Man, so he turns into Spider-Man and no one really cares, since he has been around the university so much as Spidey that people are just used to seeing him. Plus, of course, they’re all science students, so they’re more into the techno hero than they are into Spider-Man)…
Then, in Amazing Spider-Man #335, Peter and Mary Jane are attending a stunt show starring Captain America…
Amazing Spider-Man #336 has Doctor Strange make an unusual cameo. One, because Larsen draws him very much like how Ditko drew him originally (with those eyes that make it seem like Strange was meant to be Asian) and two, because Strange’s whole appearance is a bit odd. He shows up at a gathering of people to check out a fancy yacht only to say, “Man, people are so dumb to show up to check out a fancy yacht.” Really, dude? Just admit that you want to see the dope ass yacht, too.
Amazing Spider-Man #337 has the most clearly-Larsen-influenced cameo of the group, as Larsen is famously a big fan of the character of Nova (characters who debuted when we’re kids tend to have an oversized impact on us), even writing a Nova series for Marvel later in the 1990s, so sure enough, Nova made a cameo in the issue…
Amazing Spider-Man #338 has the most minor cameo of the bunch, as Mary Jane watches Mister Fantastic on television while she’s working out….
Finally, Thor shows up in Amazing Spider-Man #339, only this time, his cameo actually plays into the story, as Thor transports some chemicals into the atmosphere to cancel out an evil plot by Doctor Octopus…
Amusingly enough, Erik Larsen then wrote and drew a sequel to this story, “The Revenge of the Sinister Six” during his run as the writer/artist on Spider-Man, and it looks like he continued this homage to Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 there, with cameos in every issue, but perhaps that was just Larsen wanting to use the whole Marvel Universe before he moved on from the book (and Marvel period, for a while, as he was launching Savage Dragon for Image Comics), as the cameos were a lot more substantial in that storyline (the cover of the finale is what we used for the featured image for this piece)…
Very fun stuff all around.
If anyone else has a suggestion for a future Meta-Messages, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com
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