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That Spider-Man's origin was the first one I read - and
the one I usually picture when think of Spider-Man's
origin. Crusher Hogan be damned!

You may find it funny, but John Byrne got a lot of
criticism for his version of Spider-Man's origin, which
was just slightly more changed than that one.

There was an outcry because he didn't show Peter getting
the microscope as a gift from his relatives, I kid you
not!

On the other hand, no one seems to bother that JMS made
Spider-Man's origin mystical in nature. Weird.

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

Actually Pedro, Byrne got more grief for making the burglar's muder of Uncle Ben directly Spidey's fault instead of indirectly Spidey's fault - that's what he caught the most grief for. The microscope thing was nitpicking by folks who were looking for things to jump on Byrne about, IMHO.

OTHOH - I actually hear a lot of people complaining about JMS's "changes" to Spidey's origin, but it seems like since most folks don't believe that these kinds of retcons will "stick" anymore, the complaints seem to be less of the "I'm outraged" type and more of a "I can't believe they'd do THAT with the character" type.

You know what I love about the original Lee/Ditko version that I never noticed as a kid? When younger I always thought the guys in the car knew Peter Parker avoided them. Upon reading it now, it's obvious they think they actually KILLED Peter but they just casually laugh it off!

Crusher Hogan looks so happy in that Ditko drawing. The man loves his beatings!

Anyeone else remember the issue of Amazing Spider-Man from the mid-80's when Crusher Hogan reappeared? As far as I know, he had not been seen since Amazing Fantasy #15 (not counting retellings of Spidey's origin). From what I remember, it was a funny story about Crusher telling people that he was a friend of Spider-Man's, but no one believed him. You can predict the ending, but hey.

The flak Byrne got for the computer vs. microscope thing was part of two larger themes to "Chapter One." The first was indecisiveness as to when the story was set; sometimes it felt like it was straight out of the '60s, sometimes it felt modern, and most times it felt like Byrne was desperately trying to be hip and modern without a clue as to what late-'90s teenagers did and sounded like.
The other theme was the updating of inconsequential details in such a manner that, if they didn't already feel outdated, they would soon enough. The computer was a major part of this; even at the time, computers weren't really valuable enough to warrant a home invasion. So many of the updates were just details, and because of Byrne's cluelessness, they already felt outdated. When the point of the project was to update the origin and make it feel modern, that's a very bad thing.

Of course, missing the whole elegance of the origin (a tiny, inconsequential thing happening to a tiny, inconsequential person, turning him into something amazing, as opposed to Byrne's spectacular explosion with the spider's insult added to Peter's injury) didn't help his case.

Please let's not turn it on a Byrne flame thread, but I
must add that my mother-in-law had a house robbed a
couple of years ago and the only valuable thing inside it
was a computer. And it was an old, outdated one! (It had
been mine, I pity the guy who got that thing, that
computer gave me more headaches than probably every other
I've ever had!).

I won't dispute your other complaints, but this one is a
bit unreal.

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

In the new origin, Pete looks like a young Hank Hill.

James, I remember the issue. Hogan's career had nosedived after his defeat by proto-Spidey, and he was now a caretaker at a boxing gym, where he'd tell everyone that he ctually helped Spidey create his costume and webshooters and the like. Of course, no one believes him. Hogan then uncovers some dodgy dealings at the gym (match fixing or steroids or something), and in trying to stop it, somehow alerts Spider-Man, who teams up with Hogan to fight the bad guys. Then, bcause he's that kind of guy, Spidey tells everyone that Hogan's stories are all true. This is in the mid-200s somewhere, among all the Frenz/DFalco stuff with te black costume and Hobgoblin and so on.

Hogan popped up again more recently in an issue of Tangled Web written by Azzarello. The comic told of Hogan's story before he first met up with Spider-Man, and how exactly that meeting could have ruined his life. Great comic, that.

But Hank Hill. Definitely.

"On the other hand, no one seems to bother that JMS made
Spider-Man’s origin mystical in nature. Weird."

I would assume its because most people read the end of that story and realized that that isn't what actually happened at all.

If that wasn't what really happened, how does The Other
fit into it? Isn't Morlun's mission to hunt down
spider-totem creatures? Why would he have come back to
life to hunt Peter if he wasn't one? And who gave Peter
the new powers he gained in The Other if not the Totem?
Did you read the end of that? Then please explain!

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

Hahahahahaha! Pedro expects The Udder to make sense!

Kelvin -

Yep, that's the story. I read it as a Marvel Tales reprint, of all things!

I remember that Crusher Hogan story, although I don't recall it ever being reprinted in Marvel Tales though.

And here I thought people had a problem with Chapter One because it looked like in lieu of inking Byrne threw up on his penciled pages.

T -

It was reprinted in Marvel Tales #281 (yes, I looked it up on the Mile High Comics website - I'm shameless). Marvel Tales was cancelled less than a year later.

Oh okay, it must have been right after I stopped reading it. (I used to buy Marvel Tales regularly but the newstand by my house (yes newstand) stopped ordering it near shortly before the series officially ended.

"Anyeone else remember the issue of Amazing Spider-Man from the mid-80’s when Crusher Hogan reappeared?"

ASM 271, the first issue of Amazing I ever bought. That was a weird time in Marvel history, because old characters started reappearing all at once (Hogan here, Betty Ross in The Hulk, Karen Page in Daredevil), and all I had at the time were old 1960s b&w reprint paperbacks of Spidey, DD and the Hulk, so I knew these characters, and it was kinda neat to see them ("Oh, Karen the secretary and Bruce's girlfriend have become drunken whores!"). I sort of wonder if that was due to the impending 25th anniversary of Marvel?

Also about Chapter One: a huge number of complaints were due to Byrne combining origins of characters, particularly Spidey's and Doc Ock's powers resulting from an explosion. He said at the time that he wasn't actually changing anything, but the explosion was certainly an enormous change to anyone who cared about Spidey's origin. Also, I don't think anyone was asking for an explanation as to why Spidey's spider symbol on his back was blue for a brief moment (or remembered it, even), but Byrne felt the need to do so. Fan-wankery to the nth degree, and it looked ugly and rushed too. His old stuff was indeed better.

I won’t dispute your other complaints, but this one is a
bit unreal.
I just know that reading it, at the tender age of fourteen, it seemed farfetched that a burglar would case a house and rob it just for a computer. If it were a more random robbery, sure. But for a burglar (who apparently works at the computer store) to case a house in order to break in and steal a computer seems not only absurd, but needlessly complicated.

Not really. I've seen plenty of cases where burglars steal a computer and then pawn it for $50-$100. Of course, having a serial number means the pawn show requires a state ID, which makes the stupid criminal easy to track.

Stupid criminals aren't that farfetched...they're actually quite common.

kelvingreen said: "Hogan popped up again more recently in an issue of Tangled Web written by Azzarello. The comic told of Hogan’s story before he first met up with Spider-Man, and how exactly that meeting could have ruined his life. Great comic, that."

Really great. It was co-written by professional wrestler Scott Levy (who more folks will probably know as Raven) and was called "The Last Shoot." That was a good bit of revisionism that 1) managed to update the story without seeming hokey and 2) didn't actually negate any of the previous appearances. It was issue #14, and I really recommend folks pick it up the next time they're going through the back issues.

Stupid criminals aren’t that farfetched…they’re actually quite common.
There's a difference between "stupid" and "casing a house for days because a guy bought a computer from the store where you work, where it would almost certainly be easier to steal a computer."

The guy didn't work at the store. He was just around
(staking it?) when Uncle Ben bought the computer and
offered to help him carry it, probably to see where he
lived.

And this is getting a bit ridiculous now. There are
criminals who kill people to rob 10 bucks or so. MANY of
them! The Burglar wasn't a master criminal who robbed
heavily guarded places to steal millions, but a
third-rate petty criminal who broke into senior citizens'
houses. Those guys are used to make just a few hundred
bucks each job.

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

I really liked that Crusher Hogan story in the later ASM issue (Manslaughter was, like, a new version of Man Mountian Marko). Crusher should show up more. It'd be fun.

Crusher should be The Other!

The major complaint a lot of readers have always had about Byrne's Chapter One has as much to do with the sense of overplotting as anything else. Absolutely nothing can happen in that story without having some kind of elaborate plot justification.

The burglar cannot have stumbled into the Parker home, he must have cased it for days to steal the computer. Peter and Doctor Octopus can't have gotten powers in separate nuclear incidents months apart, they must now have been mutated in the same accident, and because Ock's origin involves a big explosion, Peter's does too. The various bad guys can't have simply happened to be bad guys in New York City, they must all have secretly been working for -- or even related to -- Norman Osborn.

The wole series seems to want to eliminate "coincidence" wherever it turns up...except that, in the end, it simply creates more painfully elaborate coincidences in so doing. Of course the nuclear explosion would have two superhuman survivors, instead of just the one. Of course the burglar's long-term scheme to steal a computer would happen right after Peter gets his powers. And of course Norman Osborn, the ultra-mastermind, would fixate on Spider-Man just as all sorts of criminals gained powers accidentally and became available to puit against him. In effect, all the same coincidences are still there, but now the chains of events that converge by merest chance are even more internally complicated.

Yes, I know...Ultimate Spider-Man kept some of the updqates. And Mark Millar did something very similar with Osborn (albeit that in that case, if you read carefully, the only villains Norman is directly responsible for are himself and the Scorpion; the rest are either genuinely coincidental, or the reuslt of the popular "success" of supervillainy.) But Byrne's Chapter One had the misfortune to come along almost immediately after Spider-Man readers had spent the better part of a decade being jerked around by big, flashy, and ultimately miserable changes and overplotted revelations. And as such, a lot of the backlash towards those tendencies in comicvs writing found a focal point in Byrne's series. (The questionable Electro, Vulture, and Ock redesigns -- again, so soon after both Ock and the Vulture had just been restored after being horribly redesigned or replaced -- didn't help much either.)

It was mistimed and missold as a return to "classic" Spider-Man. It was arguably unnecessary, since next o none of the new plot elements introduced in the mini went anywhere in the relaunched Spider-Man comics. And in the last analysis was one of the early examples of Byrne's increasing tendency to write comics with a tone that I can only describe as pedantic, comics that apparently exist for the sole purpsoe of beating everyone over the head with Byrne's very particularist present views regarding story construction, "comics time," and "core concept." (The latter often seems in Byrne to be confused with a particular plot setup rather than with something more thematic or meta that drives the characters he reboots or "restores.")

As a long-time Byrne fan, I was thrilled that he was taking over Spider-Man, but I dropped Chapter One when he revealed that Sandman and Osborn were related -- because Steve Ditko used the same technique when drawing their hair. That's just a little too much navel-gazing for me.

AS for the Spider-Man 94 origin -- I'm not outraged by it, but I also don't think that any of the changes strengthened the story at all.

And most importantly, IMO, "Chapter One" wasn't needed.

Quick JMS note, he summed it up beautifully when the tribal dude says something along the lines of: You say the earth orbits the sun. I say it orbits because the gods make it happen. It is what you choose to believe. Whether there are spider gods or not, the totems Spider-Man and his villains where are there. A lot of it was meant to be a thought put into his head, in my opinion.

I myself see a fun bit of hokum meant to get Dr. Strange and Spidey to interact (which is always a good time for me. ) The Order is something that just can't be forgotten quick enough, but thank goodness Peter David recently seemed to sweep that away.

Of course that 'retcon' itself was then synthesized with the original 1962 version in the 1980s when they did ANOTHER version of the origin...

"Quick JMS note, he summed it up beautifully when the tribal dude says something along the lines of: You say the earth orbits the sun. I say it orbits because the gods make it happen. It is what you choose to believe. Whether there are spider gods or not, the totems Spider-Man and his villains where are there. A lot of it was meant to be a thought put into his head, in my opinion. "

Wow look, SOMEONE got the story. I am truly amazed.

Spider-Man doesn't have to be some legendary being with a magical origin to have Spider powers. Additionally, he doesn't have to get his powers from the Spider Gods to fall into their jurisdiction (for lack of a better word) and get caught up in that world. Thats why the Other happened.

Oh, and Captain Power the guy that was a really a girl or whatever that was ALSO in the explosion with Peter and Doc Ock who was only inserted so he/she could show up in the current stories? That is reason enough to hate Chapter One.

So, in all those retcons, they still managed to never give "the Burglar" a name or backstory? I hope so, it reinforces the random nature of the kind of violence that Spidey tries to prevent from happening to others.

So, in all those retcons, they still managed to never give “the Burglar” a name or backstory? I hope so, it reinforces the random nature of the kind of violence that Spidey tries to prevent from happening to others.

Just don't read Amazing Spider-Man #200.

That's not as awesome as when Ben Reily started dating his daughter.

...yeah...