A bit of a let down
The general gist of the plot is quite simple: Spider-Man's aunt May and Betty Brant are captured and, to save the pair, Peter must battle against some of his greatest enemies. In heroic fashion, the Wall Crawler saves the day and the hero wins.
From the cover alone, the first ever Amazing Spider-man annual looks pretty cool. Some of spidey's greatest enemies teaming up to defeat him sounds great, or so I thought. However, it didn't live up to expectations.
A problem I see with this issue is it seemed to me that Stan used this as an opportunity to promote other heroes. Characters that have no relevance to the story keep making appearances and captions tell you what titles they appear in. I might just be paranoid, but it does seem like advertising. As well as this, due to it having to be longer than other Spider-man comics, some of the story fills like filler. For instance, when Spidey fights Mysterio, the card needed to find the location of the next villain falls a patch of fire. Spider-man then uses his web to put out the flames; this seemed a little pointless. My last complaint is that some of the story seems kind of stupid. For example, when spider-man's fighting Sandman, an "escape-proof iron cell" the Sinister Six made comes up from the ground and traps them. I thought this was an odd idea, but then it got silly. Because there was no air holes, Sandman couldn't breathe. Wouldn't a genius like Doc Ock foresee this? There's good silly in 60's comics, stuff that makes you laugh, and stuff that just seems daft.
Despite all the bad things, there were some good things in the annual too. Not all of the story is poor and, at moments, it can be enjoyable. Also, for some reason, I liked the picture gallery of Spider-man's rouges and where it explained his powers. In conclusion, the story could have been great, but it wasn't thought through very well.
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