Or anyway, I think it starred Spiderman as the Hero - I used to read a lot of Marvel comics. Annoyingly, the bit that stuck most in the memory is the villain. A middle aged blustery man in a three pieced suit who was accompanied everywhere he went by a glamorous but sour faced and bitter woman who would endlessly point out his schemes were all doomed to failure because he was such a hopeless loser. It transpires that the woman was a vision of the villains’s dead mother, killed whilst she was trying to escape from Eastern Europe when the Nazi’s invaded and that her presence was some sort of vision of the poor bloke’s guilt at not being able to save her as a young boy. And so he was stuck trying to impress her endlessly but of course never succeeding because he deep down thinks he isn’t worthy of it.
The bit that always stuck most is that at the end, the hero finds a picture of the mother looking warm and affectionate towards her son, implying that she would never be as cruel as her son’s fear and guilt conjured. it was all rather moving and I’d love to be able to read it again and see if it is as good as I remember. It seems like the kind of thing Peter David might write. Does it sound familiar to anyone?
I scanned through all of the issues of Amazing Spider-Man between 1980 and 1984 and didn’t find the issue that you were referring to but that doesn’t mean too much. There were several other ongoing Spider-Man titles at the time which I don’t have handy access to not to mention the possibility of it being a one shot.
Sorry I couldn’t give you more but the topic looked a little lonely…
It’s probably not so impressive on the page as I remember it being but the story has haunted me down the years and I’d love to read it again. As you say, spidey had quite a few titles and to complicate things further, I would have almost certainly been reading this in one of Marvel UK’s imprints which were mostly full of reruns from the US comics and thus I suppose the story might actually hail from the late '70s. I suspect my only chance will come from someone having read this exact story. Thanks again for looking for me!
I think that was an issue of Marvel Team-Up, and that the villian in question was Doctor Faustus. If I recall correctly, Spidey had been teamed up with Dr. Reed Richards.
No, it’s the issue after that one. Now that I think about it, the cover of that comic said that Spidey would be teamed up with the entire FF… but that wasn’t really true.
To further complicate matters, I said earlier that he was teamed up with Reed Richards, but in a sense, that’s not strictly true either. You’ll have to read the comic to find out what I mean.
Yeah, but based on their backstories, I don’t see Dr. Faustus being tormented by his dead mother. I’m basing this on their profiles, though, not actual information, so if you’re remembering this specifically you’re one up on me.
Oooh from looking up his info and picture, it was definitely Dr Faustus! Great, that seems to have narrowed it down sufficiently to allow me to work on tracking down the actual comic. Thanks!
Given your timeframe of the early 80s, and based on JThunder’s info, it would have probably been Marvel Team-Up #133 (September 1983). Dr. Faustus appears briefly in MTU #132 (August 1983), but the story ends in #133.
