Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man vs. Dr. Octopus! #124: When Strikes The Octopus!!

Script: Roger McKenzie
Penciler: Greg LaRocque
Inker: Art Nichols
Letterer: Rick Parker
Colorist: Bob Sharen
Editor: Jim Salicrup
Editor In Chief: Jim Shooter

Unkind as it may sound, there is little that is exciting about a fill-in issue.

You wait a whole month to find out what will happen next to your favourite characters, only to get a completely self-contained story in which no-one remembers any of the things about themselves that you can.

It's a huge irony that these issues were written with the intention that they would be able to conceivably follow on from any issue. Alas, as real life rarely operates in this bubble-like fashion, these stories have the opposite effect, adding to the disbelief that you have to suspend. Even worse, you know throughout that the final page is going to neatly resolve everything, rendering any threat contained within the preceding 21 pages ineffective.

In the mid-1980s, did Marvel just keep a stack of spare stories sitting forgotten on a shelf somewhere, ready to print the top one off the pile whenever the talent couldn't make their deadline?

If so, then I guess this one may have been at the bottom. Not because it's bad or anything (quite the reverse), but just because it seems it had been waiting there for a while.

In the story, Spider-Man's back in his red-and-blue costume again, which had been destroyed six months earlier in Web Of Spider-Man #17. His apartment hasn't burnt-down yet (which had happened a year previously in Web Of Spider-Man #11), as evidenced by the lifesize Indian dummy next to his door. Joe Robertson is once more City Editor at the Daily Bugle, a job from which he had been promoted well over two years before in Amazing Spider-Man #251.

And the villain Doctor Octopus? On page three Spider-Man refers to the "last time" they'd met, which the narration-box helpfully informs us was now all the way back in... Amazing Spider-Man Annual #15??? (at time of publication, #21 was due out presently)

Now please don't misunderstand me. This is a good all-round satisfying story, if a one-off tale is your thing. However I guess it was even more satisfying if you were the kind of reader who longed for the older, more melodramatic, way of doing things.

Yes, it seems this had been sitting on that shelf for so long, that even the style of these comics had noticably changed.

The Bugle has a Science Editor by the name of "Isabel Bunsen", who I don't think ever appeared again. (I like to think that she was related to the famous muppet) Doc Ock gets away with secretly building an atomic reactor underneath Manhattan. The whole thing ends with a 60-second countdown to detonation, which they manage to avert, but only after the clock has reached "1".

In short, this is the sort of comicbook that inspired the Austin Powers movies, and who among us can fault it for that?