SPECTACULAR

I recently wrote an introduction for a Hungarian collection of my 1990s Spider-Man arc, "The Child Within." Since Marvel (finally!) released the DeMatteis-Buscema Spectacular Spider-Man Omnibus, which contains this story, I thought I'd share the intro here. It's a window into a group of stories I'm very proud of—and a collaboration I still treasure. Enjoy! 

I was ten years old when I first encountered Peter Parker. A friend showed me an early issue of Amazing Spider-Man and, honestly, the Steve Ditko art frightened me. Accustomed as I was to the clean, sculpted look of the DC Comics of the day, Ditko’s Spider-Man, with his full face mask, his bizarre, insectoid posture, looked more like a monster than a superhero: He was too overwhelming, too eerie and disturbing, for my young mind to absorb. 

A few years later I walked into the local Brooklyn candy store where I bought all my comics and saw the John Romita cover of Amazing Spider-Man #39—which featured the Green Goblin dragging a bound Peter Parker through the skies above New York. I was intrigued—you never saw the Joker dragging Bruce Wayne around like that!—but, perhaps remembering my earlier aversion to the character,  I resisted picking it up. That resistance melted the following month for the conclusion of that classic Goblin story—I was undergoing a kind of religious conversion from DC to Marvel around that time—and just adored it: Romita and Stan Lee had me hooked with their combination of operatic emotions and explosive action. (I also gobbled up earlier Spidey stories—back issues were cheaper in the ‘60s—and learned to love the quirky brilliance of Steve Ditko.) From that day on, Peter Parker has remained an important part of my life. Just how important wouldn’t become apparent till I made the transition from fan to professional some years later.

 

Peter is, in many ways, the most psychologically real character in all of superhero comics. (Note I say Peter, not Spider-Man. Mask on or off, these stories are always about Peter Parker.) He’s a regular guy, dealing with life’s problems in a way we can all connect with. He’s not some pure and perfect hero. Not some Chosen One. He’s me, he’s you: a human being, struggling, as I think we all do, to do the right thing in life. But, like most of us, he often screws up, sometimes spectacularly. Peter’s flawed, he fails—but he always faces those flaws, picks himself up and goes back out there again, continuing to do his best, striving to be a good man and live a decent, compassionate life. But, again, this isn’t because he’s special, it’s because he embodies qualities that we all have, struggles we all face.  Maybe we don’t wear masks and shoot webbing, but I think most of us can relate to Peter, can see in him a mirror of ourselves.

My first major Spider-Man assignment came in the early 1980’s when I did a long run on Marvel Team-Up with two terrific artists, Herb Trimpe and Kerry Gammill. That experience allowed me to get to know Peter not as a reader, but as a writer—and it’s a very different experience. You have to absolutely believe in these characters in order to write them, you can’t view them as fictional constructions, and Peter Parker soon became real to me. At the risk of sounding slightly loopy, Peter became my good friend. And it’s a friendship that remains to this day.

  

A few years after Team-Up wrapped, I came back to Spider-Man for the six-part “Kraven’s Last Hunt” storyline with the incredible art team of Mike Zeck and Bob McLeod. Then, in the early 90’s, came the invitation from editor Danny Fingeroth to take over the writing duties on Spectacular Spider-Man. 

 

Danny was a delight to work with, the kind of guy who watched over every detail of the story and art like a hawk but, at the same time, gave me tremendous freedom to tell my stories in my own idiosyncratic way. Working on Spectacular Spider-Man I was able to create a kind of subset of the Spider-Man line: Danny jokingly called it the DeMatteisverse. 

 

There are certain editors who are desperate to put their own stamp on the book, who see the creative team as a kind of pipeline for their own ideas. The best editors—and Danny was one of the very best—are secure enough in themselves and their skill set to hire good people and let them follow their muse, but they’re always there to help you work out any bumps in the creative process, to let you know when something isn’t working. You can’t ask for anything more.

But there was more: I got to work with Sal Buscema.

Sal had done some fill-in issues of Team-Up and also pitched in for a few issues of my Captain America run, but Spectacular Spider-Man was our first proper collaboration. Chemistry between a writer and artist is a strange, ineffable thing. You can’t force it, you can’t create it. I’ve worked with wonderful artists, written terrific stories for them, and then watched the final product just…sit there. There was no spark, no chemistry. No magic. With Sal, the magic was there from the first page, the first panel, of our Spectacular run. We just clicked.  

My plots were usually very tight—page by page, panel by panel, crammed with camera angles, psychological shading and rough-draft dialogue—but whatever was on the page, Sal always took it to another level. The panel-to- panel flow was cinematic and crystal clear, the characters dramatic and achingly human. The man can draw everything—from over-the-top action to small, quiet moments—and weave it all together with grace and power. Sal brought my plots alive with impeccable storytelling, deep emotion, every subtlety I asked for and so much more.

 

In many ways, Sal is the very embodiment of Marvel Comics—he’s drawn virtually every character in the Marvel Universe—and I can’t praise his work, and his work ethic (he’s the very definition of a total pro), enough. Add to that the fact that he’s a truly good person—I’d go so far as to use an old-fashioned word and call him a gentleman—and you can understand why working with Sal on Spectacular Spider-Man remains one of the highlights of my career.

 

The first arc in our two-year run was the story collected in this volume: “The Child Within.” The general idea for the story had been buzzing in my head for a while; I almost did an embryonic version of it for Legends of the Dark Knight at DC, but it fell through at the last minute. I’m glad it did, because the idea provided the perfect framework for exploring the unique Peter Parker-Harry Osborn dynamic: they’re best friends, they genuinely love each other, but, because of Harry’s mental instability, they’ve become mortal enemies. Talk about fodder for great drama! 

 

I’m very interested in what makes people tick—not just in stories, but in life. I’ve done my share of inner exploration, both psychological and spiritual, and that’s always been reflected in my work. I want to know what’s going on inside a character’s head—the “why” of who they are, the emotional and psychological angels and demons that drive them. That’s why I tend to write from the inside out and let the plot build around the characters. I like to dive deep—and “The Child Within” went extremely deep, taking us down through the caverns of memory to the traumatic experiences that formed not just Peter and Harry, but our other antagonist, Edward Whelan, also known as the man-rat, Vermin.

“The Child Within” dealt with the wounds that come when we’re so young that we’re not even conscious of them.  And yet, conscious or not, those wounds shape us.  Peter, Harry and Vermin were all dealing with these primal wounds and they continued to echo through their lives, years later. “The Child is father of the Man” as the saying goes. What we experience in childhood defines us, sometimes haunts us, and if we don’t explore those issues, make peace with them, find balance…well, we may not transform into a man-rat, but life can be extremely difficult.

 

One of the ways small children survive in traumatic situations where they have no control is by taking on responsibility for the events around them: My parents are getting divorced…I’m being abused…so it must be my fault. In a twisted way, this illusory sense of responsibility, this crushing, unearned guilt, gives the chaos a kind of meaning, gives the child a sense, however false, of personal power. Peter’s parents died when he was young, but he was old enough to feel the loss, to be shipwrecked by it, and to internalize it as a sense of responsibility and guilt. A guilt that was only magnified, years later, by the death of Uncle Ben. But you can’t live with that kind of misplaced guilt without it eventually erupting up out of your psyche. And it erupts, big-time, in this story.

 

If Peter survived by taking on too much guilt, Harry survived by living in denial. He’d been psychologically broken by the emotional abuse he suffered at his father’s hands—but he never truly faced it. He couldn’t admit what a monster Norman Osborn was. The only way Harry could survive was by denying the darkness in Norman, blaming others—primarily Peter—for what Norman became, for the damage done to Harry’s life. In the end, he became the very thing his father was—the victim transformed into the victimizer—taking on the mantle of the Green Goblin. But Harry, unlike Norman, had genuine good at his core—although it would take time, and tragedy, for that good to make itself known in Spectacular Spider-Man #200. 

 

In some ways “The Child Within” was a kind of unofficial sequel to Kraven’s Last Hunt, because we picked up Vermin’s story where KLH left off, expanding that character in new, and deeper, ways, exploring—I hope with taste and sensitivity—the trauma, and the painful price, of sexual abuse through Edward Whelan’s eyes. Poor Edward had been made to feel so small, so utterly worthless, by the abuse he suffered at his father’s hands that he actually transformed, becoming a physical manifestation of that abuse, a tormented being so diminished, so filled with shame and self-hate, he felt more at home in the sewers than in the light. (When we returned to the character, for our “Death of Vermin” storyline, Edward finally made it up and out, into that light.) I’m profoundly grateful to Danny Fingeroth, and editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco, for allowing me the freedom to explore such a delicate topic.  

 

There’s one more pivotal character in “The Child Within”—as important in her way, as Peter, Harry, and Vermin—and that’s Dr. Ashley Kafka. I’ve found therapy incredibly helpful in my own life and Dr. Kafka (who was inspired, in part, by a therapist friend) was a way for me to inject that perspective into a story that really was a therapeutic journey for all the main characters. I thought it would be interesting to have a character who could do what I, as a writer, loved to do: bore down into the psyches of our cast and provide unique perspectives on the traumas of their past, the demons that drove them. Kafka quickly grew into a fascinating character in her own right—she, too, came from a traumatic background and used the wisdom gained from her experiences to help and illuminate other people’s struggles—and I enjoyed revisiting her in the 2022 Ben Reilly: Spider-Man mini-series.

 

Over the years I’ve written countless superhero stories, for a variety of publishers. There are a handful of these stories that mean as much to me as “The Child Within,” but there are none that mean more. 

 

Enjoy the journey. 

©copyright 2025 J.M. DeMatteis