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VG/Fine (5.0). Clean, flat, bright copy. Spine stress; small nick to right edge; faint corner crease. Off-white pages. Lee script. Ditko cover and art.

First appearance: Spider-Slayer. Mary Jane Watson debuts (face not shown). Close call: Aunt May finds Spidey's costume in Peter Parker's room. Spidey had an almost pathological fear of being unmasked in the Lee-Ditko run. Curiously, as soon as Ditko left the title, Spidey was unmasked by the Green Goblin on the cover of the very next ish.

The reclusive Ditko's psychological relationship to the Peter Parker/Spider-Man split has yet to be fully explored, although Blake Bell's The World of Steve Ditko offers interesting clues: "Ditko draws the intellectual Parker in a way that physically separates him from his classmates. He has his back to the wall, books in hand, wearing conservative adult clothes, mocked by his peers. The outstretched hand of the Big Man on Campus (nemesis Flash Thompson) pushes Peter away from the group. A blonde female has her back to him.... Peter even carries around an umbrella as a symbol of his ready-to-be-tortured status." What manner of hero hampers himself with such an emasculating accoutrement on a dry day? Peter Parker's social persona seems to be a sort of hairshirt he wears to willfully scourge himself... why?

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