Thanks to these posts, I nabbed myself a copy of the Definitive Collection of Lee and Ditko Spiderman Comics and have been reading through these. I've been enjoying them massively.
One thing I couldn't help but laugh at was in the Chameleon arc, Peter's name was written as Peter Palmer on 3 separate occasions and are only times he's referred to by his real name as opposed to his superhero name.
I wasn't sure if you may some insight on this, or maybe I got a misprint edition, or perhaps the letterer just wasn't paying close enough attention to the script that day.
I'm happy to have played a part in getting you into Lee/Ditko Spider-Man and even happier that you enjoy them! To me it's almost impossible to overstate how important and innovative these comics are. I've read nearly every superhero comic Marvel put out in the 60s and while they're mostly solid to good comics, Spider-Man is in a different stratosphere. It's like it took Marvel themselves a long time to really catch up to Spider-Man's inventiveness.
Peter Palmer is a somewhat famous mistake that I think you can chalk up to Stan's bad memory. According to him, he named all of his characters with alliterations so he could easily remember them (Peter Parker, Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Matt Murdock, Otto Octavius, Scott Summers, Bruce Banner, etc). Very often an alliteration name is a giveaway that Stan made up the name. Characters like Tony Stark, Hank Pym, and Donald Blake (Thor's civilian disguise) were named by Larry Lieber, Stan's brother, who apparently didn't share Stan's bad memory.
The Peter Palmer mistake also speaks to the slapdash way those early issues were constructed, in my opinion. After all, he's called Peter Parker throughout the Jameson Rocket story in the first half of the issue. It makes me think that the two stories were maybe done weeks or months apart, and Stan forgot Peter's name (Amazing Spider-Man #1 was published a full 7 months after Amazing Fantasy 15). If he had made the mistake once, then it's just a mistake, but he does it over and over again. I think when he sat down to dialogue that story he really thought his name was Peter Palmer.
The worst early name mistake Stan made was with Bruce Banner. In FF #25, the Thing and the Hulk fight, and Bruce Banner is consistently called Bob throughout the story. A few months later, in the letter pages of FF #28, Stan apologized for the mistake, and fixed it by saying that Bruce Banner's full name is in fact Robert Bruce Banner "so we can't go wrong no matter what we call him!" So now and forever, Bruce Banner's first name is secretly and actually Robert, because Stan Lee called him Bob a few times by mistake 60 years ago.
Thanks to these posts, I nabbed myself a copy of the Definitive Collection of Lee and Ditko Spiderman Comics and have been reading through these. I've been enjoying them massively.
One thing I couldn't help but laugh at was in the Chameleon arc, Peter's name was written as Peter Palmer on 3 separate occasions and are only times he's referred to by his real name as opposed to his superhero name.
I wasn't sure if you may some insight on this, or maybe I got a misprint edition, or perhaps the letterer just wasn't paying close enough attention to the script that day.
Either way, I found it very amusing.
I'm happy to have played a part in getting you into Lee/Ditko Spider-Man and even happier that you enjoy them! To me it's almost impossible to overstate how important and innovative these comics are. I've read nearly every superhero comic Marvel put out in the 60s and while they're mostly solid to good comics, Spider-Man is in a different stratosphere. It's like it took Marvel themselves a long time to really catch up to Spider-Man's inventiveness.
Peter Palmer is a somewhat famous mistake that I think you can chalk up to Stan's bad memory. According to him, he named all of his characters with alliterations so he could easily remember them (Peter Parker, Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Matt Murdock, Otto Octavius, Scott Summers, Bruce Banner, etc). Very often an alliteration name is a giveaway that Stan made up the name. Characters like Tony Stark, Hank Pym, and Donald Blake (Thor's civilian disguise) were named by Larry Lieber, Stan's brother, who apparently didn't share Stan's bad memory.
The Peter Palmer mistake also speaks to the slapdash way those early issues were constructed, in my opinion. After all, he's called Peter Parker throughout the Jameson Rocket story in the first half of the issue. It makes me think that the two stories were maybe done weeks or months apart, and Stan forgot Peter's name (Amazing Spider-Man #1 was published a full 7 months after Amazing Fantasy 15). If he had made the mistake once, then it's just a mistake, but he does it over and over again. I think when he sat down to dialogue that story he really thought his name was Peter Palmer.
The worst early name mistake Stan made was with Bruce Banner. In FF #25, the Thing and the Hulk fight, and Bruce Banner is consistently called Bob throughout the story. A few months later, in the letter pages of FF #28, Stan apologized for the mistake, and fixed it by saying that Bruce Banner's full name is in fact Robert Bruce Banner "so we can't go wrong no matter what we call him!" So now and forever, Bruce Banner's first name is secretly and actually Robert, because Stan Lee called him Bob a few times by mistake 60 years ago.