Many of Spider-Man’s early foes were animal-themed costumed adventurers, like him. And one of them was a thrill-seeking, macho master of such beasts.
“In all fairness, Amazing Spider-Man 34 isn’t a bad comic by any stretch,” observed the Marvel in the Silver Age blog. “It has some great developments — Peter (Parker) trying to strike up a conversation with Gwen Stacy for the first time and getting knocked back, and the plotline with Betty Brant exiting Peter’s life — but it can only compare poorly with the issues that immediately preceded it (the Master Planner plot). It does, however, bring back an old foe.”
Introduced in Amazing Spider-Man 15 (Aug. 1964), Kraven the Hunter was the orphaned son of Russian aristocrats. Living in Africa for 10 years, Kraven acquired superhuman strength and speed from an herbal potion he stole from a witch doctor in the Belgian Congo. Kraven was inveigled into stalking the superhero by one of Spidey’s first enemies, the Chameleon. Capturing Spider-Man represented a kind of ultimate challenge for the jaded swashbuckler.
“The villains Peter fights in the course of (Steve) Ditko’s Spider-Man stories are almost entirely older men who are inventors or scientists: the Vulture, the Tinkerer, Doctor Doom, the Lizard, the Beetle, and on and on,” observed Douglas Wolk in All the Marvels. “In particular, Doctor Octopus, a hilariously nasty old scientist named Otto Octavius, whose eight-limb motif echoes the spider design, represents the most horrible version of what the Peter Parker we saw in Amazing Fantasy 15 could have become: embittered, lonely, angry, condescending, really creepy about women. Kraven the Hunter isn’t a scientist, but he’s the jock-father sort, macho in a way Peter can’t be, and very much a pro-wrestling type in presentation.”
Kraven’s jungle milieu provided variety for the play of Ditko’s imagination.
“The jungle animals that surrounded Kraven the Hunter as he battled Spider-Man fascinated me,” recalled Jack C. Harris. “(T)hese beasts came to life under Steve’s pencil and pen.”
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