I admit it.
I cooled to The Amazing Spider-Man, a title I’d loved from the beginning, when artist Steve Ditko decided to walk away from it.
The character seemed so perfectly suited to the weird angularity of Ditko’s style that I couldn’t accept the fact that John Romita had taken over the art. I regret that now, because Romita did a fine job.
In fact, Romita’s more muted style worked well for the character, symbolizing his evolution from suspicious, introverted adolescence to the more confident and mature outlook of a smart college student.
And Romita took the reins at a melodramatic peak for the feature — Spidey’s insane archenemy, the Green Goblin,n had discovered his secret identity and appeared poised to destroy his life.
The first original supervillain Romita created for the feature was the Rhino, a formidable brute given superhuman strength and durability by experiments that bonded him to a nearly indestructible rhino suit (Amazing Spider-Man 41, Oct. 1966).
The supervillain tried to kidnap astronaut John Jameson, the son of J. Jonah, so his foreign employers could extract secrets about the U.S. space program. Jameson junior would become super-powered himself in the next issue.
After his rematches with Spidey, the Rhino tackled the Hulk in his revived title (The Incredible Hulk 104, June 1968). But I always thought he was out of his league there, even against a Hulk weakened by chloroform.
As Matthew Grossman observed, “A lot of the early Spider-Man villains aren’t just animal-themed, but animal-themed to reflect or comment on Spidey in some way — i.e., Doc Ock is thematically a Spidey double in that octopi and spiders are both eight-limbed; the Lizard is an animal-man who’s completely lost touch with his human side: Rhino and Scorpion have animal strength exceeding Spidey’s but lack his quick human smarts, etc.
“When I was heavily reading Spidey (late ’70s – early ’80s), he had a lot of silly but fun third-rate animal foes that didn’t really reflect anything about the character, but were entertaining in their zoological diversity, like the Fly, the Iguana, the Kangaroo, and my personal favorite, the Gibbon. (This last was so silly and obscure it actually won me a bet — with a comic book writer, no less — who insisted I had made up the character!)”
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