Cobwebs #73: That Time Spidey Fought Teenage Sex

Imagine it is 1976 and you are a teenager that just can’t help yourself when it comes to the opposite sex.  Well, thankfully you would have access to this Spider-Man comic to keep you safe from unwanted pregnancies and VD!  Now remember, Cobwebs is INTERACTIVE, so make sure you click ALL the links!

Recognize those building tops on the cover?  That’s the World Trade Center!

Now, I’ve brought you issues where Marvel teamed up with other companies before (like the Aim Toothpaste with the adamantium safes shaped like teeth and the Dallas Times Herald Kingpin Santa) and I’ve brought you Spider-Man PSAs where all Spidey wants is a banana.  Now, I combine them like Thanos does his stones and bring you a Spidey PSA/Company team-up!

And what great company of the ‘70s does Spidey team up with?  Planned Parenthood!  It appears that in the ‘70s, there were a plethora of teenagers bumping uglies and Planned Parenthood and Marvel were going to do something about it!

Oddly enough, this isn’t Planned Parenthood’s first foray into comics.  In 1956, they put out Escape from Fear with the warning “For Adults Only” stamped at the top.

The comic is about Joan and Ken Harper who are married and just can’t keep it in their pants.  They have been married four years and already have three children.  Ken just doesn’t know what to do.  He tried the pull out method and that failed.  She’s using feminine hygiene products and he is not sure what that means, but he’s figured out that it doesn’t stop pregnancy.  They are terrified that they will get pregnant again, but are hornier than Slott’s Silk and Parker.  They are about to split from each other when thankfully a doctor says, “You’re an idiot,” (maybe a bit of a paraphrase there) and tells him there are actual products out there that prevent pregnancy (cue epiphany music clip).  The comic was so successful that they reprinted it in 1962 and again in Singapore (but they changed the coloring and name of the characters).

If you are just so hard up on needing more comics to read and have exhausted your Marvel Unlimited options, then you can read Escape from Fear here.

While it might not be their first foray into comics, it does mark their shift from targeting married couples to unwed teens.

As soon as you open the comic, you get an ad for The BIG 3 INFO PACKET.

For just a dollar, you can get all of these:

• Sex Alphabet (a dictionary of sexual terms that I can only hope is written like an ABC book)
• Birth Control Methods That Work – And Ones That Don’t
• Pregnancy, Teenagers and the Law (they didn’t even put the Oxford comma in!)

Add $.95 and you can get Love and Sex in Plain Language (none of that uppity vocabulary) and for another $.95 you can tack on Understanding Sex: A Young Person’s Guide.  Of course, you need to add more money in for “handling and mailing” (that’s where they get you).

But then we are in for the real deal!

This is brought to you by artists Ross Andru and Mike Eposito (who were the artist team for current ASM) so you know they areserious about making this the best PSA ever.  They even got famed writer  Ann Robinson!

Who?

Guys, it is downright hard to find who this is.  The only writing credit she gets is this comic.  I looked up books by Ann Robinson to see if she is a writer (found one Ann Robinson who wrote How to Make Your Own Liquid Soap Start Up Company (I know our very own Hornacek and Evan were considering a joint venture in that field, but I don’t  think it panned out), but I don’t think it is the same Ann Robinson).  I searched to see if she worked for Planned Parenthood, but no dice.  I was about to give up, I am chagrinned to say, but then I found it.  Our very own Bruce Wechtenhiser is probably yelling at me for not recognizing the name, but she had a job in Marvel’s licensing department and in 1972, she brought us Spider-Man: Rock Reflections of a Superhero.  She also put out a Marvel exercise book (next month, folks, got to wait for that one) and convinced Stan Lee to allow her husband’s company to make a Fantastic Four radio show, which you can listen to here and here, when you are done with this article, that is. Eventually, she got the Prodigy writing gig.  And that pretty much ended her writing career (unless she is the liquid soap lady)!

OK, so Spidey climbs up the Pan Am building and makes the first of several allusions in this book.

You young guys like Tyler probably don’t recognize Dr. J, but he was a great basketball player and you can play Dr. J vs Larry Bird on the computer back in the day!

So what does out hero see that bothers him??

Since they are poor, they MUST be up to no good!  And just who is this Henry Gross singer?

Ann’s husband produced Henry Gross’s albums at the time.  If you don’t know him by name (I’m sure George has all his vinyls), you might know one group he was in – Sha Na Na, which you old Spidey fans might even remember watching on the tube!  The dude is still around making albums!

Later this page, we get this oddity:

So not only do we have guards conveniently giving out needless exposition, but the guard is also saying to look for a note on the next page????

Somebody goofed here and I think we may just have to lay this at Joe Rosen’s feet.  I’m sure that Ann wrote that note in the wrong spot on her script but I think it is obvious that by page three, the letterer AND the editor (who decided to NOT have his name on this issue!) have really just stopped reading what is going on.  And that note on page four it references – you know what?  Page four is such a mess, I’m going to give you the whole thing!

Let’s break down the absurdity here!

Panel 1 – “This pale skin makes me nauseous.” Racist much, Prodigy?  But you got to like the caption box (no, not the one referenced on page 3) that has alliteration like “devious demon”.  And I am assuming MacDuff is an allusion to the character from Shakespeare’s Macbeth and not to famous Canadian curler, Jack MacDuff, though why either of them would be referenced here, I don’t know.  But who am I to turn down a Macbeth allusion?  I’ll take what gems I can from this train wreck.

Yes.  You read that correctly.  His home planet’s name is Intellectia. Which we find out a little later on this page, is in the Andromeda Galaxy, home of the Skrulls and the Nova Force.

Panel 2 – Is it me, or does that guy look like Chi-Town?  Anyway, if you DON’T have “GALACTIC GLORY” on your mirror to motivate you to succeed in your day – why not?

Panel 3 – So his superpower is his “magnetic monotone”?  Ha!  So here is the long awaited for caption box that the guard told us to look for back on page 3.  IT IS TEN LINES LONG!  I’m thinking that he may have bought his shields used from Reed Richards or something.    And just admire that poetic prose in the simile: “his voice draws people to him like a vacuum cleaner.”  William Wordsworth couldn’t pull off such beauty.

Panel 4 – Nothing wrong here.  Just want to take the time to check out those awesome shoes.  They remind me of the goldfish shoes Fly Guy wears in I’m Gonna Get You Sucka!

So the next page not only gives us more alliteration, but also reveals the nefarious plan:

Geez!  Maybe in a comic like this, we should just avoid talking about swallowing sludge all together, though I do want to point out that ‘pernicious’ is a nice vocabulary word and that is quite to fancy alliteration going on there!

And, as far as plans go, this one isn’t the WORST I’ve read. COBWEBS CHALLENGE – Name a worse plan a villain had in a Spidey book.

Back to Spidey, he decides to shoot a web line to the helicopter to find out what all of those poor kids are up to, cracks a goodnight John Boy joke that Neil Bogenrieder is too young to catch, and heads off to the secluded mansion where Prodigy starts filling the heads of these impressionable youths with sayings like “Prove you’re a man!” and “How can it harm you” and they just want “to keep you from having a good time.”  The guy says that responsibility is nonsense, but thankfully Spidey is there to let us the reader know that all the above is just “jive stuff”, though Spidey wants to cover his bases and say that there is nothing wrong with having babies.  So either those magnetic monotones are getting to him or Spidey just isn’t into pregnant shaming.  But he does make a quick Twinkies plug.

This goes on for a while.  The kids ask the hard questions as they resist his magnetic monotones, but with rhetoric like this, who can resist for long?

Now, while this Spidey comic is telling you that sex clears up acne, you may want to read this X-Men comic that gives an alternative zit remedy (or just talk to BD).  Spidey makes yet another cool and hip reference, this time to Marcus Welby, which was basically the Grey’s Anatomy of the early ‘70s.  It also appears that Stan Lee saw the fiasco of the previous editor’s boxes and stepped in to show them how it’s done.

But don’t let all those cool TV references distract you from the tragedy at hand here!  Spidey is pissed!

To be fair, Prodigy does NOT want these kids to be baby-changing machines.  He wants them to be breeders – there’s a difference. He is offering free child-care, which one could assume handles all the diaper changing needs, after all.

But when Prodigy reveals he’s going to use that golden voice of his on TV to entrap all the teens into his scheme, Spidey feels enough is enough!

You thought Crazy Town Banana Pants was an odd interjection…

But before Spidey can act, Prodigy’s guards come along patrolling.  Spidey tries to pretend to be a gargoyle, but that doesn’t work very well, so a small fight ensues.

No matter, Spidey busts in on the live TV broadcast and calls him Prodigy for some reason (sure, it’s the guy’s name, but he has never referred to himself nor has anyone said it in front of Spidey!

Gnome-Dome!  Ha!  That’s my new name for Chi-Town!

So, how does a superhero put a stop on a villain who’s very voice can control people (because I’m sure Jessica Jones could have used this lesson in season one!)?

Before I go further, the English teacher in me is quite impressed with the alliteration here and fancy-shmancy words like ‘pernicious’ and ‘mesmerize’!

However, the Spidey fan in me is a bit taken aback by the manner in which he stops Prodigy.  Isn’t shooting webbing down the throat the EXACT WAY Spidey threatened to kill the Kingpin in ASM #542?

Wait a minute… Now I understand this panel much better!  Why does Spidey say that to Kingpin?  Because he knows EXACTLY what happens when he shoots webbing down the throat of an opponent.  I guess that since this is a baby-stealing alien, it’s not such a bad thing, but WOW! does THIS shed some light on scene!

I’m also quite sure that no editor was paying attention or else we wouldn’t have a scene where fluid is being squirted into …  you know what?  Maybe I’ll just stop there before BD censors this who thing.

And that’s that!

On one website, Latisha Rotunda wrote this comment about the comic: “I thought this comic was stupid back in 1976 and so I rebelled against it. Now I blame this comic for my 18 pregnancies and the fact that I’m living in a trailer with all those kids and no husband and that I weigh 290 pounds. Screw you, Spider-Man!”

Now, far be it from me to give credence to rumors, but I heard that JR himself can trace his love of Spidey all the way back to when he picked this issue up from the school nurse.  And don’t even try to tell me that you don’t want to hear JR review this on Spider-History!

Sources:

“Andromeda Galaxy.” Marvel Database, Fandom, marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy.

Bazz, Robert.  “Bill Murray and Stan Lee’s Fantastic Four Radio Show.” High Five! Comics, 4 Jan. 2011, highfivecomics.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/bill-murray-and-stan-lees-fantastic-four-radio-show/.

Bazz, Robert. “Spider-Man Vs. The Prodigy: Take That, Horny Teenagers!.” High Five! Comics, 11 Oct. 2010, highfivecomics.wordpress.com/2010/10/11/spider-man-vs-the-prodigy-take-that-horny-teenagers/.

“Escape from Fear.”  Comics with Problems, www.ep.tc/problems/seventeen/02.html.

Jared. “Spider-Man and Planned Parenthood Team to Educate No One – The Amazing Spider-Man vs. the Prodigy!” Blog into Mystery, 14 Aug. 2015, blogintomystery.com/2014/08/15/spider-man-and-planned-parenthood-team-to-educate-no-one-the-amazing-spider-man-vs-the-prodigy/.

Mirk, Sarah. “In a Bizarre 1976 Comic Book, Spider-Man Fought the Villain of Misleading Sex Education.” Bitch Media, 23 Apr. 2014, www.bitchmedia.org/post/in-a-bizarre-1976-comic-book-spider-man-fought-the-villain-of-misleading-sex-education.

Sjoerdsma, Al. “Spider-Man vs. The Prodigy.” Spider-Fan, Comic Boards, 1998, spiderfan.org/review/comics/marvel_promo_misc/prodigy.html.

Sorene, Paul. “In 1976 the Amazing Spiderman Fought the Prodigy and His Plan for Teenage Sex.” Flashbak, Alum Media, 8 Sept. 2014, flashbak.com/in-1976-the-amazing-spiderman-fought-the-prodigy-and-his-plan-for-teenage-sex-20048.

Thompson, Davin.  “Listen to the Melodramatic Spider-Man Rock Record from 1976.” Nerdist, 14 Nov. 2017, nerdist.com/article/listen-to-the-melodramatic-spider-man-rock-record-from-1976/.

Credible Hulk

 

‘Nuff Said!