Len Wein and Marv Wolfman’s The Amazing Spider-Man: Mayhem in Manhattan was Marvel Comics’ third novel and the first since 1968, making it a decade between attempts to transition their characters to a different medium. This book was the first of a series of eleven from Pocket Books that appeared between March 1978 and October 1979. Following this series, Marvel only published a single novel in the 1980s (an adaptation of the Howard the Duck movie) before their novel line again took off with Diane Duane’s Spider-Man: The Venom Factor in October 1994. Since then, they’ve published multiple novels a year, every year. In light of that, Wein and Wolfman’s novel represents an opportunity to imagine what might have been had Marvel’s attempts to license its characters in novels continued uninterrupted since the 1970s. It’s also remarkable as, of the previous two novels from the 1960s, only one was written by a comic book writer (Otto Binder). For 1968’s Captain America: The Great Gold Steal, Marvel instead chose science-fiction author Ted White. With the novels that followed The Amazing Spider-Man: Mayhem in Manhattan, Marvel alternated between science-fiction authors such as William Rotsler & Ric Meyers and comics insiders like David Michelinie & Paul Kupperberg, with comic writers Wein and Wolfman writing or editing four of the eleven Pocket Books.

The story of Mayhem in Manhattan focuses on Spider-Man being wrongly accused of a murder after he found the body of a man thrown from his penthouse apartment. Meanwhile, in his secret identity as photojournalist Peter Parker, he follows J. Jonah Jameson and Joe Robertson to the site of a meeting where all the world’s oil producers are gathered. Someone has irradiated their oil supplies and is holding them hostage, demanding they pay for a clean supply of oil for one year or else risk the information of their tainted supply going public, thereby driving the world’s governments to invest in alternative energy sources (pg. 62). The story itself works particularly well as it appeared only four years after the end of the OPEC oil embargo. Furthermore, J. Jonah Jameson and Joe Robertson’s distrust of major corporations and investigation fit in well with 1970s skepticism of traditional power structures. As part of this, Wein and Wolfman include a reference to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (pg. 121). Like Ted White’s Captain America and the Great Gold Steal from 1968, Wolfman and Wein initially attempt to hide the big reveal of the villain orchestrating the oil scheme. Unfortunately for their efforts, their description of him attacking the first victim at the story’s beginning somewhat gives it away: he has “a soup-bowl haircut” (pg. 19) and a “grip of steel” (pg. 20) and wears “an olive-green opera cloak” (pg. 18) and “thick dark glasses” (pg. 19). Though they try to obfuscate it, he’s obviously Doctor Octopus.

In tone, the story closely resembles the comics at that point, though Wein and Wolfman do take advantage of the longer format of the novel to add more detail, character development, and even the occasional mild profanity and possibility of characters actually dying. That said, the novel’s third act is pure comic-book action and the story never feels as far removed from the medium that birthed Spider-Man as the previous Marvel Comics novel did from its comics forebears. As a bonus, Wein and Wolfman also include a nice reference to Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko (pg. 121). Finally, through Joe Robertson, Wein and Wolfman perfectly sum up Spider-Man’s importance, writing, “So long as he wears that mask, he could be anyone. He could be you, he could be me – he could even be someone like Peter Parker. So long as he wears that costume and that mask, Spider-Man remains a symbol – a symbol of what any man who hates injustice and who fights for the good can become” (pg. 171). ( )