“I’ll have my glasses now, please.”
Writer: Zeb Wells
Artist: Kaare Andrews
Ever since he was first introduced back in Amazing Spider-Man #3, Otto “Doctor Octopus” Octavius has always been considered one of Spider-Man’s greatest foes.
His origin story was brilliant scientist who designs a set of artificial limbs that he can use to help him in his studies of radioactive isotopes gets caught in a lab accident that fuses the artificial limb harness to his body, but also gives him mental control over the limbs … and also drives him a bit crazy.
But in 2004, writer Zeb Wells came along and posited the idea that maybe it wasn’t the lab accident that drove Otto crazy. Maybe he was always a bit Norman Batesy.
With Spider-Man/Doctor Octopus: Year One (and that is a clunky title if ever there was one), Wells shows us the good doctor as a child, coming home from school with broken glasses, and his mother trying to rush him upstairs before his father finds out he’s broken another pair.
The bullies at school, Otto says. Stop being such a pansy, his abusive father says, and fight back.
With an overbearing father and a co-dependent mother, Otto didn’t stand much of a chance. Add to that his physical limitations—short, overweight with Coke-bottle glasses—it’s not a childhood anyone would wish for.
The only thing that helps him along, helps him escape the abuses of high school, is his IQ which causes him to be recruited from school, given an early diploma, and put to work for the military working with radioactive materials.
This is a dream come true for Otto who, upon seeing footage of the effects of an atomic bomb in childhood, has always been fascinated by the devastation one explosion can wreak.
He quickly becomes the talk of the base, even garnering the attention of a certain young nurse. But when his widowed mother (dad was killed by a machine at work) learns of the girl, she guilts Otto into dumping the harlot. It’s only later when Otto learns his mother is spending time with another man that he flips out and attacks her.
And then later at work, he’s designed a set of robotic arms that he employs to help him manipulate the radioactive materials he’s working with, Tab A fits into Slot B, and we soon have the origin story we’re familiar with.
While I enjoyed Spider-Man/Doctor Octopus: Year One overall, I can’t say I was necessarily in love with it. Wells is very good at giving depth to this character we’re all familiar with, at giving us a backstory I don’t think we had seen up to that point—it is hard to believe that a character who had been around since the early 60s, by 2004 didn’t have a backstory—I’m just not sure it had to be THIS backstory.
I said earlier Otto was always a little Norman Batesy because those are the vibes I got, someone who was always just a little too attached to mommy (even carrying on interior monologues with her after she’s dead), who just might have some deep personality issues. Otto was always shown in the comics talking to his robot arms, so that part of his split personality didn’t surprise me.
I just never realized he was so in love with nuclear energy and the destruction it could cause. I mean, in the comics, he was always shown as wanting to prove he was smarter and better than everyone else, he always had a huge megalomaniacal streak, but Wells has made him downright dangerous, writing him as if he’s willing to kill millions of people in a nuclear meltdown just to prove he can, and to some extent to offer a sacrifice to his true love, radioactivity.
Spider-Man/Doctor Octopus: Year One is all very comic booky and slightly overwrought, but there are also moments of sheer brilliance, like when Otto is being restrained after his initial accident that fuses the robot arm harness to him and the military is questioning him and he just keeps saying, “I’ll have my glasses now, please.” That scene was pretty chilling and very dark.
The interior art is by Kaare Andrews and it seems to be done in a very homage-to-Frank Miller style, evoking the darkest of Miller’s SIN CITY work, so much so at times I kept looking back to make sure Miller didn’t do the pencils in any particular issue.
Andrews works well in the shadows and silhouettes, using color and shape to tell the story with little need for dialogue. Seeing his work here, it’s no wonder he won the 2005 Outstanding Comicbook Artist award.
I read Spider-Man/Doctor Octopus: Year One as part of an effort to read stories of the Marvel Universe chronologically in the order they happened for the characters, inspired by comicbookreadingorders.com, which places this story between issues 3 and 4 of the original Spider-Man run. But I’m not sure that’s the best order to read them: the tone of this one is SO MUCH DARKER than the original Lee/Ditko stories, the transition would be almost impossible to make without throwing the reader WAY out of the story.
However, it can very easily be read on its own, far removed from the bookending issues of the original Spidey run. Just don’t read it on Marvel Unlimited; the guided panel view is terrible and the text on the screen so small you’d have to strain just to make out every panel. Maybe one day someone at Marvel will go through and fix all the guided-view books that don’t work. For now, though, Spider-Man/Doctor Octopus: Year One can be purchased in full—and in print—from Amazon or mycomicshop.com.
