The Amazing Spider-Man’s Epitaph: Ten Key Peter Parker Stories

In the last fifty years, there have been a great many great stories told featuring Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-Man…and now that he’s gone, for however long it lasts, we figured it was a good excuse to look back on those fifty years and say, if you were writing a biography of Peter Parker, which are the stories you’d want to be sure to include?This isn’t a “best-of” list. Creating such a thing and narrowing it down to ten would be borderline impossible–but this is a good reading list if you just want to reacquaint yourself with Peter, some of the biggest moments in his life, and some of the ones that won’t resonate quite as much with somebody else under the mask.So, what are our desert-island Spider-Man stories? Here they are, presented in roughly chronological order.Amazing Fantasy #15The first appearance of Spider-Man has, let’s face it, kind of been done to death at this point. Everyone can recite the story pretty much beat for beat, even outside of comics where we’ve now seen two feature films based on the story.Still, it’s a brilliantly-told story. In addition to the introduction of the “With great power…” mantra to popular culture, the story was the first superhero origin we can think of where the hero is driven as much by guilt and remorse as by any sense of altruism. It’s a totally different feeling than almost any other superhero origin and that’s probably one of the reasons it still resonates today.