Marvel’s new Brick line of chunky compendium paperbacks appears to have found its cornerstone. According to the listing now trending on X, Amazing Spider-Man: Power and Responsibility will gather Amazing Fantasy #15, Amazing Spider-Man #1–38 and the Annuals, which is to say the whole of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s run, into a single 960-page volume priced at $60, complete with Ditko’s covers. It’s reportedly due on 6 July 2027 and is the first of a trilogy. We haven’t yet seen Marvel’s own solicitation, so treat the page count and date as provisional until it turns up in the catalogue.
The Brick line itself is real enough. Marvel announced it last month, with a first wave made up of Uncanny X-Men: All New, All Different (the first of six volumes of the Claremont, Cockrum and Byrne years), Superior Spider-Man: Hero or Menace?, Uncanny X-Force: The Apocalypse Solution and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Eats Nuts, Kicks Butts, alongside a second new line of evergreen collections called Marvel Renown.
None of the Ditko material is new to print, of course. The Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus volume one covers the same ground in 1,088 hardback pages for $99.99, and the two Epic Collections, Great Power and Great Responsibility, run to 504 pages apiece. In other words, the Brick is essentially both Epics bolted together and sold for rather less. Given that Amazing Fantasy #15 cost 12 cents in 1962, Marvel will no doubt point out that you’re still getting a bargain, provided you don’t do the maths on inflation.
And what a run it is. Those 38 issues, published between 1963 and 1966 before Ditko walked out on the book, introduced the Vulture, Doctor Octopus, the Sandman, the Lizard, Electro, Mysterio, the Green Goblin and Kraven, as well as J. Jonah Jameson’s moustache and the Master Planner sequence, in which Peter Parker heaves a collapsed machine off his own back. That last image is still the best argument anyone has made for the character in sixty years.
Here at SFcrowsnest, our only reservation is structural. A 960-page paperback is the sort of object where, with great weight, comes great risk to the spine: its own, and the reader’s.
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