Does the explosion in CHAPTER ONE draw too much attention to Peter?
One thing that’s notable about the way Peter gets his powers in AMAZING FANTASY #15 is that it happens very, very quietly, in a way that no one but Peter himself notices. The big explosion involved in the CHAPTER ONE origin takes away from that. JB: You’re not the first to raise this particular objection, and my response is the same each time: you’re standing too close. Explosion or no explosion, no “special attention” is drawn to the moment when Peter is bitten by the spider. Only you, the readers, see this event, exactly as in the original version. There is no “string of evidence” to be followed that would lead an investigator from the explosion to an assumption that someone there was transformed into Spider-Man, and thence to Peter Parker’s doorstep. Howard Mackie and I, in fact, addressed this very point in one of our AMAZING SPIDER-MAN stories — showing someone who was tracking down people who had been involved in the event to find out if (in a universe were such things were not
