Discovering during Character Chronologies that Electro fought Spider-Man only THREE TIMES during the Stan Lee run, and wouldn’t fight Spidey all that often for decades, made me think… how often does Spider-Man fight his huge rogues gallery?
Obviously I can’t do this for the ENTIRE history of Spider-Man, so I gave myself a limit: analyzing only the period when he had ONE book.
Since Spectacular Spider-Man #1 has a cover date of December 1976, I’m only considering what was published up to 1976.
This means that I’m looking at “only” Amazing Spider-Man #1-163 and Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1-10. Well, four issues of the Annuals are reprints only… but there are NO reprints in the main book!
So take this analysis with a grain of salt: I based this exclusively on the covers and my memory of the stories, so it’s entirely possible I missed one or two cases.
I didn’t plan this AT ALL, but by sheer coincidence the cadence of appearances fits neatly in a Top Ten… with a caveat.
#???: nobody
There are two issues, #87 and #100, who really don’t have a “villain”. Unless you count Spider-Man being his own enemy, which you probably should.
#10-ish: superheroes
There are SIX superheroes who would fit into the #10 spot if they were villains: Black Widow, Iceman, Luke Cage, Medusa, Nightcrawler and Quicksilver. Notably three of those started out as supervillains, but they’re already heroes by the time they fight Spider-Man as the main antagonists of the respective story.
All of them fight Spider-Man exactly ONCE; only Nightcrawler has a follow-up story where they team up.
The Hulk fits in this category because he’s not a villain… but he’s the primary antagonist THREE TIMES. Arguably four, but Amazing Spider-Man #14 feels more like a glorified cameo.
#10: only 1 fight
There are a whopping TWELVE characters in this category, as they only fought Spider-Man ONCE in the period I analyzed.
These range from characters that Spider-Man will eventually fight again like Doctor Doom, Human Fly, Looter, Mendel Stromm, Wizard and Xandu…
…to characters who would have been completely forgotten if they didn’t appear in the Ditko period like Cat, Joe and Living Brain…
…to VERY minor villains: Mindworm, Mirage and even a Red Skull impostor.
Mindworm has his fans (I never got the appeal) but Mirage is FAR better known as one of the villains murdered by the Scourge Of The Underworld than by being the villain who crashed Betty’s wedding.
#9: back for one more (2 issues)
This is where the surprises start to show up, because amazingly (pun intended) this category includes people I assumed showed up more.
People like Beetle, Chameleon, the Circus of Crime, Morbius, Rhino and the Tinkerer!!!
I am not surprised this is the category where we find the SECOND Green Goblin (Harry Osborn), the minor but historically significant Crime Master, Silvermane and two copycats: the second Mysterio and the second Vulture.
This category includes absolute nobodies like Cyclone, Disruptor, Gibbon, Grizzly, Kangaroo and even Jigsaw! Better known as a Punisher villain, but he debuted on Spider-Man.
#8: back for more, again!? (3 issues)
This is the category that started it all with Electro, but I’m surprised that this is also where we find Scorpion and the Enforcers.
Prowler is more of an anti-hero than a villain here, but he does show up as many times as the incredibly lame Man-Mountain Marko.
This is also the “son of” category because we have both Schemer (son of Kingpin) and John Jameson, the son of JJJ who has fought Spider-Man three times.
Twice as a werewolf, because comics.
We also have Smasher, who might just be the most forgettable character in this entire list.
He’s in 3 issues but I’ll bet that 99% of Spider-Man fans have no memory of him.
#7: things are getting interesting (4 issues)
We are done with the nobodies: from this point forward we only have proper Spider-Man villains.
Starting off with Shocker, Molten Man and Tarantula.
Plus Punisher, who at this point is BARELY an anti-hero.
#6: that guy again? (5 issues)
Sandman being here is not a huge surprise, as he spent A LOT of time being primarily a Fantastic Four villain.
Hammerhead being this high on the list is entirely due to just two storylines.
One of which has the best title in the history of comics: “Gang war, shmang war! What I want to know is… who the heck is Hammerhead?”.
Yes, the whole thing is considered the official title.
#5: won’t you just go away? (6 issues)
Mysterio being in the middle fits him just fine. The Spider-Slayers not so much, but there’s a three-issue storyline tipping the scale.
Lizard feels like he should be higher, but that’s only because Curt Connors shows up occasionally.
#4-ish: regular criminals (8 issues)
Yes there are THAT many issues where the villain of the story is just a guy. Maybe with some common thugs as henchmen.
This DOES include a two-parter where they try to murder a mystical guru, but in the Marvel Universe it’s still just regular people.
#4: same time next Thursday (8 issues)
Vulture and Kraven are basically guaranteed to show up every once in a while, but at most they have two-parters.
Whereas the Jackal just. Won’t. Go. Away.
Well at least we’ll jusy have to endure him during the clone saga, it’s not like they’ll ever bring him back after he dies.
#3: exactly who you expected to see on the podium (12 issues)
I’m sure you expected to see the original Green Goblin here, despite the fact that he doesn’t appear all that often in the Ditko issues and eventually dies.
But even counting only the times he fights Spider-Man in costume and he’s not just Norman Osborn, he shows up A LOT.
I was confident he wouldn’t get the top spot, but I would’ve sworn he’d take second place!
Instead, that questionable honor goes to…
#2: a legitimate businessman (14 issues)
Boosted by more than one storyline where he’s not the only villain, sure, but it’s still A LOT considering he hasn’t been primarily a Spider-Man villain for decades.
Consider this: I’m including in the analysis 169 issues, meaning that Kingpin shows up in 8% of them!!!
That could only be topped by…
#1: was there any doubt? (18 issues)
Doctor Octopus shows up in little more than A TENTH of issues in this range.
‘Nuff Said.
That was fun and with some unexpected results. I will definitely do something similar for other characters… but not for DC.
In the Silver Age they have A LOT more reprints, they tend to have more than one story per book, and since I’m not as familiar with them as I am with many Marvel series I would have to really look into each issue instead of relying on the covers and my memory… it would take significantly more research.
Some might consider Marvel Team-Up the first Spider-Man spin-off book, shortening the the period covered by this ranking by a few years (MT-U #1 has a cover date of March 1972).
It’s debatable, since it hasn’t Spider-Man in the title and some issues don’t feature him at all, but it does seem relevant since it recycled more villains than it introduced, granting many Spidey rogues another appearance, and was eventually replaced by “Web of Spider-Man” (Web of Spider-Man #1 came out the month after Marvel Team-Up #150 and had the same editor, writer and penciler).
You would think adding Marvel Team-Up would change things if we’re going by the same rules (up to December 1976).
That would mean including the first 52 issues of MTU, but out of those there are only 8 issues where he fights some of his classic enemies.
It affects only John Jameson (+1), Morbius (+2), Looter (+2) and Sandman (+3): all of them jump ahead 1 spot in the list.
If we go the other way around and remove the issues after March 1972 (the cover date of MTU #1), things are a bit more interesting.
That restricts ASM to issue 106 and removes only Annual #10 (the others in the range are reprints).
This approach DOES affect Green Goblin (-2), Kingpin (-1) and Doctor Octopus (-4)… but that still leaves the order of the top three as it is.
It does, however, COMPLETELY change the fourth spot: this removes 2 Vulture appearances and ALL the Jackal stories, leaving Kraven as the uncontested fourth most recurring villain.
Now I am even more surprised that Electro only appeared three times. He was in the first issue of ASM I read, and they obviously had a history, so I thought they fought constantly. Interestingly, Electro shows up in three episodes of the first season of Spidey’s 1960s cartoon. I don’t think he appeared in the remaining two seasons.
Apart from Marvel Team-Up, which The Fine Point pointed out, another series to consider is Spectacular Spider-Man magazine, the short series that was published in 1968. There were only two issues published, but stills counts.
The particular thing about this magazine is that the first issue was reprinted in the main book of Amazing Spider-Man, reworking the story to fit the current continuity, making this story a headache to the chronology perspective because Spidey has to live the same “story” twice, and the two adventures are canon one way or another.
So… yes, Smasher “technically” has four appearances (and also the other villain of the story, Richard Raleigh).
The other issue of Spectacular Spider-Man Magazine was reprinted in the ninth annual issue of Amazing, in which he fought the Green Goblin again.
Of course, if you add the first two years of Spidey’s Super Stories (https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Spidey_Super_Stories_Vol_1) that changes things again, adding appearances by Kraven, Medusa, Lizard, etc.
Yeah I was shocked how long it took between Electro’s first and second (solo) appearance in Spider-Man comics.
The DC equivalent (for me) is Poison Ivy who debuted in Silver Age Batman got shuffled around on various villain teams in the bronze age, got an origin in a Wonder Woman back- up story and had well over a decade between her second and third appearance as the main villain in a Batman story.
Tarantula, Jackal & Hammerhead are helped here by Gerry Conway re-using his own villains a lot. I imagine if you did the same thing for the late ’80s and early ’90s, Tombstone might make the podium, as he seemed to appear in pretty much every issue for a while.
I was expecting Doc Ock to win this, with the Goblin in 2nd place. I hadn’t expected the Kingpin to place so highly here, but now I think about it, I wonder if Kingpin might actually be the villain who’s appeared the most times in Spider-Man comics full stop?
Because there’s plenty of stories where Kingpin isn’t the main villain, but he’s the guy hiring the main villain, or Spider-Man comes to Kingpin’s office etc.
While Norman Osborn & Doctor Octopus appear a lot as the main villain, but they also go away for extended periods sometimes. (Maybe it depends if you count Superior Spider-Man as Doc Ock villain appearances or not.)