Despite being of the earliest additions to his rogues gallery, Quentin Beck has remained one of the more underused of Spider-Man's colourful cast of adversaries. First appearing in Amazing Spider-Man #13, for such a stalwart who has reappeared to menace the webhead ever since, Mysterio doesn't have a whole lot of big storylines to call his own. The closest he got was his appearance as the twist villain at the end of Kevin Smith's Daredevil story, where it turns out he's dying of cancer and wanted to get a last revenge on his enemy only to discover he was, at the time, a clone, which rather scuppered that. So he just decided to go after the blind lawyer superhero instead cos, meh, cancer. Makes people do crazy things, or so the Big C has taught us. That was a good show. Anyway, whilst you don't hear much about it, Mysterio does have a pretty good story that revolves all around him. The Madness Of Mysterio appeared in Amazing Spider-Man #66-67, a Stan Lee/John Romita joint, with the celebrated collaborative pair at the peak of their powers. It's pretty much that Daredevil story, albeit with less cancer and more the special effects-boasting bad guy breaking out of prison and slowly planning his revenge on Spidey, taking advantage of a mentally drained Peter Parker as he puts him through the psychedelic ringer with his visual trickery and mind games. It's pure comic book fun by two genius creators, with our hero navigating a series of death traps straight out of a PG rated Saw. Big, bombastic, brilliant superhero fun.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
