Improbably, Marvel's anti-marijuana screed Fastlane might be one of the most read Spider-Man comics of all time. Which is no mean feat, because Spidey has appeared in more PSA comics than seemingly any other hero - to the point that there's a collection of them - being a figurehead for everything from Riot At Roboworld (which was supposed to get kids into engineering) to Skating On Thin Ice (which somehow linked ice hockey with peer pressure). The reason Fastlane got into so many hands? Not because it was a great story, that's for sure. It's because, in a unique agreement with the Clinton administration, Marvel agreed to include each part of the story - which ran for eight months - in the middle of every single story it published during 1999. As for the story itself...well. Peter Parker, in his job as freelance photographer at the Daily Bugle, is somehow put in charge of a couple of college interns working on a project for the paper. Somehow this gets tangled up a movie star called Zane Whelan, who promotes drug use and is such an idol of one of the interns that he becomes a pothead himself. It all starts to go wrong for Sam, the stoner intern in question, when he finally meets Whelan and finds out that he's a total phony who never touches the stuff. Annoyed and high, Sam accidentally drives his van off the Brooklyn Bridge, and only with the help of a score of other heroes can Spidey rescue him. The intern learns an important lesson in Fastlane: if you smoke weed you will probably die, unless you have a team of superheroes looking out for you, because Galactus was presumably busy with something else that afternoon. Winners don't do drugs, kids!
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/
