Humble Beginnings: Spider-Man...a.k.a. "Mr. Peepers"

One of my favorite Humble Beginning moments appeared in the very first Spider-Man story from Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962). For the most part, the costume created by young Peter Parker looked exactly as it does today some 46 years later...but toward the end of the 11-page story, a peculiar new detail appears in this panel:

Those beady little eyes peeping through the mask's white "eye" shapes made their first and last appearance here in this panel...which I can back up with the same panel from the page's original art (which was recently donated to the Library of Congress):

Why the eyes? My guess is that artist Steve Ditko added them to amp up Peter Parker's shock at recognizing the burglar who killed his Uncle Ben. I have to admit, though...as jarring as the dot-eyes look, when subsequent reprints removed them, the scene lost much of the emotional impact those odd little dots imparted.

Comments

[Silver-Chef]

Kinda looks like Pete Ross killed Uncle Ben. Now there's a cross-over. (gotta luv the early webbed pits)

[Mark. Engblom]

Yeah, the blond hair and freckles definitely evoke Clark Kent's boyhood pal from Smallville. Give the thief red hair, and he'd look a little like Walter Kovaks, a.k.a. Rorschach from Watchmen.

[Silver-Chef]

Or Mr. Action - Jimmy Olsen

[Ralph C.]

Spidey's costume was supposed to be red and BLACK when it was first created with the blue parts as highlights on the costume but it just didn't turn out that way. I think it turned out to be easier or a mistake by the coloring at the printer. There was some reason that I cannot recall for it becoming red and blue.

I guess those two-way lenses on his mask were really cheap and later on he was able to get a better grade of lens....

Yeah, the eye-dots were the only way without taking off his mask in front of the killer of showing shock.

[Guido]

Another problem with that particular drawing (and that would happen every now and then in the early issues) is that the webbing pattern on Spidey's mask is going on the wrong direction. On top of that, in the original drawing, the shadow of the nose is very visible (something very few artists usually do on Spider-man) so the overall effect -to me at least-is that it looks as a different character that sort of looks like Spider-man, or some sort of foreign knock-off...