First Flight Of The Vulture!

In mid-1963, fans of the new Amazing Spider-Man title were greeted with a stunning image of a villain who would become a mainstay in the web-spinner's career--the deadly Vulture, whose crime spree took New York City by storm and whose strange power of flight seemed beyond the capability of conventional police force methods to deal with.

Yet, given time, Spider-Man deduced the secret of the Vulture's technology and developed a mechanism to counter his power to stay aloft--and the adventure would prove to be not only a feather in his own cap, but also a windfall as far as opening the door to bringing in much-needed money for himself and his Aunt May, using the miniature camera belonging to his Uncle Ben to snap exclusive crime photos which could be sold to "The Daily Bugle" for cash.

Yet it would be awhile before we learned of the Vulture in more detail beyond his sudden existence as a super-criminal. How and why did such an aged man come to begin a career in crime at this stage in his life? What was his background in science and invention? Who was the man we would later come to know as Adrian Toomes?

Twenty years later, almost to the month, writer Roger Stern brings the Vulture out of semi-retirement when Toomes happens to note an upcoming electronics expo in the news, and one attendee's name in particular--Gregory Bestman, a name that Toomes remembers all too well from his past, and which fills him with enough rage to make a trip to New York and kidnap this man from the show in broad daylight. As Peter Parker, Spider-Man is present and attempts to prevent the Vulture from getting away with his terrified prey, who obviously recognizes Toomes and realizes he's in danger from his winged captor--and though the Vulture succeeds in evading the police giving chase, Spider-Man tracks the two to the abandoned silo which has served for so long as the Vulture's undiscovered hideout, where he becomes a witness to the details of a long-standing grudge that Bestman had made the mistake of believing had long since run its course.

We learn through a series of flashbacks how Toomes and Bestman went into partnership and began a start-up electronics business, with Toomes responsible for the concepts and groundbreaking technology aimed at putting them on the map. It wasn't surprising to see Toomes' magnetic harness, the device that would of course later gain him infamy, quickly show promise as the device mostly likely to spearhead them to success; but it wasn't long before Toomes discovered that Bestman didn't have his best interests at heart and was unfairly taking advantage of him. The dissolving of their partnership soon followed, though Toomes would find that Bestman was again several steps ahead of him.

Left to his own devices (quite literally), Toomes spent months fine-tuning his harness, which he'd already discovered had enhanced his personal strength well above what would normally have been possible for his physical age. But Toomes' success was redirected toward revenge when he decided to bring to an end any hopes that Bestman might have had toward profiting from the company they'd founded--and "the Vulture" struck for the first time, but not the last. For in laying waste to Bestman's company, Toomes saw the way forward for choosing his own profitable career path--and that night, he indeed went into business for himself, in a manner of speaking.

We don't really know how much time has passed for these men in "real" time, though we can assume their original partnership was struck about a decade ago. Toomes' age, of course, limits the amount of time the Vulture has been on the scene to just a few years; but if we assume Bestman has been out of circulation until now, it's reasonable that he might have noted the absence of the Vulture in the news for awhile and thought that it might have been safe to take another stab at going back into business. Obviously, for Toomes, Bestman failed to understand that the message Toomes had sent to him all those years ago applied for life.

But as the Vulture prepares to strike once more, Spider-Man of course can't stand idly by while an execution takes place. Unfortunately, for the Vulture, things have gone too far--and clearly, the passage of time has done nothing to heal the wounds of betrayal.

With Bestman out of the woods, that's just where Spider-Man must now pursue the fleeing Vulture, a thicket where a flier must cede the advantage to an agile web-spinner who can still track him.

Whatever sympathies Spider-Man and the police might have for the Vulture, there's no real quandary as far as the need to take him into custody, given his hostile intentions toward Bestman--as well as the fact that it's clear the Vulture, still a wanted criminal, has hardly turned over a new leaf. Even so, Bestman finds that, though the clear victim in this encounter, he's still not off the hook with either of his rescuers.