Literally never happened. Neil Gaiman misremembered that and now people have decided it is face and even made reference to it in the comics. All as part of a larger trend to make a binary of Randian Ditko and cool liberal Stan Lee. Except Ditko said nothing about the war and never had Peter be angry at protestors, while Stan was against pulling out of Vietnam and had peter mock protestors, albeit not over Vietnam

In Jonathan Ross’ BBC Documentary on Steve Ditko, Neil Gaiman mentions the protest scene of ASM#38 as an example of the disputes between Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.

“There are famously a number of issues they clashed over. Stan is meant to have looked at comments of Ditko’s where Spider-Man is swinging past protestors and he’s meant to be saying things like, ‘look at those dirty hippies down there’ and Stan would go in and give him a word balloon and say ‘hey kids, I’m with you’ and whatever. You feel politically, there’s a wonderful sort of clash there between Swinging Stan Lee and magnificently uptight, world class uptight, impossibly uptight Steve Ditko!”

There’s a major problem with Gaiman’s quote. The scene he talks about never happened. The protest scene of ASM#38 shows the dialogue by Stan Lee as unsympathetic to the protestors exactly as the art indicated by Steve Ditko. To the extent there were clashes between them it had nothing to do with that scene. Obviously, the revelation of Lee’s own fascination with Rand and his libertarian moderate leanings happened after 2007, under Blake Bell’s biography in 2011, and Riesman’s biography in 2021, so Gaiman can’t be faulted for not having access to the freshest research. But one can well argue how a person so intelligent as Gaiman, so nuanced and learned, failed to commit the close reading to support his claim. Gaiman’s quote in the BBC documentary which aired in 2007, thanks to his great prestige and fame, legitimized the notion of the dichotomy between “Liberal” Stan Lee and Objectivist Ditko.

As for the scene

The scene is a single page, a 8 panel grid. It shows Peter walking alone past campus while Flash, Gwen, Harry who are Peter’s bullies in his college era in the Ditko run comment on the sides. The protestors are an all-white group, and they are specifically listed as “protesting tonight’s protest meeting” in other words it’s a non-political protest event. Symbolically of course the entire scene portrays college protests as somewhat frivolous so it can be seen as mocking, though as stuff goes it’s pretty mild. We also have Gwen, Harry, Flash attacking Peter because they think he’s joining the protests but then they make fun of him for being too spineless to march which attacks the hip posturing involved in performative activism.

Now as drawn and plotted by Ditko, this is a mild bit of comedy showing how the college social scene is different from the high school era but at the same time, Peter’s still misunderstood and made fun by Flash. The dialogues by Stan Lee (perhaps following Ditko’s indications), portrays a studiously non-political protest. Now you might see this as implying that all college protests are frivolous but for me, it shows this protest as frivolous in content, rather than showing protesting as being frivolous in essence, such as Robin Wright’s Jenny’s ’60s hippie arc in the movie Forrest Gump which shows the counter-culture era of the ’60s as a downward arc for the girl who tried to escape her family and ultimately get AIDS, and whose main legacy is leaving behind a kid with the “good ol’ Southern Kid” (who descends from KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest — yep that movie didn’t age well). One of the protestors when attacking Peter for not joining in says he listens to “Lawrence Welk” i.e. a 60s entertainer known for “champagne music”. So this isn’t exactly about political attitudes.

A close reading of this scene finds it lacking in teeth, and it doesn’t seem anything that Lee or Ditko gave any time or mind to in the charting of this issue. Which stands at odds with the mountain of commentary that this protest scene has gotten.

Here is the Ditko one

and here is the purely Lee and Romita one

It’s virtually the same comic thirty years later but unlike Ditko’s brief 8 panel grid which is a side gag to larger story, ASM#68 is explicitly about student politics as a major subplot, featured on the cover and the title “Crisis on the Campus” and we have Peter walk away from solidarity from an African-American led protest. Where Ditko satirized a protest as frivolous in content, Lee and Romita satirize protesting as frivolous in essence. So the question is why does this scene written and drawn after Ditko left, not subject to scrutiny of any kind? From Riesman’s biography of Lee Stan’s dialogue played with fire, putting words like,’ ‘Uncle Tom,’ and ‘soul-brother’ into black characters’ mouths and depicting Peter as telling them to see the administration’s side of the story and yelling, ‘ ”Anyone” can paint a ”sign,” mister! ”That” doesn’t make you ”right!”” There’s no real resolution to the political questions posed by the comic, merely a bizarre deus ex machina in which the protest leaders are arrested on the false belief that they were linked with the Kingpin, something the reader is supposed to see as a positive event because the courts will surely exonerate them. Even jail is a bonus, muses Peter: ‘And they’ll ”all” have a chance to ‘cool off!’

All this because Gaiman couldn’t be assed to check first and cause it fits a really simple narrative that reinforces Lee’s persona as a cool uncle and not a conservative exploitive asshole. Down with Lee, uphold Kirby thought