Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of comic book history that interests me.

Today is National Pizza Day and so I was thinking about that awesome scene in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, but luckily the clip is actually available on YouTube, so if you don't know the scene you can watch it here.

If you don't feel like watching it, it shows Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) showing up late for his job as a pizza delivery guy. His boss yells at him and tells him that they have an order for eight extra large pizzas and that they are now just eight minutes away from being late (the store offers a "You'll get the pizza in 29 minutes late or it's free!" guarantee). By the time he is finished yelling at Peter, there is just seven and a half minutes left. If Peter can't get the pizzas up 40 blocks in that time, he will be fired.

Luckily for Peter, he is also Spider-Man, so after he is first stuck in traffic on his motor scooter, he changes into his superhero gear and starts webspinning his way downtown (of course, this being Spider-Man, people think that he just stole the pizzas). However, not so luckily for Peter, when he is almost to his destination, he sees a kid about to be hit by a truck and so he has to stop, put the pizzas on a balcony railing and save the kids (darn Uncle Ben and his whole "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility" lesson!). He gets the pizzas back before they are opened by the person whose balcony he left them on, but the delay in saving the kids leaves him a minute late with his delivery.

It's a great scene and it has led folks to wonder, "Did Peter Parker ever deliver pizzas in the comic books?" No one specifically asked me the question (hence it not being a Comic Book Questions Answered), but heck, I will answer it anyways!

In Amazing Spider-Man #2 (by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko), Peter Parker is thinking of ways to make money and he figures out that perhaps he could become a photographer...

After his first fight with the Vulture as Spider-Man, Peter realizes that his experiment worked out pretty well, so he goes to sell the photographs and he figured that it would be kind of fun to sell them to the guy who hated Spider-Man the most, J. Jonah Jameson...

That essentially solidified Peter's job for the next thirty years or so. Peter was a freelance photojournalist, which allowed him to not have to follow office hours when he was off fighting crime whenever it popped up. Over the years, Peter had worked in various science-related gigs (as a teaching assistant when he was trying to finish up his degree, working at one or two labs plus being a high school science teacher) but he always kept up the photography gig as a part-time thing.

That is...until it all was ruined by a bad decision.

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Peter Parker has never been the most ethical of journalists, considering that he sells photos of himself that he takes while fighting crime (he even staged a battle with Sandman once by tossing a bunch of sand in the air and photographing himself punching it) but things took a turn for the worse when he forged a photograph to try to prove the innocence of Mayor J. Jonah Jameson (because Peter knew Jameson was innocent of the crime he was accused of, but only knew so in his Spider-Man identity). He was caught and Jameson fired him and his reputation was in tatters.

This got some news coverage at the time and even led to a special one-shot done in cooperation with New York City called Spider-Man: You're Hired (by Warren Simons, Todd Nauck and Anders Mossa) where Peter gets job-hunting tips from then-Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg (of course, it didn't fit into the continuity of the books at the time, since Peter had been fired by Jameson, who was the Mayor himself in the Marvel Universe at the time)...

However, the "worst" it got for Peter at the time was doing manual labor for Front Line (the newspaper that then became the Daily Bugle again)...

That same issue, though (Amazing Spider-Man #648 by Dan Slott and Humberto Ramos), Peter got a job at a think tank called Horizon Labs. That eventually led to him forming his own successful company, Parker Industries, that then went under. Recently, Peter was disgraced again when people learned that his work for his graduate degree was "stolen" from Otto Octavius (since Octavius had taken over Peter's body for a while and while in charge of it, he got Peter's degree and started Parker Industries).

So Peter is currently unemployed again, but he hasn't turned to pizza delivery just yet!

If anyone else has a suggestion for a bit of comic book history that you'd like to see me write about, just drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!