The Spectacular Spider-Man Annual #4 was the 1984 annual of The Spectacular Spider-Man, written by Bill Mantlo, and drawn by Kerry Gamill and Sal Buscema. Its main story focuses on Spider-Man's Aunt May, a stalwart supporting character whose main usual characteristics are being elderly, and fragile. This story presents another side to Aunt May: she was once a gangster's moll.
Peter Parker receives a phone call from Nathan Lubensky, one of Aunt May's boarders, that says she has been acting unusual. Peter Parker, as Spider-Man, follows her to Coney Island, where in a daze, she rides the rides, remembering the fun she had there as a young woman, in what seems to be the 1920s or 1930s. Because we need some action, Spider-Man has to stop one of the rides when it malfunctions--- perhaps an underutilization of his powers. Wanting to know what has gotten into his aunt, he searches through the attic, finding old pictures of an Aunt with a man that was not his Uncle Ben, but someone named Johnny Jerome. Using his newspaper contacts, he finds out that Johnny Jerome was once a small time criminal. He follows Aunt May to a decaying slum for a meeting with Johnny Jerome, recently released from prison where he was serving a sentence for murder. Through May's own flashbacks, we learn that while initially impressed by the flashy Johnny, warnings from Ben Parker, a poor carnival barker, led her to reject him when she learned how violent he was. In the present, she tells the parolled Johnny that he can't stop living in the memories of the past. Spider-Man's entire role in this is to fight off some minor-league criminals who thought his elderly aunt would be easing pickings. The story is really Aunt May's story, and it helps lift a static and stereotyped figure into the spotlight, showing that she does have her own experiences and values.
One of the most common stories about the Marvel Universe is that everything is connected. And often that is true: Characters and artifacts pop in and out where they aren't expected, and a story can be disrupted by a sudden change of scale. And, in fact, in another annual, just a few years further on, Spider-Man's emotional history is interrupted by events of the most cosmic and mystical kind. But here? Played absolutely straight. Spider-Man, whose powers sometimes have him fighting cosmic beings, and investigating international criminal conspiracies... punches out some thugs, stops a malfunctioning carousel, and gets someone else to use a microfiche machine for him. And this was a once-a-year annual! They could have him falling down a black hole, or fighting an entire pantheon of gods, but here he is truly a neighborhood Spider-Man, doing the bare minimum of street-fighting so his aunt can reach emotional closure. Marvel, had, a times, a surprising amount of artistic integrity and emotional subtlety in their stories.
I should admit one thing, though: although overall this was a straight story with only normal characters and very little superhuman powers, in the introductory pages, we see Spider-Man swinging through the streets at night, and we find out that he is unconscious, and his then-new alien costume was causing him to move in his sleep. And of course, this would become one of the biggest stories in Spider-Man, as the alien costume became Venom, and as we then learn, decades later, that the alien symbiote was an important player in Marvel's cosmic hierarchies. So, contrary to my hypothesis, this seemingly domestic and street-level story still included seeds of much wider events. So my hypothesis was not as clear as I might have thought.