Wednesday, January 3, 2007

JOHN ROMITA JR. WEEK CONTINUES...

SPIDER-MAN




I mentioned this before, but it was impossible to grow up a comics fan in the 80s and not read a Marvel comic drawn by John Romita, Jr.

One of my favorite stories is Amazing Spider-man #s 229 & 230 - Spidey versus the Juggernaut. I bought them as back issues when I was probably 10 or so, and JRJR's storytelling in those was just unbelievable - I must've read it a hundred times. Spidey takes a pounding and keeps on getting back up, and Romita's pencils could almost make you believe he actually enjoyed drawing the web-slinger getting crushed... almost.

Spidey has been the one book JRJR couldn't stay away from in his twenty-plus year career.

It's where he got his start, where he paid his dues, and where he was discovered by a whole new group of readers.

Romita's first run on Amazing started around # 200 and ended with # 250, with an occasional fill-in/return issue here and there.

He came back to Amazing in the late 90s for the Clone Sage, and carried that over into the relaunch of Peter Parker Spider-man. After a 20+ issue run on THOR, Romita returned to Amazing when J. Michael Straczynski took over as writer at # 30 of Amazing Spider-man, Vol. II.

JRJR left the title again in 2003 to draw HULK. But just recently, Romita announced that he would, yet agian, return to Spider-man for a fourth time... and who better, y'know?






Additional Reading:

JRJR Spider-man interview...

Marvels JRJR publishing catalog...

JRJR on Wikipedia...

JRJR checklist...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can anyone tell me who the green guy is on the far right with the glowing eye?

Anonymous said...

Great work.