The finest single panel of comics work ever produced – and I will fight you with a ready quip and feats of airborne acrobatics over this – appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man issue 42, released on 1 November 1966. And it doesn’t even feature the webbed wonder in costume.
With a point of view for the reader from just over the right shoulder of Spider-Man’s nerdy alter ego Peter Parker, the panel – the final image in the issue – introduces our hero’s long-running love interest Mary Jane Watson, in a kinetic blur of yellow and black shock wave lines and the immortal words: “Face it, Tiger … you just hit the jackpot!”
It was the work of John Romita Sr, who died on Tuesday aged 93, and was inarguably the artist who gave Spider-Man the look and tone that has endured for more than half a century.
All credit, of course, to Steve Ditko, the uniquely talented artist who co-created Spider-Man with Marvel Comics’ supremo Stan Lee four years earlier. Ditko’s highly individual and instantly recognisable style always gave the Wall-Crawler a slightly dark, even sinister tone, redolent of the creepy-crawly origins of the superhero.
In 1966 the world was changing. Star Trek and Batman were on TV, the moon was in the sights of the US, and the Summer of Love was on the horizon. And Romita brought Spider-Man out of the shadows and thrust him into a brave new sunshiney world that was just as fabulous and groovy in the pages of the comics as it was shaping up to be in real life.
Marvel Comics had always reflected the real world more than its rival DC in the 1960s. While the latter’s heroes patrolled the streets of fictional cities such as Gotham, Metropolis and Central City, the Marvel Universe was pretty much centred on New York, adding a verisimilitude to the action within the comics’ pages.
Romita’s work on The Amazing Spider-Man – from issue number 39, in September 1966, after Ditko’s abrupt departure from Marvel – ran for almost five years and pretty much defined Marvel’s “house style” for the coming decades.
He brought a romance comics sensibility to superheroes, with as much care given to Mary Jane’s bang-up-to-the-minute wardrobe of miniskirts and hairstyles as to the set-piece action sequences between wisecracking Spidey and his rogues gallery of villains such as the rampaging Rhino (like MJ, and many more mainstay characters, designed by Romita).
Spider-Man, of course, wasn’t Romita’s first comics work; not even his first chance to stamp his mark on the Marvel Universe. The man often billed in the comic credits in Stan Lee’s Barnum-esque fashion as “Jazzy” John had started work in comics in 1949, aged just 19.
His first work was uncredited, a 10-page gangster story for Timely Comics, which was the forerunner of Marvel. He cut his teeth on war, horror, science fiction and romance comics throughout the 1950s, and then late in the decade moved to DC Comics where he worked mainly on the hugely popular teen romance titles such as Young Love, Heart Throbs and Girls’ Romances.
Hearing that Romita was thinking of getting into commercial illustration after DC pulled the plug on many of its romance titles as the genre declined in popularity, Stan Lee, ever the comic book puppetmaster, met him for a three-hour lunch and persuaded him to take on Daredevil, with issue 12 of the blind superhero’s title which came out in January 1966. It’s hard not to imagine Lee quietly moving the pieces around the chessboard of his masterplan as he wrote a Daredevil issue later that year with Spider-Man (who had debuted in Amazing Fantasy issue 15 in 1962) as a guest star, to see how Romita would handle the character who – by accident, or more likely Lee’s design – was shortly to become Marvel’s flagship superhero.
Romita was responsible for another Spider-Man image (which some of you might have thought I was going to claim as his very best in this column’s first paragraph): the illustration from Amazing Spider-Man issue 50, in which a disillusioned Peter Parker walks away from his super-powered secret life, the Spider-Man costume dumped in a rubbish bin in an alleyway.
Romita’s time at Marvel Comics had such a wide-ranging impact that it seems surprising how relatively short his full-time artistic career was.
By 1973 he was Marvel’s art director, and though he was no longer working on full art layouts for books on a monthly basis, he designed many of the unforgettable characters who have been recognisable to comics readers – and later movie-goers – ever since: the Punisher, Wolverine, Luke Cage.
Later in that decade there was another Jazzy John Romita in the Marvel credits – Romita’s son, John Jr, who followed in his father’s footsteps illustrating Spider-Man, Daredevil and a wealth of characters for Marvel, DC and other companies. It was John Jr who broke the news on Twitter about his father’s death this week.
John Romita Sr was as much of a titan of the comics world as any luridly costumed champion, and his loss will be mourned by comics fans across the globe. When Stan Lee put Romita on Spider-Man in 1966, Marvel Comics – and its growing army of fans – really did hit the jackpot.
• This article was amended on 14 June 2023. An earlier version incorrectly implied that there had not been a regular Spider-Man title prior to 1966.
