IDW Announces Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man Artist’s Edition
In general, when a book starring a Marvel character comes out, you expect Marvel themselves to have made it — not one of their “rival” companies. But these are interesting times, and IDW has been granted permission by Big M to produce an artbook of scanned original pages from Todd McFarlane’s run on Spider-Man.
This was a run that changed both the character and the industry at large forever. McFarlane gained a large fanbase through his stylistic, twisted-body take on Spidey and his bold, aggressive poses in action shots. (The less said about how he drew regular humans, the better.) His biggest contribution was being the first artist to draw Venom, who he infused with his own artistic sensibility. The overall fluid nature of the symbiote was something McFarlane gleefully played up, and remains a part of him (or them) today.
A few years later, McFarlane and his collaborators would quit Marvel en masse to start their own comics company, Image. Because Todd had made such an impression at Marvel, his fanbase was willing to follow him, and his original Spawn character instantly started selling. Image itself changed a lot about how comics were bought and sold.
Now you can see these historical pages for yourself in IDW’s new collection. Each page is scanned from the original art, raw pencils and ink. No computers here — this was how things were done!
Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man Artist’s Edition contains nearly 100 pages of interior art selected from 24 issues of Spider-Man, as well as 25 original covers. The book will be out in comics shops this September.