It’s SPIDER-MAN WEEK!
By WALT GROGAN
One of the fun things about doing articles, banners, coloring, and trade dress for 13th Dimension is that the Great Gazoo, Dan Greenfield, will often throw me a curve and ask me to do something that I would never think of doing! And that’s particularly true of this article!
When the crew wanted to celebrate THE MANY LOVES OF PETER PARKER, I had to think about what I could bring to the table. While I had definitely read many Marvel comics in the late Sixties and through the Seventies and Eighties, I wouldn’t consider myself an expert True Believer by any means.
I’m a big fan of both the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and Who’s Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe, so I thought: Wouldn’t it be cool to bring together five of Peter Parker’s greatest loves in an Official Handbook overview page?
As you can see, when Marvel took on a group in the Handbook, they generally did headshots, which makes sense, right? I mean they’re well known for their corner boxes, which often contained headshots if the title featured a group.
But, even though Marvel was first out of the gate when it came to cataloging their universe in this fashion, I’ve always held that the original Who’s Who had the better design!
So here are the gals in a Who’s Who group layout featuring the art from the Official Handbook! And look at that art by a host of legendary artists: Sal Buscema’s Betty Brant; John Romita, Sr. classic take on Gwen Stacy; Erik Larsen drawing a hip ’80s Mary Jane; and Kerry Gammill giving us the Black Cat!
And I didn’t forget Steve Ditko’s Liz Allan! I searched the Official Handbook but could only find a headshot of Liz. Sadly, for some reason, she didn’t rate her own entry page. I then scoured the first couple of years of The Amazing Spider-Man comic hoping that Ditko drew a pin-up page or even included a full shot of Liz and let me tell you, the pickings were slim!
I mentioned this to Dan, and he came up with a better resolution of a shot that I could only find in low-res. And while it’s not the greatest, we were able to rightfully include her!
Finally, here are the two shots again without the vintage effect.
Dan adds: Purely by coincidence, Dakota Alexander, whose MANY LOVES entry runs Thursday, last week gave us WHAT IF SPIDER-MAN Got a DC WHO’S WHO Entry in the 1980s. He didn’t know about Walt’s piece, and Walt didn’t know about his. But I thought it made for a great tease for this theme week — for which Walt did that banner up top!
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MORE
— It’s SPIDER-MAN WEEK Starring THE MANY LOVES OF PETER PARKER. Click here.
— BETTY BRANT GOES WILD — and, Really, Who Can Blame Her, by CHRIS FRANKLIN. Click here.
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A 10-year-old Walt Grogan fell in love with the Big Red Cheese thanks to essays written by Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson in the paperback edition of All in Color for a Dime, released in 1970 and bought for him by his father off a paperback spinner rack in a liquor store on the South Side of Chicago. Walt runs The Marvel Family Web Facebook page devoted to all incarnations of the Fawcett/DC Captain Marvel and blogs about Captain Marvel at shazamshistorama.com.
