As the old saying goes, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Industry leader Marvel Comics has taken that to a new degree by allowing rival IDW Publishing to print a new high-priced “Artist Edition” honoring one of Marvel’s legendary artists and characters. According to IDW, an “Artist Edition” prints famous stories scanned in color from the original artwork at full size so that fans may see all the “paste-overs, blue pencils … editorial notes, art corrections” and more from the actual pages.

The new “John Romita’s The Amazing Spider-Man” edition of the series has Jim Collins of JC’s Comic Stop pretty jazzed.

“What makes this a must-have?” he asks. “First, it’s the size of the original art, 12-inches-by 17-inches, 152 pages and contains scans of the original art from Amazing Spider-Man Nos. 67-69, 71, 75, 84 and some unpublished covers from the time period, too. John Romita may not have been the first Spider-Man artist — that honor will always be Steve Ditko’s — but Romita made the character his own and Spidey went to a different level with his artwork.

“This collection is a tribute to that which was Romita’s Spidey. Looking through this masterpiece takes me back to when I was lucky enough to have had these issues as they came out from 1968 to 1970. It also makes me wish I owned some of these pages myself — fat chance since the average page from this collection would set you back several thousands of dollars.

“I want to make copies of the pages from this book so I can frame them. The storytelling is very powerful and does not rely on the colorist to pretty up the art. This is the truest form, as raw as raw gets. So, if you claim to be a Romita or Amazing Spider-Man fan and this edition is not yet in your collection … shame on you. Go out and purchase it; do it today.”

The next two volumes of IDW’s “Artist Edition” feature the legendary Will Eisner’s “The Spirit” and Marvel’s “Daredevil: Born Again.” Sometimes you just need a little help from your friends — or your rivals.

Tags: Comic books, IDW, JC's Comic Stop, Jim Beard, John Romita, Marvel Comics, Spider-Man

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 at 6:40 am and is filed under Arts and Life, Comics, Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.