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Welcome to Art Attack, our series of blogs looking at some of our
favourite comic art. Brief and to the point, we pick just one piece to
shine a light on.
Boom! There's bold, there's BOLD, and then there's the cover of Peter Parker, Spectacular Spider-Man #101! There are a lot of incredible things about this piece of art, but surely the most incredible, the most surprising, the most - dare I say, spectacular - is that it's by John Byrne! This wonderful cover was released in January 1985, and at that time Byrne was drawing (and writing) Alpha Flight and Fantastic Four for Marvel in his indomitable style; wild hair, textured clothes of questionable fashion, pencilled hatching, and vivid colours. Then he drops this!
Everything about this is as un-Byrne as you could imagine. The dramatic action shot filling the whole of the page, the chiaroscuro contrast of the black and white, the way the whole piece is designed with just blocks of colour with no hatching, shading, or pencil lines in sight. It's a very unusual position for the character to adopt, but as the title and costume symbol make clear; this is Spider-Man. Once we know that, the posture makes complete sense and is fully realised in our mind, in a way that just would not have worked with almost any other character. We don't need detail in order to join the dots and fill in the missing visual information. We can 'see' the outline and detail of Spider-Man even though it's not there on the page.
One of the really clever touches of the composition is the way each building has a different appearance, simply by changing the number and size of the lit windows. Not only does this differentiate between the buildings - keying us into the urban New York City location - but gives a sense of depth and perspective to the piece that shouldn't really be possible with such flat colours. Note also how by limiting the palette of the art - including the top and bottom corner boxes - to just black and white, makes the title logo pops off the page in bright yellow.
This piece also anticipates the modern day super-hero comic cover; bold, eye catching, a single character, unrelated narratively to the contents of the comic under the cover (ironic, given that narrative covers is one of Byrne's calling cards), and by a superstar artist that has not done the interior art (this issue was drawn by Juan Alacantara and inked by Bob Sharen).
For me, Peter Parker, Spectacular Spider-Man #101, is one of the greatest pieces of American comic art of the 80s, and one of - if not the - greatest Spider-Man covers of all time. Bravo Byrne!
Mike
