As of page 20, I’m drawing, inking, coloring, scripting & lettering the book, from a plot by Jim Shooter. Almost all mine! And, again, I feel like I got tossed in at a weird moment. I get one whole establishing shot on page 19 to figure out The Daily Bugle’s lobby from. I Googled what a 1980s photocopier looked like for panel 2, I took this seriously. I tried to maintain some kind of consistency with John Romita, Jr. here, but he’s one of the all-time greats and I’m a hobbyist, so I quickly realized that was kind of futile. I just did my best. I’m pretty sure the afro’d individual at the bottom of page 19 was meant to be a woman and the receptionist, but you can’t really tell and I wanted to draw Joe Robertson, so I did. He’s having a rough day. Not as rough as Janet, though!
Meanwhile, more banter. Let me just say, I was looking forward to writing for Spider-Man, and it was still way more fun than I expected. I feel somewhat uniquely qualified to do so, having read quite literally hundreds of Spider-Man comics in the last year and change (At least one almost every day, sometimes 3 or 4) ranging from the 60s right to the current series, so I have a firm grasp on his voice, I think. And of course, as anyone who knows me can attest, I’ve been drawing Spider-Mans all over any available piece of paper since I was a lad, so I’ve been training for this my whole life! I don’t know enough about New York to know where an abandoned factory would’ve been in 1983, but I needed an address. So I looked up the address of famed NY music venue The Knitting Factory and used that. Technically a factory! Sort of! Maybe not.
