Chapter One, 1998-1999

Legendary writer/artist John Byrne was hired to remake Spider-Man’s earliest adventures to make them more appealing to a new, young audience. Unfortunately, he’s past his prime, and the results were a disaster.  He chose to condense the stories of Amazing Fantasy 15, ASM 1-19, Strange Tales Annual 2 and Tales to Astonish 57 in to 12 issues of comics. He skipped 5 whole classic ASMs, discarded as much as 2/3 of others, jammed 2 or 3 old comics into most issues if his new one. To achieve this, he mostly ignored Peter Parker and his supporting cast, focusing on Spider-Man, missing the point of the comic entirely. He drastically and needlessly altered Spider-Man’s origin, gave several villains inferior new costumes, and wrote the Enforcers out of no less than three stories, erasing them from history. To make matters worse, he could not have been more clueless about how 90s teens dressed and talked. A complete failure, which was sold as the new official version of the history, and discarded basically the second the last issue came out. Well, now I’ve read it a 2nd time, and liked it even less, since this time I was much more familiar with the material being adapted. A remake deserves a remake, so I remade my two drawings covering the same period. Almost all the figures are recycled from 2 previous drawings. I did make necessary changes obviously, but the only fully new figure is Mysterio. Some changes are pretty drastic, like Green Goblin’s new head & glider, or the Vulture’s insane new tuxedo and tails, or Electro’s painfully generic new costume, or the burglar’s fetching new ski mask. Some are extremely minor. Do notice Flash Thompson’s RATTAIL. Also he seems to be wearing a burlap sack over a t-shirt, but that’s not MY fault, that’s what John Byrne thinks the kids were into in the 90s. I composited a Spider-Man from 5 different John Byrne drawings to make him similar to the Ditko drawing I used the first time. Doing a remake was a fun and different experience. Far more fun than actually reading Chapter One! From here on out, all the drawings are in the order they were completed. How novel!