Hi Jason,

I was reading the FF annual wherein the Richards' get hitched (#3) and noticed that there was something weird about Spidey's appearance in it.



First, and most obvious, the webbing on the safe is drawn very badly. And second, the figure of Spider-Man himself is a copied and re-positioned Ditko drawing - one that has been used in quite a few other contexts. Do you know if there is any story to this?

MyComicshop (dot) com lists Steve Ditko as having provided the artwork for Spider-Man on panel 4 on Page 14.

Kirby's rendition of Spider-Man was notorious for being off-model. Stan probably had someone take an existing Ditko image and paste it over the Kirby one. The webbing was maybe too much bother to fix.

Stan Lee had some nerve, considering the number of times he replaced Steve Ditko's covers with other artists. "Off-model" mattered less to Stan than his own warped sense of what constituted an attractive cover. (Replacing Ditko's art never made for a better cover.)

I've never read anything about this specific issue, but yeah, it seems pretty that clear it's a case where Stan didn't like Kirby's rendition of Spider-Man in that panel, so he has someone trace Ditko's drawing from the cover of Spider-Man #19 and paste it in. It's similar to how in FF #73 Stan had Romita redraw all of Kirby's Spider-Man figures.

There was definitely an arbitrariness about it. When Kirby drew Spider-Man, he got redrawn. Yet on three occasions Lee had Kirby redraw Spider-Man covers drawn by Ditko. I can understand the rationale for redrawing Ditko's Spider-Man figure for the cover of issue #35, in that Spidey's ass is front and center in the Ditko version:


But Ditko's original cover for Spider-Man #10 is far superior:

And it stands to reason there was probably another version of the cover for issue #10 that happened between these two. Since Ditko drew the villains in the published version of the cover, it seems likely he must have redrawn the whole cover but then for some reason Lee had Kirby redraw Spider-Man and paste it over on the finished version.

And of course Ditko's cover for Amazing Fantasy #15 is superior to Kirby's:

As Ditko himself noted, in his version we are in the air with Spidey, seeing things from his perspective. Whereas in the Kirby version, we see things from the perspective of a bystander looking up at Spidey from the street below.

Also Kirby's version isn't even speaking English. You're in America, Spidey, hello.

Another related question: I'm now reading FF annual #5 and the credits read 'inks by Joltin' Joe Sinnott', but the first few pages look much more like the work of Frank Giacoia to me. Any thoughts?

EDIT: I was right it seems, but the reason for the misidentification is still unclear:
https://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronoc ... lver.shtml

Wait...were Joe and Frank using the Vinnie Colletta method of inking or something...?

It's probably best we never find out...

I read something about this once somewhere and it's bugging me that I can't remember where. My memory is totally shitty, but I feel like Jack might have drawn Daredevil in there and the web was supposed to be a net or something? I'll see if someone knows anything about this.

I don't know if I agree 100% with Ditko on this one. I personally like his better, but there's a quality to it that makes it feel like it would have been much less iconic had it been used than the actual cover was...a combination of the pose and the perspective, maybe.

Agreed that Ditko's unused cover for ASM #10 is a million miles better than the actual one used, though. I remember the Marvel Tales reprint of that ish back in the early 80s included the unused cover as a bonus and even my snot-nosed kid self thought it was far better than the one that graced my comic book.

I think Kirby's cover for Amazing Fantasy 15 looks better. He looks like Jordan dunking it with those toes pointed back.

That seems off though -- in every other instance, Stan would have the current Amazing Spider-Man artist fix Jack's Spidey in the inking stage, as seen below from Strange Tales Annual #1 and Fantastic Four #73. If he's willing to have it done for an entire story, surely he'd have it done for a single panel. Keep in mind, he dialogued the books from the pencils and had the lettering done next, so he saw them before the inker and could have had the pencils adjusted rather than go for an awkward paste-up like that.

It was easy to have Ditko "fix" the Spider-Man figures in Strange Tales Annual #2 because he was already inking the story. Whereas having Ditko fix that Spider-Man figure in FF Annual #2 would have meant somehow getting that page to him either before or after it went to Vinnie, an additional step that would delay production. Things were also complicated by the fact that FF Annual #3 was produced in 1965, when Stan and Steve were no longer speaking to each other... so asking him to do a quick redraw while he was in the office delivering pages would have been problematic. My guess is that the feeling was that no one available around the office could redraw Spider-Man any better than Kirby, and getting the page to Ditko was too much work, so Stan decided a quick paste-up was the easiest thing to do.

Well comics.org says this,

Inker credit corrected by Steve Grant on 12 September 2005; an editorial reply on the letters page of Fantastic Four #71 explicitly says that the credit is wrong, and that inker was Frank
Giacoia, not Joe Sinnott.

I'm just a bit impressed with myself that, even at this 'distance' from my comic-obsessed youth, I can still identify an inker of a comic book If only this talent could be used for good (or even evil!)

Or at least the pursuit of profit.