Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2011 April 06 • Wednesday

Going through some old comics the other day I was startled by this Bill Sienkiewicz cover for Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man, one of three Spider-Man titles that Marvel was publishing in the 1980s. (The Amazing Spider-Man and Web of Spider-Man were the other two.)

It's the second of two stories that I remember being serialized in all three titles. I guess this way they hoped to persuade you to buy three Spider-Man comics a month—which I was doing anyway.

Both of those stories were, I guess, attempts to do something for Spider-Man that was similar to what Frank Miller had done for Batman and Alan Moore had done for superheroes in general over at Marvel's rival, DC Comics.

Getting Bill Sienkiwicz to do the covers automatically raises the interest level. He did all three covers for this story but this is the one that caught my eye—because it's done in the style of Egon Schiele. Note that Sienkiwicz wrote "After Schiele" right above the Fall of the Mutants box.