To honor Dan Slott’s 10 year run on Amazing Spider-Man Newsarama recently put out a top ten list of the best Spider-Man writers of all time. I won’t make you click 10 times to read the thing. Here is their list.
- Stan Lee
- Steve Ditko
- Dan Slott
- Brian Michael Bendis
- Gerry Conway
- David Michelinie
- J. Michael Straczynski
- Roger Stern
- J. M. DeMatteis
- Kurt Busiek
So where does outgoing writer Dan Slott rank on your list? I find it criminal that Tom DeFalco, Marv Wolfman and Peter David are not on the list. So what does your list look like? I’ll post mine in the comment section. Please join me in the fun.
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Where does Dan Slott rank in my top 10 Spider-Man writers? The answer is… Nowhere! My top 10 Spider-Man writers are-
1. Stan Lee (obviously)
2. Steve Ditko (He wrote most of the amazing “IF THIS BE MY DESTINY” story arc)
3. Rodger Stern
4. Gerry Conway
5. J.M. DeMatteis
6. Peter David (wrote the funniest Spider-man story known as “The Commuter Cometh”)
7. Tom DeFalco
8. J. Michael. Straczynski (First half of his ASM run was phenomenal! Second half… not so much)
9. Paul Jenkins (Criminaly underrated! He wrote some of the best PETER PARKER: SPIDER-MAN vol. 2 issues)
10. Brian Michale Bendis (His work on ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN and THE NEW AVENGERS was very good. But he started losing his touch after he killed off Ultimate Peter)
I mentioned this entry in one of my own articles, so I should give my own opinion here. I would rate Slott pretty highly.
10. JMS
9. Paul Jenkins
8. Gerry Conway
7. Peter David
6. Dan Slott
5. Brian Michael Bendis
4. J.M. DeMatteis
3. Roger Stern
2. Stan Lee
1. Stan Lee/ Steve Ditko
@ Alex Evangeli:
My comment about Slott’s bouts of boredom is based on how his series would have a high-energy, carefully-plotted, zingy story — then settle down to blah for a while. Then another event! Then, after the event, down to blah. Peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys. This is why I stuck Slott down around 7-9. He tried to do a bunch of new things with Peter, and he wrote several red-hot multi-part “event” stories (Spider Island, Superior, Spider-Verse, and Red Goblin). But as his tenure wore on, his Peter turned from idealistic to childish and Spider-Man was laughable rather than dangerous.
@Alex Evangeli —
Sorry, I went looking but couldn’t find anything. Google indicates there used to be an old thread about it at CBR, but I think it got deleted when CBR wiped their boards.
I think Mackie deserves to be on this list somewhere. He was a good writer. The Clone Saga absurdities and excesses were forced on him by management. He was at least as talented as several other names on that list.
http://www.spidermancrawlspace.com/interviews/mackie.htm
Dan Slott ranked higher than Roger Stern and JMS?
… Newsarama is on crack!
@Jack Brooks
I heard rumour of Mackie having health issues but can you confirm he had cancer? How do you know that?
I’m not doubting you I just really want to know so I can write something up in defence of his work. For instance I think he actually was the most consistently reliable CS era writer. DeMatteis did better stuff at times but also worse stuff. Mackie wrote the ONE good issue of Maximum Clonage and brilliant stories with Ben as Spidey.
True but there are two things with that.
a) Isn’t it kind of damning that Slott essentially lost interest then a measly 2+ years into his solo run? Like even if you lump his BND stuff in there that means he did Spidey for 4 years and was like bored. Hardly the work of Spidey’s biggest fan apparently
b) He could’ve saved himself that boredom by tapping out much earlier like at the end of Superior. Instead he admitted he stuck around just to write ASM #800 because ego thy name is Slott
As for DeMatteis’ heavy psychology I am the spider stuff, rememeber that stuff doesn’t really accound for most of his work. Combine MTU, KLH, Lost Years, Sould of the Hunter, Redemption, his ASM run and his Spec run and the I am the Spider stuff is less than 10%
Yeah, Slott doesn’t deserve to be in the top 10. Especially not the top 3. But, you know, this is just after Slott has left, and the news sites aren’t likely going to want to piss him or Marvel off, so they likely want to do this just as a good PR move.
Give it time. In a few years, there will be articles talking about how the “New direction” of Spider-Man is doing right by the character, and how much better it’s serving him than Slott’s run. And Slott will slowly but surely slip down that list. Likely with Spencer taking his spot.
Just how these things work these days.
I’d say mine are as follows:
Conway
Lee/Ditko
DeMatteis
Straczynski
David
DeFalco
Michelinie
Stern
Mackie
McFarlane
@Alex Evangeli:
I believe what you saw in a lot of Slott’s work was a man who became bored with Peter Parker, and had to keep inventing more and more outlandish scenarios to put him in, as a way of keeping his own interest up.
Boredom, slow-down, sales sink, big zany event. Rinse and repeat.
Ditko doesn’t belong in that list, because it’s impossible to tell where he and Lee began or left-off.
Busiek’s series wasn’t ASM, and was too brief. Bendis didn’t write Spider-Man, he wrote Ultimate Spider-Man which was a whole ‘nuther animal. It was good, but not the original flavor. I’m leaving Paul Jenkins off because he mostly did a lot of little one-and-dones.
Lee automatically gets top spot. I would push Gerry Conway up, because his first ASM run set into motion all kinds of significant changes that have lasted down to today. I would push Stern up, for quality comfort-food Spidey. JMS goes up, for sheer craftsmanship and excellent characterizations, though he loses some points for constantly trying to mystify the series. So those are my top four: Lee, Conway, Stern, JMS.
I never liked the heavy-psychology, “I Am Spider” stuff. So DeMatteis is mid-pack somewhere. Kraven’s Last Hunt by itself earns him fifth spot.
I know so little about Michelinie’s, Mantlo’s, and DeFalco’s work, I can’t have an opinion. (I stopped collecting during the 1980s). I didn’t think all of Mackie’s work was bad, and the poor guy was battling cancer at the time. But Mackie gets saddled with the Reboot, and a lot of the Clone Saga.
I would put Slott in the lower four somewhere. Setting Slott’s personal quirks aside, his work was inconsistent. It was a roller-coaster, but not in a good way. He could produce a very good story, and then the very next story would be totally “meh.” He wasn’t consistent. I think this is why his ASM kept sinking down into the mid-fifties in sales.
After ten years, I felt battered by his bad writer habits. He relied on the Idiot Ball a lot (Roger Ebert’s phrase describing a plot that requires everyone in the story to be an idiot for the plot to work). Magical plot contrivances abounded. He couldn’t write female characters. My biggest complaint was how he distorted Peter Parker into a disrespected 15-year-old.
As for my own list.
These are not necessarily my favs, but these are the ones I consider the best. I confined it to 616 comics, so not including AUs or other media. Also not in any particular order.
1. Lee/Ditko/Romita: I lumped these guys together because we dunno who did how much of what exactly
2. DeFalco/Frenz: Included Frenz because he and DeFalco fed each other ideas
3. DeMatteis: Real talk in terms of pure craftsmanship when DeMatteis was on his A-game he wrote objectively the best Spider-Man stories ever
4. PAD: Speaks for himself
5. Stern: Speaks for himself
6. Conway: Speakins for himself
7. Straczynski: For all his problems JMS rarely got the characters wrong and most of the time did some of the best characetrzation and internal exploration of them ever. Also was willing to progress the characters.
8. Sacasa: Underrated but solid as Hell. Rarely can I think of him making any serious missteps in his handling of the characters.
9. Mantlo: Also underrated. Going to say something really controversial here, I think he was writing better stories than Marv Wolfman during the time they were both working on Spider-Man. At least I really think he understood Spider-Man way better than Wolfman
10. Millar: 12 issues isn’t much but it was nevertheless really, really awesome. Again, no serious missteps with characterization. Awesome action, best Black Cat moment ever, some awesome Norman moments and an embracing of Spider-Man’s wider mythology. Except done well unlike Slott
As for the list itself if that is the author’s list of personal FAVOURITE Spider scribes i respect that.
But if they were actually saying that yeah Slott is below only Lee and Ditko themselves they are utterly ignorant to literary analysis and just plain good writing.
Let’s ignore the inclusion of Bendis who barely wrote 616 Spider-Man and who’s rendition of Spidey and his mythology in USM can be questioned in a lot of ways (how the fuck do you make Nick Fury and you fanfiction Self-Insert OC more relevant characters than J. Jonah Jameson and Harry Osborn!). Let’s also ignore that including Bendis on the basis of USM should open up OTHER AU Spider-Man writers too who did great jobs.
Let’s instead ask this.
What kind of ignorance do you need to place the guy who wrote Spider-Man dialogue like it was still the 1970s over the most influential comic book writer of the 21st century who’s most famous work was doing an update of Spider-Man that’s influenced every version since.
What kind of blindfolded Spider-Man reading experience did the article’s author have that they place the guy who wrote Doc Ock masturbating in Spider-Man’s body over the guy who created the most consistently good Spider-Man title of the 1990s, Untold Tales.
What blackmail material does marvel have on someone to make them put the writer who’s most famous work on Spider-Man was presenting a villainous dark Spider-Man who subverted his values over the guy who INVENTED VENOM!
How prone to bribary does someone have to be to say the guy who’s best written Spider-Man story was an abject indulgence in continuity porn is BETTER than the acclaimed film and TV writer who invented Babylon 5!
How much must you hate good storytelling to place the guy who had Aunt May guilt trip Spider-Man over ‘abandoning’ her the night Uncle Ben died, over the writer who invented the Hobgoblin, wrote Nothing Can Stop the Juggernaut AND the Kid Who Collects Spider-Man…a story the former writer obviously tried to copy.
What kind of dark matter density must you be to place the dude who made iconically down to Earth everyman Peter Parker the internationally famous globe trotting head of the world’s largest tech conglomerate who also used his own private G.I. Joe Spider army to illegally invade countries…over the guy who wrote ASM #400, Spec #200, Spec #250 and Kraven’s Last Hunt!
How little attention were they paying in English 101 to have placed the guy who looked at the Death of Gwen Stacy and said ‘I can improve on this’ over the guy who ACTUALLY WROTE THE DEATH OF GWEN STACY!
This list is prison ass
Dan Slott is #1 on my list of Top 10 Spider-Man writers….so long as it’s the top 10 worst ones
My list (this could change if you asked me tomorrow):
1. Stan Lee (I think you just have to)
2. Gerry Conway
3. Roger Stern
4. Tom DeFalco
5. Peter David
6. J. M. DeMatteis
7. Marv Wolfman
8. Paul Jenkins
9. J. Michael Straczynski
10. David Michelinie
I think of Ditko more as an artist than a writer, even though he co-plotted/plotted some of the issues.
Bendis barely wrote Spider-Man. He wrote Ultimate SM and Miles. That is not Spider-Man. This should be a list of writers of 616 Spider-Man.
Kurt Busiek’s run on Untold Tales was so short, it feels wrong to put him ahead of equally good writers who wrote the character longer.
However you divide the writers (top half/bottom half, top third/middle third/bottom third, etc) I think Slott belongs in the “bottom ______”. His good stories are overwhelmed by his many many bad/terrible stories. No way he should be above any of the 10 in this list.
Dan Slott
Slott doesn’t come anywhere close to my personal top ten.
10.) Bill Mantlo
09.) David Michelinie
08.) Tom DeFalco
07.) Brian Michael Bendis
06.) JMS
05.) Peter David
04.) Roger Stern
03.) J.M. DeMatteis
02.) Gerry Conway
01.) Stan Lee
Its impossible to include Slott in any list of “Top Spidey Writers” because in simplest terms, Slotts entire run was defined by the simple idea – How far can we take Spider-man from his established norm? How can we break the mold on what people expect in a spider-man comic?
Which is fine for a storyline or two, subvert the normal expected status quo for a bit – BUT when literally every arc takes the character further and further from his roots, and then you continue these status quo breaking storylines one after another for 10 FULL YEARS – after a while people don’t even know what a normal spider-man comic is supposed to be like because you’ve had ten years of stories designed to break an old status quo that younger readers don’t even remember or know anymore. So a writer that did nothing but take the character farther and farther from its established roots – how can that writer be considered the “best” example of how that character should be written? He literally BROKE the character. For 10 YEARS.
Your list is prett Solid Brad. Slott is on my list in the top ten but towards the bottom. I enjoyed his run but of course it had it’s ips and downs.
I would have J Michael at the top of the list – he made Peter Parker genuinely funny and heroic. I like a sassy Peter Parker, sue me. Gerry Conway is often great, as is Peter David, but at times too cheesey for my taste (I honestly think his Renew Your Vows is barely mediocre but the good characterization carries it).
Slott’s Spider-Man is at least fun, with Paul Jenkins’ version, though a better writer in my mind, at times too mopey at times and came off as a bit pathetic.
I would also put Joe Kelly on the list – before Spider-Man /Deadpool I wouldn’t have considered him.
IMO I’d give his run an overall C-. HIs dialog is pretty bad and not conversational. He also put Spidey in a backseat for most of his run. His Spider-Man needed help to do anything. He made it a Team Up book and Spider-Man was anything but Amazing. .He portrayed Peter as a looser that can never catch a break.
Here is my list and I didn’t leave any Slott’s empty in the list.
1. Stan Lee
2. Gerry Conway
3. Roger Stern
4. Tom DeFalco
5. Peter David
6. J. M. Dematteis
7. Bill Mantlo
8. David Michelinie
9. Paul Jenkins
10. J. Michael Straczynski
Slott would’nt crack top 20.