The Amazing Spider-Man comic strip is going into reprints and it seems writer Roy Thomas and artist Alex Saviuk aren’t continuing on the strip. A message was sent to newspaper publishers that said:
Attention Spider-Man clients: You’ll be seeing some changes in your friendly neighborhood AMAZING SPIDER-MAN comic strip over the coming months. Starting on March 25, King Features and Marvel will be re-running some of Spider-Man’s greatest hits. We’ll be back soon with great new stories and art to explore even more corners of the Marvel Universe for you and your readers to enjoy. We’ll be announcing more about these new adventures in the very near future, so keep your Spidey senses tuned in!
Roy Thomas who has been writing the strip with Stan Lee for years gave a comment to the Daily Cartoonist website and said:
“I know nothing of any Spidey strip to come, only that the one Alex Saviuk and I (and until recently Larry Lieber) had been doing is kaput.”
I asked Alex Saviuk about the news and he gave me this quote.
Hi Brad! Now that KFS has posted their statement yes, the Spider-Man strip as we know it has come to an end. And as much as Roy Thomas and I were hoping that the strip would go on to continue Stan Lee’s legacy just as King Features did with The Phantom after Lee Falk died 20 years ago, that’s not the case here. March 23 will be the last Daily and March 17 will be the last Sunday as we close out the current storyline. It’s news to me that in the statement it mentioned a new strip starting up possibly months down the road after they reprint some classic Lee-Romita stories from 40 years ago or 30 years ago whichever they choose! A strip further exploring the Marvel universe as they say which doesn’t mean it would or wouldn’t be Spider-Man and if they were going to feature new creators or if they would call on Roy and me again to create stories in any universe they desire us to go. Time will tell but in the meantime it was glorious fun while it lasted and I learned a huge lesson about not counting any chickens before they hatch. It was difficult inking and sending in my last week of Dailies a few weekends ago ( the Sundays were always done 3 months ahead of time so I hadn’t drawn one of those in months ). It was like saying goodbye to my old friend all over again .
If the strip doesn’t come out of reprints it will be an end of an era. The comic strip began on January 3, 1977. That is 42 years of daily Spidey in your newspaper. What are your thoughts on this latest news?
If you’d like to learn a bit of history about the newspaper strip take a listen to my podcast interview with Bruce Canwell. He works with IDW to reprint the strip in these nice hardcover collections.
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For ten years, this was my go-to Spider-Man comic as the BND era and Slott’s reign of terror pretty much eroded any interest I had in the character. It’s version of Peter and MJ were amongst the healthiest depictions of the characters on record and their love for each other was never in question. Sure the strips occasionally made Peter a putz who needed constant bailing out, but that was where some of the intentional, and unintentional, humour lay. The new content will be hard to adjust to if it doesn’t feature the marriage and reverts to a teenage Spider-Man…assuming Peter even appears at all. Time will tell, but thankyou Roy and Alex, Larry, Stan and Romita for your hard work on this niche and undervalued phase of Spider-Man lore. Here’s hoping the reprints lure in new fans.
Who is this Mary Jane you mentioned? Peter Parker isn’t married to anyone!
I really hope it’s not the end, and it not just because it was the only place where Peter and Mary Jane are married now that Renew Your Vows is no more, but it was the only haven where I could get a decent Spider-Man story during Slotts run.