Amazing Spider-Man #700 To Have Steve Ditko Variant Cover

Before you get too excited by the title, no; Steve Ditko has not suddenly pried open the door to his New York studio, gone to embrace Stan Lee in his hospital bed, started using Atlas Shrugged as a cutting board and taking commissions from all comers.

No, instead Marvel has found and restored an unused version of the original cover from Amazing Fantasy #15 *, produced by Ditko presumably before that issue was released in 1962, and announced that they will be using it as a variant cover for Amazing Spider-Man #700.

We’ve known for a while that there was gonna be a Ditko variant cover to the book, but a full-sized image hasn’t been available until now, when Newsarama got a hold of it. So feast your eyes…

The High Price of Nostalgia: Creepy #7 Review

While on one level it’s admirable that Dark Horse Comics has resurrected Creepy Magazine as a comic book, it’s playing to a sense of nostalgia that simply can’t exist. With its mascot Uncle Creepy and short horror vignettes, it clearly calls back to the old EC Comics horror books, which went under thanks to a conservative panic about them in the 1950s. Considering the median age of comics readers is roughly Generation X, we have no frame of reference for comics like this. The people who do have that reference are my dad’s age, who won’t ever find this book, because they’re too busy having a conservative panic about comics.

So the audience for a book like Creepy is questionable at best, but that’s okay, because the book’s not all that good anyway. It’s something different, and some of the art is fairly impressive, which might be enough reasons to pick it up, but there’s only one story of the five contained in this book that feels like the old EC ironic twist stories… and that’s because it’s a reprint from the original Creepy in 1962. Which honestly is the best reason to consider paying five clams for this book, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The book opens with a story by Joe R. Lonsdale about a kid who hatefully creates a vengeful mud monster that Should Not Be… which easily describes every Saturday morning in my bathroom since 1990. The story is just light and simplistic, containing a child delivering dialogue like – honestly – “If I was bigger and stronger, they’d pay… if I was big, I’d show them.” Really? If an actual nine-year-old had written that dialogue he’d backspace it out while muttering, “No nine-year-old actually talks like that.” It was particularly disappointing because I generally like Joe Lansdale’s stuff; I’ve got his entire Hap and Leonard series of novels on my Nook Color, and his stuff on Jonah Hex back in the 90s still holds up for me. This story felt like Joe sneezed with the pen still on the page after writing “By Joe R. Lansdale” and sent it in. If you’re buying this book because of Lansdale’s name, skip it and look for The Dunwich Horror instead.

What’s Green, Scaly And Russian In Origin?

So, this an image that may or may not be conceptual art for the Lizard in the Spider-Man movie reboot popped up on the Russian Web site, Spider Media. Yes, it does have a “.ru” in the address. No, it is not babushka porn. Settle down. Google Translate tells me all the Cyrillic comes out to “SpiderMedia.RU : Comics, Movies, Superheroes, Games, Action Figures, Animation, News, Reviews” and at this stage no Red Dawn malware seems to have been installed on my computer, so, as far as I can tell, these are our people. And they probably have vodka, so take a look and tell me if you think this art looks pretty close to the Steve Ditko art I’ve shopped in next to it:

This man could definitely sit down and have a chat with you about the heartbreak of psoriasis...but he'd probably just eat your face.

It’d be nice if the creatures created actually looked like they came from the comic book the movie was about, right?

Sure, as Bleeding Cool pointed out, this has been released conveniently close to the promotional Pez dispenser reveal, but, who cares? It’s certainly better than the costume they came up with for the Green Goblin in the first movie. Hell, they could probably use a green Sharpie to draw scales on a greenman suit and it would look better than the Green Goblin costume for the first movie.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to go satisfy my craving for Pez and vodka.