Marvel Celebrates 1,000 Issues of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man!
There are comic book milestones, and then there is The Amazing Spider-Man #1000.
More than six decades after Peter Parker first learned that with great power must also come great responsibility, Marvel's flagship Spider-Man title is about to reach a number that very few comic books will ever see. One thousand issues.
Think about that for a second.
One thousand issues of Peter Parker swinging through New York. One thousand issues filled with Green Goblins, Doctor Octopuses, Venoms, Vultures, Sinister Sixes, symbiotes, clones, alternate universes, broken relationships, dead girlfriends, resurrected friends, impossible responsibilities and enough Parker Luck to ruin approximately 10,000 normal human lives.
And somehow, Peter Parker is still swinging.
Marvel isn't simply treating Amazing Spider-Man #1000 as a nostalgia book, either. The milestone arrives in the middle of one of the strangest developments in Peter Parker's family history.
The current storyline has introduced Cormac Crane, who revealed himself as the biological son of Aunt May and Uncle Ben. That makes Cormac Peter Parker's first cousin and fundamentally changes a family dynamic that has existed since Spider-Man's earliest stories.
For Peter, that's particularly complicated.
Aunt May isn't merely his aunt. After the deaths of his parents, May and Ben raised Peter as their own child. After Ben's murder, Peter and May became each other's family in practically every meaningful sense of the word.
Now May suddenly has the biological son she believed she'd lost decades earlier. Recent issues have explored exactly what that means to Peter. He's happy for May, but Cormac's existence inevitably changes something Peter has taken for granted his entire life. Peter has always been May's son. May, however, has made it clear that Cormac's return doesn't erase the life she, Ben and Peter built together.
It's a massive change to Spider-Man mythology, and whether fans ultimately love it, hate it or spend the next 20 years arguing about it online, this is Spider-Man we're talking about, it gives the road to #1000 considerably more weight than simply slapping a giant number on the cover.
But as interesting as the current storyline is, it's hard not to be even more excited about what 1,000 issues of The Amazing Spider-Man actually represents.
Since then, generations of writers and artists have taken their turn telling stories about Peter Parker.
Stan Lee. Steve Ditko. John Romita Sr. Gerry Conway. Roger Stern. J.M. DeMatteis. Todd McFarlane. David Michelinie. Mark Bagley. J. Michael Straczynski. John Romita Jr. Dan Slott.
And that's barely scratching the surface.
That's what makes #1000 so special.
Comic books are constantly relaunched, renumbered and given shiny new #1 issues, but legacy numbering reminds us that these aren't really separate series. They're chapters in one enormous story stretching across generations.
There are people who bought Amazing Spider-Man comics off spinner racks in the 1960s whose great grandchildren are now reading Spider-Man.
That's freaking awesome.
Marvel isn't holding back for the celebration.
The oversized issue brings together an absolutely loaded collection of Spider-Man talent, with writers including Joe Kelly, Noah Hawley, Frank Miller, Dan Slott, J.M. DeMatteis, Brian Michael Bendis and Larry Lieber, alongside artists including Pepe Larraz, John Romita Jr., Patrick Gleason, Peach Momoko, Marcos Martin, Stuart Immonen, Humberto Ramos, Giuseppe Camuncoli and more.
Some of the combinations alone are enough to get comic fans excited.
Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen reunite for "The Gesture," featuring Spider-Man and the Avengers. Dan Slott and Marcos Martin return for "Now I Can Rest," which revisits the night Uncle Ben died. J.M. DeMatteis and Humberto Ramos team for "Requiem of a Goblin." Frank Miller and Peach Momoko collaborate for the first time on "Tears of the Spider-Queen," which sends Spider-Man up against the Hand.
And Noah Hawley, creator of tv shows Fargo and Legion and showrunner of Alien: Earth, makes his comic book writing debut alongside Patrick Gleason.
That's not an anniversary issue.
That's an Amazing Spider-Man convention stuffed between two covers.
Speaking of those covers! Oh boy.
If you're a variant-cover collector, Marvel is coming for your wallet.
Hard.
The artwork being released for Amazing Spider-Man #1000 is an incredible celebration of practically every era of Spider-Man.
Pepe Larraz provides one of the main covers, while John Romita Jr. and Paolo Rivera collaborate on another painted main cover. Then the variant lineup starts getting ridiculous.
We're getting artwork from Alex Ross, Mark Bagley, Stuart Immonen, Marcos Martin, Patrick Gleason, Humberto Ramos, Erik Larsen, Julian Totino Tedesco, J. Scott Campbell, Skottie Young, Ryan Stegman, Lee Bermejo, Ed McGuinness, Peach Momoko, Paco Medina, Todd Nauck, Giuseppe Camuncoli and others.
And Marvel didn't stop there.
One of the coolest pieces is an Ed McGuinness foil variant inspired by John Romita Sr.'s legendary Amazing Spider-Man #100 cover, creating a fantastic visual connection between two enormous milestones separated by 900 issues.
There's a Marvel Animation wraparound cover celebrating the classic 1967 Spider-Man animated series. There's a Spider-Man: Brand New Day movie variant. There's Todd Nauck's four-part connecting legacy artwork. There are covers featuring Spider-Man's villains, different generations of the character and wildly different artistic interpretations of the Web-Head.
Perhaps coolest of all, Marvel even dug into Spider-Man history for a variant featuring rare, previously unpublished Steve Ditko artwork.
For a character whose visual identity has been interpreted by some of the greatest artists in comic-book history, that feels exactly right.
Good luck choosing just one.
That's really what makes Amazing Spider-Man #1000 exciting.
Spider-Man doesn't belong to one generation.
Some fans see Steve Ditko when they picture Peter Parker.
Others see John Romita Sr.
Maybe your Spider-Man is Todd McFarlane's impossibly flexible Web-Head with spaghetti webbing everywhere. Maybe it's Mark Bagley. John Romita Jr. Humberto Ramos. Erik Larsen. Alex Ross. Marcos Martin. Stuart Immonen.
And a kid picking up Amazing Spider-Man #1000 might someday look back at Pepe Larraz the same way longtime readers look at those legends.
That's the beauty of reaching a milestone like this.
Spider-Man keeps changing while somehow remaining Spider-Man.
The costume gets tweaked. The supporting cast changes. Peter gets jobs and loses them.
Relationships begin and collapse. Villains become heroes. Heroes become villains. Continuity gets rewritten, restored, retconned and occasionally tied into knots that would make Peter's web shooters jealous.
But underneath all of it is still that kid from Queens who learned one terrible lesson and has spent the rest of his life trying to live up to it.
There will undoubtedly be plenty to argue about surrounding Amazing Spider-Man #1000. That's basically part of being a Spider-Man fan.
But forget continuity debates for a minute.
Forget whether you love the current run.
Forget whether you think Peter should be married to Mary Jane, dating someone else or living alone in a crappy New York apartment because Marvel apparently enjoys watching this poor bastard suffer.
The Amazing Spider-Man reaching issue #1000 is worth celebrating.
Thousands of characters have been created since Spider-Man first appeared in 1962. Very few have become genuine cultural icons. Even fewer have remained this important for more than 60 years.
And now The Amazing Spider-Man gets to put #1000 on the cover.
Judging by the unbelievable collection of artwork Marvel has assembled for the occasion, the biggest problem may not be deciding whether to buy it.
I've already secured the variants I want for my collection. Which ones are you going after?
