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John Romita, from Shadow to Light

John Romita the Elder produced a run of art on Amazing Spider-Man that distinguished him as one of the bedrock talents of the latter half of the Marvel Comics Silver Age. Though he did not reach his peak momentum early enough to participate in the frenzy of the Kirby-Lee-Ditko Marvel Revolution, he nonetheless managed to create a name for himself with an excellence in his work that bespeaks truth both to the Marvel house style and to the John Romita, Sr. idiom.

From his approach to facial features to his treatment of anatomy and human motion, Romita's work combines an elegant cleanness of line with a keen aesthetic feel and a liveliness that helped bring Amazing Spider-Man to the ranking Marvel title by 1970. Yet significant periods of his comics work and development reflect Romita's attempts to replace talent Romita revered and reveres; to see the peak of his work, an observer might experience considerable surprise at Romita ever having felt he needed to fill another man's shoes.

Timely/Atlas Comics and Early Work

An unofficial biographical entry places John Romita's birthday in 1932, a plausible enough date considering the days of the height of his career. If this figure represents his real birthdate, Romita shares with other esteemed professionals a comics career that began early in his life, since his earliest Marvel work appeared in Timely(!) titles, especially in the last days of Captain America's comics before he, like the rest of the superheroic stable Timely created, vanished into the oblivion of changing tastes and merciless market forces.

This period would provide many comics artists, particularly those who worked in the superheroic idiom, a plausible reason to question their own ability and style, and Romita, perhaps unfairly, seemed to suffer from the long shadows cast by the Marvel Revolutionaries (specifically Kirby, Lee, and Ditko). The bottoming-out of the market frightened others to excellence in the Silver Age, particularly Gil Kane, although one should not underestimate the benefits of experience brought to the medium by Golden Age talent just reaching maturity with the innovations taking place at DC and Marvel around the turn of the 1960s.

Not Ditko

In a sense, "dead man's boots" provided John Romita with the opportunities he needed to reach his virile best in his artwork. First in Amazing Spider-Man, then later in Fantastic Four, Romita would step in to follow a celebrity act; this held more significance in the earlier instance, when Stan Lee handed Romita the penciling chores in Amazing Spider-Man when Steve Ditko left Marvel Comics.

After an upwardly-mobile run of three years, the very successful Amazing Spider-Man had entered an editorial crisis. Steve Ditko, the character's (co-)creator and artist, as well as semi-credited writer, had fallen out with the direction provided by Lee. Ditko, after all, had done very well by the character and concept and did not see the necessity of meddling, even by the editors themselves; and Lee's vehemence about involving himself in the creative process helped render Ditko unhappy enough to leave the title and Marvel altogether. In this, Ditko remained several years ahead of other Marvel talent that would fall or flee in the great talent culling around 1970-1972.

Lee and Marvel had, then, an increasingly successful title without the talent that had driven its early success. The title's future depended upon keeping the readers happy.

However, Lee faced a difficult problem. In that era of comics, successful artists did not breed armies of look-alike pencillers to substitute for a missing artist. With talent of no particular identity beyond a "house style," this would present no problem, but Ditko represented an extremely idiosyncratic talent whose peculiarities remain noticeable when they appear in the work of others.

Marvel chose John Romita, Senior, to replace Ditko, and the transition, in some ways, represents a shift from the late-fifties monster-comics-and-surrealism of Earliest Marvel to the passionate days of soap-operatic, tear-jerking, pathos-laden High Silver Age Marvel. Romita, after all, had a style completely unlike Ditko's. He used a different anatomical style, altogether different body language; and his handling of facial expression did not have much in common with Ditko's. Romita knew all of this, but proceeded anyway with the notion that, for the sake of the fans and the title, he should attempt to portray his subject in as Ditko-like a manner as possible.

Romita, fortunately, abandoned this misconception early, and rapidly proceeded to redefine the character visually, and, in the process, become one of the true masters of comics cover art.

Romita's look for the characters he inherited from Ditko would predominate in the various Spider-Man titles (at least three by 1975) and continue until the 1980s, when Marvel attempted to have Todd McFarlane redefine the look of a number of their properties. The truly great period of the comic, though, passed with Romita driving the visuals. The finest pieces of Spider-Man confronting typical foes (of Ditko make) such as Dr. Octopus, the Lizard, the Vulture, and the Green Goblin, all bloomed under his pencil; and, while the Spider-titles would enjoy considerable talent in their manufacture in later years, none of Romita's successors would infuse quite the same passion for the subject.

Some critics note that Romita's work, in a sense, turned the Ditko elements of the Amazing Spider-Man title on its head. Recall, if you will, that Spider-Man originally represented a hopeless and mistreated nebbish bludgeoned by circumstance and bullied by all manner of predatious alpha males. Romita's treatment, however, took away a few points of the character's outsider essence; his pencil seemed unable to make even ugly things ugly, so the new art gradually turned Peter Parker into a vigorous and handsome alpha male himself, plus invested him with a female companion (Mary Jane) detailed with such an eyesome manner that Romita's renderings of this character belong in the category of Great Comics Cheesecake (see the work of Nick Cardy and Will Eisner). The eye, at this point, made a lie of Peter Parker's claims to misery; how could such a handsome young man connected with such a knockout female significant other allow himself the luxury of unhappiness?

Not Colan

I would credit this Daredevil cover, if someone asked me to look at it, to Gene Colan with an inker I couldn't recognize, but my information sources (don't look for a bibliography; I'm not doing footnotes here) attribute it to Romita. As mentioned previously, Romita frequently felt intimidated when asked to handle materials closely tied to talent whose work he esteemed more highly than his own; he felt obliged to give fans what he could of the artists they had come to expect when he took over or filled in on a job. Here, then, we see Romita doing a fair job of giving the readers something not too different from the Gene Colan covers they knew.

Although many comics purists make originality the cardinal virtue (with considerable justification, if we qualify it with occasional reservations), in some cases great artists can utilize a variety of styles, including derivative ones. For instance, Barry Windsor-Smith and Jose Ladronn both came into the public eye doing Kirbylike work, although either artist has done excellent work that does not so directly owe to a prototype.

Romita's viewpoint in the sixties took a different tack about the question of derivative artwork. He believed that fans bought a title to see a certain artist's work. When circumstances dictated that Romita fill in for or replace someone whose work had built a readership, Romita tried, in good faith, to give the readers what he thought they wanted. He ironically notes, in retrospect, that he received much mean-spirited criticism from fans who did not feel his work as a substitute to suffice.

Not Kirby, Either

In the gloomy days after Jack Kirby said "See ya!" to Marvel, right around Fantastic Four #100, the editors (which meant, mostly, Lee himself) faced a familiar situation, though blown much larger. Like Spider-Man, Fantastic Four provided a large percentage of Marvel's sales, and no one wanted to risk its success. This, perhaps, brought to mind the earlier crisis, whose resolution not only saved Spider-Man, but allowed it to become Marvel's premier title in sales.

Early post-Kirby Fantastic Four featured the fine work of John Romita, who, again, stepped in to salvage a calamity. Romita's work in this title demonstrated a considerable, intentional Kirby-like feel (visible in physical proportions, some body language, panel size, pacing, and many other particulars) enhanced by Romita's passionate feel for facial expression. Although Romita did not remain very long on the title before passing the title to the well-qualified hands of John Buscema, his run possessed a specialness that remains visible three decades down the line, bearing the same classic Marvelness typical of the Buscema Avengers or the Trimpe-Severin Incredible Hulk. In a sense, one must look at his work to recognize just what Marvel had going for it that, say, DC lacked; words like dynamism and passion quickly fade to redundancy in attempting to explain qualities that an observer must, himself, see to understand.

Romita's Fantastic Four work, which postdated his fantastic stride on Amazing Spider-Man, managed to combine both mature Romita elements and a bushel load of Kirbyisms that seemed more to represent the things Romita liked about the elder artist's work rather than an attempt to masquerade. Disgruntled readers and comics historians who attribute this Kirby style to ineptness on Romita's part fail to appreciate that Romita had already built a solid and distinctive (even classic) style by this point, and by no sensible standard needed to prop up his work with bits and pieces from anyone's work. When an artist reaches an independent and autonomous excellence, at that point should we lay aside claims of "ripping off" the greats. Romita, like Jim Steranko, did not need to use Kirby elements. Each of these men did so for a combination of valid editorial reasons and because of their respect for the Great Man's work.

Romita as Cover Artist

Romita could really lay down a cover during the Silver Age. He could gut-punch with a cover better than most of his contemporaries and successors in the medium; more mood dripped from his pencil, during one of his rolls, than appears between the covers of a year's worth of ordinary comics.

Furthermore, Romita's work could brighten a cover several ways. His work shone when Romita handled it from pencil to inks; but his pencils did well under a variety of inkers (especially Dave Cockrum), and his inks brought vigor to other pencilers' covers (especially his excellent inking on a series of Avengers covers in the 140s, particularly Gil Kane's work). In this sense, Romita could join the company of the likes of Nick Cardy and Neal Adams, who frequently created remarkable covers that belied the listlessness of the art, by lesser lights, that appeared inside these books.

While Romita certainly executed a few truckloads of wonderful covers, one can leave the table feeling hungry still after studying the better examples of his work. If Romita failed to do a cover for an existing Marvel title in his heyday, I couldn't name it; regardless, he covered the bases of the flagship titles with work that serves as a seed for tributes even close to a generation after the height of his fame.

From Artist to Art Director

Promotions have cost the medium some of the great hands in comics art and writing. Just as editorial duties eventually pulled Stan Lee away from writing altogether, and front office duties took Carmine Infantino and Dick Giordano away from the hands-on side of comics production, so did Romita's excellence inspire higher-ups to promote John Romita to the role of art director. The irony of this sort of promotion appears obvious: Producing work that stands as the bedrock of a classical period of comics or of a comics title invites management to remove talent to an editorial or oversight position, where readers (customers) no longer directly enjoy his work.

Since free persons who love what they do produce better material, we can abandon (after a moment of lurid wish-fulfillment) the notion of chaining some talents to their desks and forcing them to WORK! until we, the readers, become tired of them. People move up because that move seems to promise them greater happiness or success, things that Romita certainly earned.

In Giordano's and Infantino's cases, each of these men occasionally ventured out into the territory where fans best liked to see them move. After Giordano retired as an editor, in fact, he took up his pen and brush again, appearing as the inker of credit in Valiant Comics' Solar (as well as other projects that appealed to him). Will John Romita, someday, return to some of the work that made him famous? It seems unlikely, considering how dreadfully the industry treats its talent (with the rare exception of the rare ultra-celebrity); on the other hand, Romita, not depending upon his pencil for his livelihood as he did once, could approach an art project as something he wanted to do.

I don't know if Romita will undertake anything that will allow him to reach another peak. For those who hunger for a treat for the eyes, however, seek out the Essential Spider-Man volumes that include his work, and see if anything on the shelves these days has that kind of appeal. You may have to look for a long time.