John Romita Sr., Spider-Man’s other father, has died

Another piece of Marvel history is gone. On June 12, John Romita Senior died in New York (at the age of 93, he was born in Brooklyn on January 24, 1930), the last of the historic Marvel authors still alive and an authentic legend of American comics.

And he became a legend quite by accident.

In the mid-sixties, an extremely classic artist and active above all on the so-called romance comics (comic books with sentimental stories also addressed to a female audience), he would like to leave the medium for the more profitable job in advertising, but Stan Lee’s proposal arrives , editor and co-creator of major Marvel characters. He draws some books of the blind lawyer and superhero Daredevil, but soon comes the opportunity that will mark his professional career.

Lee and the designer and scriptwriter Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man, are now at loggerheads.

The editor wants a sunnier character, more integrated with society, he knows that many college students read the series and therefore Peter Parker (Spider-Man’s alter ego, among other things at that time he too was a student in the comic university) must become more normal, so that readers can identify with him, while Ditko prefers him mocked and misunderstood; he is a follower of the theories of the libertarian thinker Ayn Rand, and sees him as a true Randian hero who perseveres despite the difficulties.

As often happens, the employee wins over the external collaborator, Ditko leaves the series and Romita takes over, who becomes a sort of third creator of the character.

Stan Lee, in fact, does not write a real screenplay, but limits himself to providing the designer with a short plot (sometimes only oral), subsequently writing the dialogues on the basis of the drawings, the designer with his method (used for years, to a different, from all the writers of the publishing house) also a sort of co-writer.

And so without Ditko Spider-Man’s stories become more solar and ironic, thanks not only to the bubbly dialogues of Stan Lee, but also to the drawings of John Romita, whose version of Spidey is still the most famous and iconic one.

If in the Ditko era many super-villains have been created, in the Romita era, which is essentially an adventurous soap opera in which Peter’s love affairs are almost more important than Spider-Man’s superhero ones, the only really relevant one that comes introduced is Kingpin, the crime lord of New York. If he could have chosen Romita he probably would have drawn detective comics or spy-stories a la James Bond, with beautiful girls and fat criminal leaders.

Peter is divided between the blonde Gwen Stacy and the redhead Mary Jane Watson, who Romita, attentive to fashion and strongly influenced by the very elegant Alex Raymond of the striped series Rip Kirby, is perfect in characterizing.

They are beautiful girls next door (lucky who has them as neighbors), it is Romita who graphically creates Mary Jane, and the cartoon in which she appears for the first time saying to Peter ‹‹Admit it, tiger cub … you just hit the mark !›› is one of the most iconic in the history of American comics.

‹‹When I was a little girl, my brother’s bedroom was the repository of all the coolest things – wrote former Marvel editor Renee Witterstaetter on Facebook remembering Romita. – Of course it was forbidden for me, but I went there anyway. I remember the moment I discovered the Spider-Man book with that famous cartoon like it was yesterday. There was this strong, beautiful woman who dominated the scene and I think she was an inspiration to me. Rest in peace John, when I was a little girl in Texas I never thought I’d get to know you and work with you, I wonder if you knew how many people you inspired. We all nailed it with you››.

Gwen’s death and final years

Ironically, it is Romita, together with the writer Gerry Conway and the artist Gil Kane, who is responsible for Gwen’s death, in the historic Amazing Spider-Man 122 with cover date July 1973: her death is indeed caused by the super-villain Goblin but it is precisely Spider-Man, in an attempt to save her with his web as she was falling, snapped her neck and killed her.

It’s an epochal book: it marks the end of innocence for the superhero comic, and also the end of what historians of the genre call the Silver Age.

When asked, Lee gave his consent to Gwen’s death, but later denied having done so.

Romita, based on texts by Lee, is also the author of the first four years (from 1977 to 1981) of the Spider-Man strips, in newspapers, a logical landing place for a designer like him who was formed precisely on comic strips.

He remained Marvel’s art director until the 1990s and in 1991 he was a guest at the Lucca comics fair, where he was interviewed by the historic magazine of criticism and information on comics Fumo di China, still on newsstands today.

‹‹You asked me about Gwen Stacy earlier and you didn’t tell me that she was well drawn, but that you were sorry for what happened to her. – She says during the interview. – This is the greatest compliment for me, because when someone tells me this he is not saying that I have a great technique, but that my characters are alive ››.

At the end of the eighties, the lawyer Gianni Agnelli said, with a little envy, that Cesare Maldini was better than the then president and former Juventus player Giampiero Boniperti because he ‹‹knows how to have children›› alluding to his son Paolo, at the time young talent in the stellar Milan built by the president Silvio Berlusconi and the coach Arrigo Sacchi.

Like Maldini, John Romita knows how to have children. John Romita Jr., born in 1956, in over forty years at Marvel (except for a brief spell at DC Comics for Batman and Superman) has been able to become a true icon of the publishing house with his versions not only of Spider-Man, but also of the X-Men, Daredevil, Thor and the Punisher, a vigilante created graphically by his father in 1973.

Thanks to the reprints (and also to Romita Jr.’s comics) more than a generation has grown up with the Romitas and there are those who, passing from Corso Romita to Tortona or from Via Romita to Acqui Terme, immediately think of him (or of his son) , certainly not to the former Tortonese minister Giuseppe Romita.