Marvel Team-Up No. 4 Cover by Kane & Giacoia

I was a wee lad in the summer of 1972. I liked Spider-Man a lot. His cartoon (the 1967 series) was on TV (and still rules today). But it wasn’t until Mom gave me 20¢ in the drugstore that I bought a copy of this, my first comic.

A nice-looking copy of the published comic. I still have the copy I bought, though it’s pretty ratty and I wrote my name on the cover.

Written by Gerry Conway and drawn by Gil Kane & Steve Mitchell (the cover was inked by Frank Giacoia), it was a sequel to the greatest Spider-Man storyline ever told (personal opinion there).

In a story arc running from Amazing Spider-Man 100 through 102, Peter grew four extra arms, teams up with the Lizard and fights new villain Morbius, the Living Vampire. Coolness personified.

The Marvel Team-Up issue followed a few months later. I’m using its cover as a way to show people my process for cover reconstruction and colouring.

A raw scan of the line art from The Essential Marvel Team-Up Volume One.

Contrast- and density-corrected scan. The art is looking pretty good, but there’s a wonky warp and woof to the logos, most likely due to a stat of the masthead being glued down wrinkly on the page and then reproduced that way. The published comic shows the same effect.

With the logos reversed on black – and looking pretty rough even on the cleaned-up scan – I went looking for better elements to work with. I found them on a scan of issue 5 available on Heritage Auctions.

When I re-create type that was originally hand drawn, the goal – as I see it – is not to perfectly duplicate the original, warts and all. I try to respect the feel while at the same time bringing consistency and the quality of construction we can achieve with modern tools.

These elements were replaced with re-created elements. The red items were re-typeset with digital type. The black items were hand drawn. The Comics Code seal I had re-created previously.

Colour applied to the trade dress.

The cleaned-up art. The frame border was as rough as the logos, so it was replaced. Putting the black background on a separate layer made it easy to composite the different pieces together.

All the pieces put together with the cover’s original colour re-created.

New colour version.

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From 2002, the first time I coloured this cover, without the logo reconstructions. I was just beginning to explore computer-aided colouring.