| Posted: 30 August 2025 at 11:00am | IP Logged | 1
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I’ve mentioned before how John Romita Sr. Took me into his office one day early in my career and taught me his special trick for drawing the webbing on Spider-Man’s costume. The “scallops” changed direction based on the angle from which they were viewed. This was to prevent them looking like coffin lining, as JR put it, and they would even switch halfway up—or down—his arm, or be different on each boot or glove in the same panel. This was not something Steve Ditko did, but I saw the sense in it and immediately started using it when I drew Spider-Man. This morning, for purely nostalgic reasons, I was flipping thru the ESSENTIAL volume of Spider-Man’s first adventures, and I noticed something for the first time. In the first story Ditko had drawn the webbing on Spider-Man’s face and costume curving the opposite direction to how he would later draw it. I don’t know how I had missed this before. I checked to see how long this persisted and found that in the second story the webbing on the mask was in a more familiar configuration. It still remained backwards on the body of the costume. Then in the third story, that reversed too.
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