Volume I

Marvel Album Edition, Volume 1




Our story begins with penciller Joe Quesada. Joe toiled away in the independent comics scene of the early 90's, though he did co-create Azrael - the man who would take over the role of Batman when Bane had broken Bruce Wayne's spine.

Max Landis explains while cooking

By 1998 Marvel had filed for bankruptcy (and Avi Arad had swooped in, selling off movie rights left and right - but that's a different story altogether) and they outsourced a selection of characters to Quesada's group of creators he brought together under the Event Comics banner. These books, dubbed Marvel Knights, were a grittier, darker take on the characters heavily influenced by late Bronze Age of comics (Bronze Age is generally agreed to begin with the death of Gwen Stacy and culminate in both Frank Miller's Dark Knight Rises and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen - so dark, death, and character deconstruction). Three series were produced initially, all edited by Quesada: Black Panther, the Inhumans, and Daredevil. Daredevil was written by Kevin Smith, who Quesada had met doing Smith's View Askew comics, and drawn by Quesada himself. The Marvel Knights line proved to be so successful Quesada was quickly named the new Editor-in-Chief at Marvel (and eventually became the second longest EIC after Stan Lee). Other titles were added under the Marvel Knights banner, and thus other independent creators, and the entire imprint itself eventually was folded into actual 616 continuity as previously it really kinda hadn't. Preacher's Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon worked on a Punisher series for Marvel Knights.

Played by Kevin Nash in the Tom Jane version

With the Marvel Knights aesthetic slowly enveloping the entire Marvel line and the Kevin Smith/Joe Quesada Daredevil storyline concluded, the title bounced from creator to creator (including a run written by Back to the Future scribe Bob Gale that Marvel has never, ever reprinted) until landing in the hands of Brian Michael Bendis. Bendis broke as a writer (and sometime artist) of the crime and noir comics Jinx, Goldfish, and Torso (the latter of which was the true story of Eliot Ness' attempts to capture the Cleveland Torso Murder) and was close friends with David Mack, who worked on Daredevil briefly with Quesada after Smith left, and briefly with Bendis before Bob Gale. From there he had written a few books in the Spawn universe before in 2000 Marvel launched the Ultimate Comics line with Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man at the forefront - a series still basically in production this very minute). That same year Bendis also launched his creator owned series Powers with artist Michael Avon Oeming.

Two seasons on PSN, Sharlto Copley stars

Ultimate Spider-Man became the gem of the Ultimate Marvel line, thus Bendis was given full writing duties Daredevil, and also leveraged his success to create a whole new, non-Comics Code Approved line of R-rated books, the MAX imprint. The first book to be published was Bendis' Alias (a book originally conceived of to star sometime private detective Jessica Drew the Spider-Woman, but much like Watchmen before, was rewritten to feature a new character), with books featuring the Black Widow, Blade, Luke Cage, Howard the Duck, and the Punisher - in which Vietnam vet Frank Castle aged in real-time, again written by Garth Ennis) quickly followed.






Close your eyes and picture Peter Parker. Not Spider-Man, but Peter. If you're anything like me, you pictured the John Romita era.

Steve Ditko, the character's creator stayed with the series until Amazing Spider-Man #38, and his version was more lithe, and at times grotesque (much like Fantastic Four was spawned from earlier monster and romance comics, Amazing Fantasy was a science-fiction/horror title revamped into a superhero series starring Spider-Man and his original adventures were told in that style).

Ditko's Spider-Man

John Romita replaced Ditko, and John Romita Jr. grew up watching his father draw what ultimately became the character model for 20 years. A young JRJr had a hand in co-creating Hobie Brown, the Prowler, at age thirteen - Donald Glover portrayed the Aaron Davis, the Ultimate Prowler in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Aaron Davis' brother Jefferson Davis is the father of Miles Morales.

John Romita Jr the artist first broke on Iron Man (co-creating Justin Hammer) before being handed Amazing Spider-Man and being tapped for the much ballyhooed Dazzler series. Dazzler, of course, was commissioned of Marvel Comics by Casablanca Records (in the Kiss comics mold) where-in Marvel would produce a series and Casablanca would produce a singer and Filmation would produce a movie, and thus a great cross-cultural hysteria would consume the nation. Only the comic series actually saw the light of day, obviously, and JRJr left Dazzler to focus on ASM and Uncanny X-Men, co-creating Hobgoblin and Forge. He then began working on Daredevil at the end of the 80's, post-Frank Miller.

Romita has been outspoken on this era of his career, and says that stardom found him before he had fully matured as an artist, and is most proud of his work on his second stint on Amazing Spider-Man, with writer J. Michael Straczynski - creator of Babylon 5 and staff writer on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, the 80's Twilight Zone reboot, Real Ghostbusters, and Murder, She Wrote.