Amazing Spider-Man #700 To Have Steve Ditko Variant Cover

Before you get too excited by the title, no; Steve Ditko has not suddenly pried open the door to his New York studio, gone to embrace Stan Lee in his hospital bed, started using Atlas Shrugged as a cutting board and taking commissions from all comers.

No, instead Marvel has found and restored an unused version of the original cover from Amazing Fantasy #15 *, produced by Ditko presumably before that issue was released in 1962, and announced that they will be using it as a variant cover for Amazing Spider-Man #700.

We’ve known for a while that there was gonna be a Ditko variant cover to the book, but a full-sized image hasn’t been available until now, when Newsarama got a hold of it. So feast your eyes…

…and now that you’ve seen it, you don’t need to be one of those dildos who hectors the owner of my local comic store, who knows me by name and asks me not to pretend that assless chaps are a “variant cover,” to over-order the book so you can get your hands on it. There’s been a lot of hemming and hawing in the comics press about the potential detriments to the comics market that variant covers might be causing, and considering all I know about comics retailing is that it takes a special kind of hardy capitalist to not call the police when I enter the place, I’m not qualified to comment on that. But what I can say is: variant covers are, almost exclusively, fucking stupid. You can’t put lipstick on a pig, and all the polybagged die-cut chromium flake in the world isn’t gonna make, say, Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 anything but an unreadable mess. Buy the comic, read the comic, enjoy the comic (or don’t), and make your kid pay for his or her own Goddamned college education. That is all.

Still and all, it’s nice to see Ditko get a concrete nod like this for his role in creating Spider-Man on what will be the last issue of the book… you know, until it is inevitably relaunched with a new first issue, possibly named The Superior Spider-Man. Probably with 37 different variant covers.

The Amazing Spider-Man #700 will be in comic stores, variant covers and all, in December.

(via Newsarama and ComicBook.com)

* Which reminds me: I’ve always wondered if the only reason Spider-Man’s flagship book was called The “Amazing” Spider-Man was because he came out of the anthology Amazing Fantasy. Considering that comic series was called the somewhat, shall we say misleading, Amazing Adult Fantasy up until that fifteenth issue, I can never stop thinking that this character might have had a very different history had its parent book been named, say, Perverse Fantasy, or perhaps Titillating Fantasy. But fuck it; what’s done is done.