Best Cover EVER: Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man

(Originally published on Forbidden Planet International blog, November 4, 2012, edited by Richard Bruton.)

So, what is the best cover EVER? That’s the question we’ve been asking over the last few months. And of course, everyone has a different answer… which is great, because that means we can show you lots of wonderful comic cover art when various comic people tell you all about their own personal best cover EVER.

This time we have Michael Carroll; author and one of the current Judge Dredd scribes charged with the daunting task of following up John Wagner’s epic Chaos Day storyline.

Carroll’s current comic project (alongside Dredd) is his first US-published comic, Jennifer Blood: First Blood, coming out this autumn from Dynamite Comics. It’s the 6-part prequel to the Jennifer Blood series created by Garth Ennis, and continued by Al Ewing. His sci-fi saga The New Heroes (or Quantum Prophecy in the US) is up to Book 6; Stronger.

Now, over to Michael and a cover many of us will remember fondly….

Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel/DC, 1976

Cover by Carmine Infantino (layout), Ross Andru (finishes & pencils), and Dick Giordano (inks).

I was ten years old when this mega-sized comic was published in 1976, old enough to know that Superman and Spider-Man belonged to different companies. The cover price was a whopping 75p (which, with tax, came to 82 1/2p over here in Ireland), and that was way more than I could afford. I think my pocket-money was about 10p per week. Took me ages to save up for it, but it was worth the struggle. I still have my copy, and it’s in pretty good condition considering that it’s thirty-six years old. It’s certainly aged better than I have.

In those days I was always more of a Marvel fan than a DC fan, mostly because of the Marvel UK comics, so I was a little hurt that Superman got top billing, but secretly pleased that Spider-Man himself is very slightly larger than Superman on the cover.

Written by Gerry Conway, the story is a wonderful slice of mid-70s superhero silliness… Doc Ock has a giant tentacled spaceship thingy called The Flying Octopus, Lex Luthor zaps Spidey with a special “red-sun radiation” ray-gun that temporarily gives him enough strength to wallop Supes around (even at ten years old, I did wonder why Luthor never used that gun on himself), there’s a giant robot trying to demolish Metropolis (hey, when isn’t there a giant robot trying to demolish Metropolis?), J. Jonah Jameson talking shop with Morgan Edge, Clark Kent and Peter Parker encountering each other in their civvies, a giant tidal wave, a space-station… this comic has it all!

The artwork – Ross Andru on pencils, Dick Giordano on inks – is great, with lots of double-page spreads and figures large enough for a ten-year-old to trace, especially the back cover which features our heroes standing back-to-back, arms folded, smiling out at the reader. Well, Superman is smiling but it’s hard to tell what expression Spidey is wearing under his mask. I like to imagine he’s got the same expression comic fans get when they meet one of their favourite creators at a convention: “Look! I’m standing next to this famous person like we’re old pals!” (Be honest: we’ve all done it… We spend a couple of nervous minutes – maybe not even that long – in the presence of someone like Jim Starlin, and forever after refer to him as “actually a very good friend of mine.”)

I know that many readers don’t have any time for intercompany crossovers, but Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man really struck a chord for me, and even now I have a soft spot for stories that breach the walls of their fictional universes. Which is why I had so much fun creating this particular image for a competition on the 2000AD Online message board a few years ago…