Spider-Man has been dazzling audiences with his selfless heroics, incredible acrobatics, and unforgettable supporting cast for over 60 years. This complex and immersive legacy is part of what the wallcrawler’s many fans love about him, but for newcomers, it can be more than a little intimidating. How do you summarize such a legacy into a single volume that anyone can understand and appreciate?
I interviewed Patrick A. Reed, author of the upcoming book Spider-ManTotal Universe, about just that.
At 800 pages, you might expect Spider-Man Total Universe to be comprehensive. Not quite! While it does cover just about every major development and character debut since Spidey himself first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15, Reed describes the book as more of a “mixtape” or a “road map that shows the essential landmarks and some can’t-miss sites that I want to steer people toward.”
To create that road map, you first need to find an author who already knows Spider-Man inside and out. Reed certainly fits that bill.
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“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Spider-Man,” he told mecartoons, and merchandise, Reed eventually worked directly with Marvel on various museum exhibitions, including the Spider-Man: Beyond Amazing show at Chicago’s Griffin Museum of Science + Industry. After that, “it seemed like a natural next step to do a deep dive into the comic book history!”
Even for a lifelong fan like Reed, the prospect of going through the “literally tens of thousands of individual issues” that Spider-Man has featured in over the years was a little intimidating. And yes, he did read (or reread) all of them.
“I started with an outline of things I knew I wanted to include, but then constantly revised and reworked it as I went,” he explained. Reed added that the process was just as informative for him as he hopes the resulting book will be for readers: “[O]nce I sat down and started going through the many thousands of issues I was going to cover, I found new appreciation for a bunch of stories, discovered some that I’d forgotten, and even came across some that I’d somehow never read before that became immediate favorites that I realized I needed to pull out and showcase.”
In addition to identifying which storylines to cover and how to write about them, Reed was instrumental in deciding what cover images and panels to include in the book. This included where to include them so that readers could better understand and appreciate the plotlines, artistry, and character moments that make Spider-Man comics so memorable.
In this aspect of the book’s production, he received substantial assistance. He credits Becky Koh, his editor, for suggesting image opportunities he missed. Also helpful was book designer Katie Benezra, for perfectly showcasing each image and “dropping in a bunch of graphics that I can’t [take] a single bit of credit for (as much as I wish I could).”
Unlike superheroing, which Spidey typically manages well enough on his own, making a book is a team effort. The encyclopedic nature of Spider-Man Total Universe makes it easy to recognize that fact: from Stan Lee and Steve Ditko to modern-day super-fans like Reed, the creation and continuation of Spider-Man’s story is the work of countless people who all feel a connection to the same amazing character.
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