Decade after decade, how time flies when you spend your days fighting crime and saving the world from evildoers. It seems like just yesterday I was writing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the wall-crawler, and now, faster than you can tell”slamit’s 10 years later and yet another Spider-Man storybook is on the shelves.
Spider-Man: A Decade-by-Decade History and Celebration of the Web-Slinger is the latest tome to document the life and times of Spidey from his inception to the latest Marvel/Sony films. It’s a beautiful coffee table-sized book with bright colors and interesting behind-the-scenes stories, but it also contains inaccuracies and awkward artistic choices.
The biggest mistake comes from the back cover of the advance copy of the book I reviewed, which states that Spider-Man first appeared in the Incredible Fantasy #15 comic in 1961. In fact, the comic was released in the early summer of 1962 (not 1961) with an August cover date. Not a great start for a book celebrating the hero’s story.
Published by Epic Ink, written by Robert Greenberger and Peter A. David, and updated by Matthew K. Manning, this Spidey history book is overall entertaining and fun to watch while reliving some of the robot’s greatest stories. exploration, both in his comics and in his creative adventures.
When it comes to those weird art choices, for example, there’s almost an entire page dedicated to Gil Kane’s Warlock art, which is out of context and has almost nothing to do with Spider-Man. Maybe they included it because Warlock is rumored to appear in one of the upcoming Marvel movies? It’s just a weird addition to a Spidey book.
Another weird page has a full cover reprint of Giant-Size X-Men #1 in the Spider-Man 90s section, when this X-book came out in 1975. Again, I don’t know what one has to do with the other.
It’s almost as if those weird graphic locations were used as filler, which should never have been necessary. (If you want to talk about the X-Men, why not show them teaming up with Spidey?)
Finally, another small complaint, this book lacks any kind of index, which could have been very useful to go back and use the volume as a historical resource.
All in all, it’s not a bad book, but if you already have a similar volume (or volumes) in your collection (and there are several others like this), you won’t find much new here.
This book will be released on October 11, 2022.
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