How the Greatest Comic Collab Came Together

“It wasn’t easy, but enthusiasm can move mountains,” wrote Marvel Comics publisher Stan Lee in his introduction to Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man. “Comics,” agreed Carmine Infantino, head honcho at DC, “may in this one momentous undertaking prove détente can be more than theory.”

If comparisons between caped superheroes and nuclear superpowers appear overwrought today, it is difficult to overstate the impact that Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man created, among the impressionable, when it hit newsstands and spinner racks 50 years ago this month. The book’s reissuance in a facsimile edition—at 13 times the original $2 cover price—evokes what the Wall Street Journal termed “a momentous event in the comic book world.”

Friends for decades, Infantino and Lee had long discussed a crossover; but until the Supes-Spidey matchup—conceived by David Obst, Lee’s literary agent—the closest thing had been a DC-Marvel edition of The Wizard of Oz. The same attentiveness to sequencing and apportionment employed in great-power diplomacy was brought to the project’s staffing: DC’s Gerry Conway, then the only man who had scripted both characters, was chosen for writing honors; Marvel veteran Ross Andru, the only artist who worked on both characters at that point, drew the dream penciling assignment; Dick Giordano, long associated with DC, would ink Andru’s pencils; and so on.

Of this “most asked-about comics magazine of all time,” an 83-page extravaganza printed on 11×14 paper in an initial print run of 400,000 copies, newspapers reported brisk sales; for a successful book today, the average print run is 50,000. Ultimately, the product embodied Marshall McLuhan’s maxim that the medium is the message, for the fact of the crossover, its mere existence, proved more exciting than its contents.

In a trite tale of attempted world domination punctuated by snappy dialogue, extended fight scenes, and wanton destruction of downtown locales (“Most of the demolished buildings were empty,” a newscaster assures us), chapters alternate between the perspectives of the two heroes and their alter egos, Clark Kent and Peter Parker; their respective romantic interests, Lois Lane and M.J. Watson; and the book’s other historic team-up, between Marvel’s Dr. Octopus and DC arch-villain Lex Luthor.

Trickery by the bad guys and their use of a “red sun radiation device,” under which Superman loses his superpowers, lead Spider-Man to believe erroneously that the Man of Steel has gone rogue and to batter him, high above Columbus Circle, for four pages. Once the heroes recognize they’ve been duped, they join forces to reverse a tsunami—”a super tidal wave,” as “Stan & Carmine” inform us with an asterisk—that Luthor creates with an unspecified “alteration” to the wiring aboard Comlab One, an “orbiting communications laboratory [that] combines the best features of Comsat and Skylab.” Also unraveled is Luthor’s blackmail demand of $10 billion (roughly $58 billion in current figures).

Those perennially in search, in older texts, of creeping signs of technology’s advance will rejoice in the presence here of computer consoles and modules, data terminals and programming circuits, sonic pulses and high-intensity lasers. Of the contemporaneous celebrities referenced—ranging from Norman Mailer to Henny Youngman—only Dan Rather survives today. And a brief diversion to Tanzania provides cringe-worthy cameos for Chagga and Nu’Chaka, members of the Masai, a nomadic Black warrior tribe, dressed in primitive-looking African garb.

“Greetings,” the son of Krypton announces, standing next to Spider-Man in the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro and nowhere explaining why he imagines his interlocutors would speak English. “My friend and I have come from the sky, seeking two evil men.” “You’re Superman, aren’t you?” Nu’Chaka interrupts with a smile. “I saw photos of you when I studied in London.”

In retrospect, Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man marked a turning point in popular culture. “We both knew [this] would someday have to happen,” Lee wrote, because “all fandom was clamoring” for it; and young readers such as me, who turned eight in 1976 and cherished the book, believed it owed solely to the inexorable logic of comics’ two biggest heroes going mano-a-mano.

In truth, the pairing represented a union of two powerful but imperiled economic forces. Now that special effects in films and TV could replicate the fantastic scenes that, up to then, only comics conjured, DC and Marvel realized they needed to adopt a bigger-is-better mentality to survive. The next few years saw the release of Star Wars and Christopher Reeve’s Superman, triggering tsunamis of licensing and crossover marketing, followed by the Batman and Spider-Man franchises and an explosion at San Diego Comic Con: a once-cliquish event that now draws 135,000 attendees and $160 million in revenue. Before January 1976 was out, Infantino was dethroned, replaced by 28-year-old wunderkind Jenette Kahn, who ushered DC into the age of blockbusters.

An industry source told me the facsimiles “are meant to resemble copies hot off the press when they were first released without any artificial aging techniques.” Accordingly, AI was not used; instead, the source said, the editors reviewed the original archival film on servers and “cleaned it up,” then recolored it using the original issue as a reference. Any discernible differences in color quality, the source insisted, are due to “modern printing technology on new paper that hasn’t undergone 40+ years of UV damage and fading.”

The insistence on fidelity meant one shortcoming was preserved. Ross Andru was nearing 50 when the crossover materialized, a journeyman whose unmemorable work had sustained Wonder Woman, The Amazing Spider-Man, and other titles for two decades. Andru’s finished pencils for this book, completed despite a worsening eye problem that affected his depth perception, went to Dick Giordano, a preeminent editor and artist, for inking duty.

In those years Giordano was partnered with Neal Adams, the era’s most celebrated comic book illustrator, at Continuity Associates, the small Manhattan studio Adams had founded to work on comics and accept more lucrative jobs in commercial advertising. Adams’s singular mastery of anatomy, facial expression, layout, camera angles, and coloring had revolutionized the product that comics fans beheld, as well as the processes that placed that product before them. When Giordano received the Andru pages, Neal noticed them on Dick’s drawing board—and recoiled.

As Giordano confirmed to writer Daniel Best, Andru’s biographer, in 2004, Adams quietly redrew most of Andru’s Superman figures. Giordano said Adams did so without permission; Adams told Best he did secure permission, from both Andru and Giordano, and that both were “delighted” by the improvements to the musculature, foreshortening, and cross-hatching seen on the Man of Steel. “I kept it Ross as best I could,” Adams said, “but if you look real close…”

That wasn’t necessary. Even untrained readers spotted when Andru’s clunky renderings yielded to the superior fluidity and definition that was unmistakably the work of Neal Adams; now as then, however, Adams remains uncredited. So, too, do Marvel superstar John Romita, who redrew the faces of Parker and Watson; and Terry Austin and Joe Rubinstein, younger artists who handled backgrounds and inking chores.

Though so much of the superhero ecosystem has changed since 1976, the genre’s appeal endures. “It seems whenever we have a depression, the superheroes hit again,” Infantino told the Oakland Tribune while promoting the crossover. “You read Superman and you dream.”

James Rosen is chief Washington correspondent at Newsmax and the author, most recently, of Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986-2001.