Paul Smith — Wonderous World

Original Art and The Artists

Paul Smith, Pin-up tribute to Steve Ditko, ASM Annual #2 (1965), 2001

Elegant, clean and striking: The definitive Paul Smith style captures Steve Ditko’s classic (and only) pairing of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange in Amazing Spider-man Annual #2 from September 1965.

Seeing the pairing of these now iconic Marvel cinematic characters creates some wistfulness here.

Last week, Disney postponed the feature film Black Widow once again. It’s now scheduled for May 2021, a full year behind schedule. 2020 will be the first year without a film in The MCU since 2009.

And, even when the films were less frequent in the early days, a Fox or Sony Marvel film typically filled in the gaps.

(No, I’m not going to act as if the recent New Mutants counts. More people have probably seen the officially unreleased Roger Corman Fantastic Four film than New Mutants.)

Now of course, Covid has thrown the entire upcoming film schedule into disarray. Eternals and Shang-Chi also moved, and swapped positions in the queue — for now.

After that, it’s a bit of a wild card.

The next three films should be Spider-Man 3, Doctor Strange 2, and Thor 4… but, we’ve seen differing revised release dates for those just in the last week.

Then, the schedule becomes even hazier, but let’s put off that discussion until next week.

Meanwhile, up next this coming week on the blog:

Spidey, Doc, and of course… Thor. See you soon.

The current digital version of the original splash from Amazing Spider-Man Annual #2 in 1965.
Many reprints, many colors, and a few layout and production changes, too. From left to right, the original annual coloring re-mastered for digital, the coloring and other changes from the “emergency” reprint in Doctor Strange #179, and the re-colored (again) reprint from Marvel Tales.
Here’s a bet: Ditko drew the cover for ASM Annual #2 well before he and Stan knew what the story would be. Otherwise… you’d probably see Doctor Strange actually on the cover. A few years later, and a deadline blown, Barry Smith was called on to provide a new cover for the story which was reprinted completely out of continuity in Doctor Strange #179.
Digital colors by Gerry Turnbull, and, in the MCU, Spidey and Doc work together to try to defeat Thanos in Avengers Infinity War. It doesn’t go well… at first.