Pat Olliffe — Spider-Man’s Fireworks (Part 1)
Untold Tales of Spider-Man #6, February 1996
The Human Torch and Spider-Man: peanut butter and chocolate? Or oil and water?
Maybe both.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the pairing of Marvel’s two original teenage superheroes. Peter Parker and Johnny Storm should probably understand each other better than anyone else in the Marvel Universe.
Naturally, they mostly annoy the hell out of each other.
Which is why I enjoy it.
This terrific Pat Olliffe / Al Vey cover comes from Untold Tales of Spider-Man, a modern retro gem of a series that filled in the gaps between Spidey’s earliest Lee/Ditko adventures. The Kurt Busiek-penned book had the tricky job of feeling new without stepping on sacred ground, and typically it pulled it off.
This cover does the same thing.
It feels classic without being phony-retro — just a clean, punchy Marvel image with Spidey and Torch doing what they do best: racing straight into trouble.
And that’s the fun of them together. Torch is all swagger, Spidey is all wisecracks, and they’re usually over their heads before the story even has a chance to get warmed up.
Pun intended.
Fun fact: It’s a “modern” series only if you’re an old-timer. It’s about 30 years old now, which means it’s roughly as far from us as the original Ditko stories were from it.
Sigh.
