Another one of the great comicbook legends has passed on and the only comfort is that John Romita at least lived to the ripe age of 93 and thus lived a full life while doing what he loved. We should all be that lucky.
Now as usual this post is late which is especially infuriating since I spent the last three days preparing everything for it so that I only need to go.
But this is not the first time one of my posts has been derailed just when I thought I had it all worked out. In this case it was the part about 38C - 24 - 33 science fucktion cult sirenKariWuhrer in the bonus section of my DEFENDERS / Joe Sinnott tribute post which first became longer and longer ( so I had to find more Kari Wuhrer pictures ) and then turned into a JUSTICE LEAGUE DETROIT feature that I could not finish Yesterday.
So I spent most of the day adding new material - like some original art by Tom Derenick or an episode of the 90s SWAMP THING tv show which also starred Kari Wuhrer - and just when I thought I could finally come to this post ( I was already wearing my AMAZING SPIDER - MAN issue 100 " The Spider - Or The Man ? "John Romita shirt in tribute ) I not only came across a lot of episodes of the aforementioned SWAMP THING tv show but also episodes of one of my guilty pleasures Acapulco H.E.A.T.
As longtime followers of the blog can attest these are very hard to come by - especially in high quality. And since I had written about that series and british 36C - 24 - 34 Busenwunder and PLAYBOY's Playmate Of The Month Of October in 1990 AlisonArmitage a.k.a. Brittany York in my Steve Rude / NEXUS tribute post I spent the last few hours going through the episodes to find the breast one to include in the post, downloading the episodes before they get deleted. Which for some strange reason takes infinitely longer than usual and I am still working on that as I am writing his. I am however down to seven episodes. Okay, now it's three.
Coming back to the genesis of this post for those of you wondering why it took me two days to get ready for this, since my old picture archive is currently in digital limbo the only John Romita pictures I had were those few I found while working on other posts. Which meant that if I wanted to make a decent John Romita tribute - and the man deserves nothing less - I had to look for more of John's work, preferably original artwork.
Most of these posts evolve organically depending on what I can find on the interwebs and since most of the material I had was from his ground breaking AMAZING SPIDER - MAN run with Stan " The Man " Lee ( it is often overlooked how much his writing contributed to the success of these titles ) and that was the series from which I found the most stuff.
Of course being the perfectionist that I am I also wanted to include the covers by german publisherWilliamsVerlag - since that was how I first read most of the Spider - Man stories - and since I thought that my readers outside of Germany might get a kick out of it I also threw in the covers from Bildschriftenverlag even if they did not publish all issues.
Now you might think that might be enough but I decided to add another wrinkle by including a few pages from the Bildschriftenverlag issues of DIE SPINNE and since I had the german pages I also had to include the original version. All of this would have been difficult enough under ideal circumstances but as regular blog visitors know my new laptop is built for anything except what you need to run a blog so to make things more interesting it decided to close all of the folders I was working on without warning which meant that all the previous preview pictures disappeared.
And I had to click on each picture one by one and they kept sliding back to the top of the folder which meant that I had to scroll constantly. But as you can see neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, nor laptop stays this blogger from the completion of these appointed post.
Anyway, while having not enough material before I started my research I now had to pick and choose what I would include and believe me it has not been easy. Usually I avoid material I have posted before but since this is a tribute post to a comicbook legend I invoked the statute that I can ignore that rule if the new material is of a higher quality then what I already posted. So for this post - which I suspect is just the first one of many - I went with some iconic scenes as well as my favourite moments.
to be continued
in memoriam