Everything about John Romita Sr totally explained
John Romita, Sr. (better known as simply
John Romita) (born
January 24,
1930) is an
Italian-American comic-book artist best known for his work on
Marvel Comics'
The Amazing Spider-Man. He was inducted into the
Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2002.
Romita is the father of
John Romita, Jr., also a comic-book artist.
Biography
Early life and career
John Romita graduated from the
School of Industrial Art in 1947. He broke into comics on the seminal series
Famous Funnies. "Steven Douglas up there was a benefactor to all young artists", Romita recalled. "The first story he gave me was a love story. It was terrible. All the women looked like emaciated men and he bought it, never criticized, and told me to keep working. He paid me two hundred dollars for it and never published it — and rightfully so".
Romita was working at the
New York City company Forbes Lithograph in 1949, earning $30 a week, when a friend from high school whom he ran into on a subway train offered him $20 a page to
pencil a 10-page story for him as uncredited
ghost artist. "I thought, this is ridiculous! In two pages I can make more money than I usually make all week! So I ghosted it and then kept on ghosting for him", Romita recalled. "[He] showed me
Dick Ayers' splash page for a
Daredevil [and] asked me, 'What would you do with this page?' I showed him on a tracing paper what I'd do, and then he asked me to do a drawing of Daredevil the way I'd do it. I did a big drawing of Daredevil ... just a big, tracing-paper drawing of Daredevil swinging. And Stan loved it.}}
Romita began a brief stint on
Daredevil beginning with issue #12, initially penciling over
Jack Kirby's dynamic layouts as a means of learning Marvel's storytelling house style. It proved to be a stepping-stone for his famed, years-long pencilling run on
The Amazing Spider-Man. "What Stan Lee wanted was for me to do a two-part Daredevil story [#16-17,May-June 1966] with Spider-Man as a guest star, to see how I handled the character".
Additionally, Romita contributed to multi-artist jams in commemorative issues. He did a panel in
Captain America vol. 3, #50 (Feb. 2002), starring the first Marvel superhero he'd drawn; a portion of
Iron Man vol. 3, #40 (May 2001), although the hero wasn't one of the artist's signature characters; a panel for
Daredevil vol. 2, #50 (Oct. 2003); and a few pages featuring Karen Page in
Daredevil vol. 2, #100 (Oct. 2007), done in the style of the
romance comics he'd drawn decades earlier. Romita both penciled and inked the cover of
Daredevil vol. 2, #94 (Feb. 2007) in that same romance-comics style.
In the mid-2000s, Romita sat on the board of directors of the charity
A Commitment To Our Roots.
Footnotes
Further Information
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