Comic artist John Romita has passed away.
January 24, 1930 – June 12, 2023
John Romita, Jr. broke the sad news that his father had passed away:
My father, John Romita passed away peacefully in his sleep this Monday morning. He is a legend in the art world and it would be my honor to follow in his footsteps. Please keep your thoughts and condolences here out of respect for my family.
He was the greatest man I ever met.
The Guardian, ComicBook.com, Multiversity Comics, Comic Book Resources, Smash Pages, among other news and comics sites have published obituaries and career reviews of John.
A comic artist for the entire second half of the 20th Century (and into the 21st) artist John Romita will forever be famed for taking over the Spider-Man comic book in 1966 and visually making the character his own.
It was John Romita’s Spider-Man that I grew up with and his will always be THE Spider-Man for me.
Jim Keefe, who wrangled a 2002 Flash Gordon comic strip page out of John, has long been a Romita admirer.
John was The Amazing Spider-Man comic strip artist from its beginning in 1977 until 1980.
Facebook and Twitter are being filled with praise and tributes and memories of John.
Can you imagine following Ditko on Spider-Man? And then not just succeeding, but, arguably, _surpassing_ him as the definitive Spider-Man artist? I know, I know, Ditkoheads out there will rant and rave up and down bla bla bla, but if you ask someone off the street to point to the “way” they think Spider-Man “looks,” chances are they won’t point at Ditko’s (or McFarlane’s); they will point at Romita’s. I don’t think I’ve ever looked at Romita’s take on any character and thought, “Yeah, he missed on that one.” He just nailed it like clockwork every time. What a truly rare combination of slick professionalism and inspired artistry. Godspeed to one of the definitive comic book artists of all time and forever.
*Keefe got ROMITA?!?! How did I not know this?! Way to go, Jim!
I loved John from his first DAREDEVIL issues before he was given SPIDER-MAN, BUT the saddest thing to me is that John worked for DC from ’58-’65 (after Marvel temporarily shut down in the fifties when their distributor was forced out of business by ant-trust law) and all they gave him were romance comics to draw. They were impeccably drawn and quite beautiful, but no self-respecting males read them as kids. Just imagine if he’d been given BATMAN to draw instead–just as comics history was forever after altered when DC let Jack Kirby go to Marvel in 1959, they really didn’t know who they had. At least they let Gene Colan out of his romance cage to draw some SEA DEVILS stories as an experiment before he too foiund a home at Marvel.