Amazing Spider-Man #299 pg 15 (Todd McFarlane/Bob McLeod) pub'd 1987

My favorite McSpidey pages are a. Venom or b. Black Suit Spidey. While the last 24mos have turned up more McSpidey pages than I've seen in 5yr periods, it is still exceedingly hard to find Venom or McBlackSpidey. I haven't seen one since 2019. When this page serendipitously turned up, I 'pounced' and was fortunate to get a handle on it and am excited to add it to the McSpidey vault!

After Todd's run on the Incredible Hulk at Marvel, they decided with ASM 298 to give him a run at the primary Spidey book. Todd learned on his previous gigs that it was his strong preference to ink his own work (later he would want to write too of course). I don't know the story here, maybe there were concerns on his ability to hit deadlines with pencils+inks, but in the first 2 issues here, Bob McLeod did the inks. By ASM300 Todd would be doing both pencils+inks as he worked to refine his signature McSpidey style that really put him on the map.

Said another way, this page is only 35 pages into his ~900 page run (across 45 issues) on ASM/SM and in this period he was really in his jam and pushing to change the Spider-Man character to his style to create buzz. I imagine some folks at Marvel fought him the entire way.

To me McLeod over McFarlane is as if McFarlane and Sal Buscema combined styles - a tighter look on the characters married with spaghetti webbing.

Ok, enough backstory! Let's look at the page.

Top panel - we see a truck letting off a hitchhiker
Left panel - our hitchhiker is walking towards a destination called ESU
Middle panel - Whoa - he has found a facility in the middle of BFE with guards, he makes a familiar sounding quip.
Right panel - Holy cow, that's Peter Parker pulling a Clark Kent costume reveal. But wait, that's not the usual Spidey costume we're used to?
(Note, this Pete 'look' is interesting as it's def pre McFarlane vibe, so you can imagine McLeod inking it to look more like a 'standard' marvel type of a look. Or perhaps Todd knew he had to pick his battles and it was best to start changing up webs and Spidey vs. Pete.

Bottom panel is the pay-off->

TWHIP

Black Suit Spidey (Venom?) with some of the first Spaghetti webbing, uses his webs to get into the secret facility by webslingin' in the trees.

While not quite the 'broken hip' classic McSpidey pose, it's a dynamic pose between webs that Todd treats us to here.

Color page from the book is in alt images.

This is the third page I've been able to find from 299

Signed by Todd in the bottom, I hope you enjoy this page as much as I am!