Q&A with James Meeley

Which piece in your gallery is your favorite and why?

You only want to know, so you can denigrate it or ask me to sell to you for a loss. So, forget it!

Please tell us a little about yourself.

You don't give a tinker's damn about me. Any info you get will only be used by you to try and take advantage of me in some way.

How long have you been collecting comic art and what prompted you to start?

Long enough to know that the hobby is full of averistic clowns, looking to bleed a collector dry, and chintzy cheapskates, who think a good bargain is never good enough.

How do you display/store your collection at home?

Why? So when you try to burglarize me you'll know what to look for and where to find it? No way!

What are your top five most wanted original pages or commissions?

Yeah, so you can grab them yourself and then "offer" them to me for some jacked up price that no sane person would ever pay. I wouldn't tell you the time of day it was, let alone something like this!

Grail

Web Of Spider-Man Annual #4, page 52 (1988) - Tribute To Kraven's Last Hunt

In your comic reading lifetime, much of the great stories and art you see will eventually kind of blur into one giant mass of memory. The specifics will be lost and sometimes even the generalities, too. But there comes along, every so often, a story or image, which is just something so special and powerful, that it almost seers itself onto your brain. Something that seems to become a touchstone, not only to the book you saw it in, but to comics in the broadest sense. This image is of just such a type for me!

This illustration was used as part of a pin-up section for a "year in review" of Spider-Man. There were many great pieces used in it, but this one, above pretty much all the others, is what stood out to me the most. This one was used to tribute to the storyline of "Kraven's Last Hunt." The Art Nouveau style of the backgrounds immediately caught my eye. Then, the pose of Spider-Man, almost as if he was a lifeless marionette on strings, waiting for someone to pull on them to give him life, makes for a very potent image and plays directly to how he was treated in that storyline. It brings out a very visceral emotion, when you view it in person. It's part of what made it have such an indelible imprint on me, during my early comic reading days. For me, this is probably one of the best Spider-Man pieces, and probably overall pieces, artist Mike Harris has ever done (something the artist himself agrees with me on).

But you can only imagine my surprise, when I learned from Mike Harris that this great piece was never intended for the purpose in which it was ultimately used. He told me that its original purpose was to be used as a cover for the "Gang War" storyline in Amazing Spider-Man (in issues #284-288, for those curious about what issues those would be) a couple of years earlier. He said he was a big fan of artist Alphonse Mucha, who worked in the Art Nouveau style, which was most popular between 1890 and 1910, and was known for producing illustrations, advertisements, decorative panels, as well as designs, which became among the best-known images of the period. The wreath of flowers in the background, were not meant to signify a burial, as was done to Spider-Man in "Kraven's Last Hunt," but to infer the villain called the Rose, who was a major figure in the "Gang War" storyline. He said the editor at the time was very excited about this image Mike created. As for why it never got used, Mike speculated that it likely got put into a drawer by that editor and then forgotten about, until someone unearthed it a couple years later and repurposed it for this Spider-Man annual. Just one of those funny happenstances, that occur more often in the world of comics than we ever know about. Ah, what might have been...

As 2023 quickly comes to a close, we always like to reflect back on the year that was. And so, what better way for me to do that with my comic art acquisitioning for the year, than to end it with a piece that was part of a "year in review" segment itself? That it also happens be a piece that is one of the most memorable images of my earliest days as a comic reader, only makes it that much more significant. The word "grail" is often thrown around a bit too liberally in this hobby, but for me, this is a piece that certainly qualifies for just such a description. What a perfect way to ring out the year!

About The Owner

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Member Since: December 2004
Last Login: April 2026
Website: https://www.youtube.com/@SequentialTreasures
Country: UNITED STATES
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Grail

Web Of Spider-Man Annual #4, page 52 (1988) - Tribute To Kraven's Last Hunt

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