This took way longer than I was hoping it would. After agonizing over what I was going to do for the upcoming HEROES CON program book (you saw some of the sketches I was mulling over in earlier posts), I came up with an idea. Since one of the themes for this year’s con is the SPIDER-MAN BLACK of the new SPIDER-MAN 3 movie, I thought it would be fun to recreate the cover I did for my first issue of FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN, only with SPIDER-MAN in the black costume instead of his traditional red and blues. I decided that I would try to do this as one of my ‘blog-style’ sketches and work it up in blue and graphite pencil. Unfortunately, I didn’t like the way it was turning out. I tried to trace the original cover image and just change the costume details to the black version. It LOOKED traced and very stiff and lifeless. Then a light bulb went off over my head, and I thought of just doing a rough re-creation of that cover…. but giving it the SPIDER-HAM twist. I’ve had a lot of fun drawing different superhero characters in the ‘HAM’ style… and I really enjoyed drawing the cover and 6 pages from last year’s SPIDER-HAM special. So combining the two elements into a humorous take on that cover seemed like a fun idea. I like the way it came out.