32 years ago, Marvel Comics Spider-Man number one, written and illustrated by Todd McFarlane sold  2.5 million copies.

The series originally was conceived as a showcase for  McFarlane. McFarlane, who until then had only been known as an artist, was hugely popular at the time and the series was created by editor Jim Salicrup so that McFarlane could pencil, ink, and write a Spider-Man title of his own, starting with the “Torment” storyline.

The series was a massive sales success, with over 2.5 million copies printed.^[ McFarlane stayed on the title until issue #16 (November 1991) in which the story was printed in a landscape format. He created the character Spawn and help found Image Comics in 1992.He was succeeded on the title by Erik Larsen, who had succeeded McFarlane on The Amazing Spider-Man two years earlier, and would later join him in the founding of Image.

The following year, Rob Liefeld’s X-Force #1 (August 1991) went on to sell 3.9 million, then a couple of months later Jim Lee’s X-Men #1 (October 1991) sold 7.5 million copies, these sales being driven by heavy use of collector cards and variant covers. Within a year these superstar artists left Marvel to form Image Comics off the back of the success on these titles, and developments started in these comics led to the speculator boom of the mid-1990s.

However, according to Dave Wallace at Comics Bulletin, “commercial success didn’t equate to critical acclaim for McFarlane’s new venture, and many found the artist’s attempts at writing to be clumsy, unsophisticated and pretentious” and that “[t]here was a frequent sense – as with many writer-artists – that McFarlane’s scripts were being written in such a way as to give himself something ‘cool’ to draw, rather than to provide a particularly compelling or satisfying story.”

The writing was also picked up by Alex Rodrik at Comics Bulletin, who highlighted the lack of consistency in the narration (switching from first person to third-person), concluding that “Torment is nothing more than a showcase of Spider-Man’s fluid movement, and while the art is wonderful, pages (at times) are congested and indulgent.”

Even for fans of the series at the time the series has not stood the test of time. Augie De Blieck Jr. confessed that “[w]hen they first came out, I was a mind-numbed McFarlane fan” but reading the trade paperback he found that “the money shots of Spidey over the city and fighting for his life still look as energetic and lively as ever, the rest of the pages feel claustrophobic” and that Parker’s lettering was “awful.”

McFarlane admitted his first run at writing a series had problems:

by the time Spider-Man #1 came out, I’d been in the business, five years, six years, I’d done hundreds if not thousands of pages of art at that point. I’ve been able to get the kinks out of my drawing. While Spider-Man #1 is the beginning of me starting to put kinks on the page writing, which you have to then eventually, like all writers do, get through. I was in that weird situation on that first issue where, arguably, the worst story I ever write is going to be the one that most people bought. But I never said I was going to come wholly formed here. But I believe that, as time went by, two, three, four years later, that the writing became adequate at that point, and was better than the writing in Spider-Man #1.^[10]

Games Radar:

All of that makes Spider-Man #1 more than just a massive success – it’s the single comic book most responsible for the comic culture of the ’90s.

The cover is so iconic in fact, that a variant cover for December’s Batman #118 that paid homage to the classic image went sales gangbusters – even spawning (sorry) silver and gold foil variants of its own, similar to the metallic variants of McFarlane’s original Spider-Man #1 cover.

But the lasting influence of Spider-Man #1 doesn’t stop at the cover imagery. In fact, the issue and the impact it had might be the defining comic book of the entire ’90s.

McFarlane set the tone for comics’ wildest, most extreme decade right at the start of the ’90s – including setting the stage for the rise of the comic book speculation boom, redefining the role of artists in comics, and even directly leading to the founding of Image Comics.

How does one comic book accomplish all that?

Well, launching with sales figures of around 2.5 million copies (according to industry trackers Comichron) doesn’t hurt. Nor does putting arguably Marvel’s most popular hero in a fresh new title written and drawn by arguably the most popular Marvel artist of the era (and one of the most popular comic artists ever, at this point). And it’s safe to say that kicking off the title with numerous variant covers probably made an impact.

Still, the real power of McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 – and why the imagery and style of McFarlane’s Spider-Man still resonate – goes beyond the numbers, and even beyond what’s on the page in the issue. It’s all about the energy and excitement that Spider-Man #1 brought to the comic book community and the sense of renewed and refreshed possibilities in the Marvel Universe that came with it.

Not to mention the fact that, at the end of the day, Spider-Man #1 really lived up to the hype.

Comic industry go boom

Spider-Man #1’s most obvious effect on the comic book industry of its day can be seen in its sales numbers – but what those numbers meant not just for Marvel Comics’ bottom line, but for the progression of comic books into larger and larger print runs and sales figures for major releases takes a little more context to understand.

In the early days of the comic book industry, it was not unheard of for comics to reach circulation and sales numbers into the millions. For one thing, they were cheap, even for the ’30s and ’40s when comics became a popular medium. And for another, TV wasn’t around yet. So for kids comparing nickels in the early 20th century, a comic book you could hold onto and pass around was often a more lucrative proposition than spending their coin on a movie serial that would fade into memory as soon as the theater lights went up.

Not only did Spider-Man #1 wind up selling around 2.5 million copies (a massive feat both then and now), but it led to a new, shifting culture of comic book collecting in which the resale value of a given comic was as important to some fans as the actual contents of the issues were to others, and in which some fans bought numerous copies of individual issues that were perceived to be likely to appreciate in value.

McFarlane’s success with Spider-Man skyrocketed not just sales of comic books even outside of Marvel, but led to an increase in the profile and fan regard for specific artists as the driving creative forces of comic books, even more than the writers in some cases.