Defalco Update on Lost Spider-Man Graphic Novel

A couple weeks ago I brought you an image from a 1990 issue of Marvel Age where it advertised a graphic novel called Spider-Man: Web of Fotune. Peter David was writing it, Ron Frenz was on pencils and John Romita Senior was the inker. That’s three of my favorite creators so I was really curious to find out why it was never finished. I reached out to Tom DeFalco who has worked with artist Ron Frenz for years and he just sent me an update on it. Here’s his e-mail to me. 

“Hi, Brad!

 

I finally remembered to ask Ron Frenz about this Spider-Man graphic novel.

 

According to Ron, this assignment was given to him with the understanding that there was no hard deadline and that he could do it in his so-called “spare time”. You have to remember that Ron was pretty popular back-in-the-day and he was usually juggling a few pressing deadlines at any given moment.

 

Anyway, Ron said that he would complete a batch of pages for this project and then–to his surprise–learn that the project had been shifted to a new editor, He’d ask around until he learned who the new editor was and then deliver his pages. This kept going on until Ron was unable to find out who was in charge of the project and decided to wait until some editor contacted him. None ever did.

 

Ron isn’t sure how many pages he completed, but he understands that John Romita, Sr. did inks (or partial inks) on quite a few of them. Needless to say, Ron is curious when–if ever–he’s going to get his share of the penciled pages back.

 

That’s all I was able to learn.

Tom D.”