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J Scott Campbell's Amazing Spider-Man #601 Cover Sells For $144,000

The pencil original artwork to J Scott Campbell's Amazing Spider-Man #601 cover from 2009 sells for $144,000 at auction

Published Sat, 30 Nov 2024 07:57:09 -0600

Article Summary

J Scott Campbell's Amazing Spider-Man #601 cover art sold for $144,000 at Heritage Auctions.
The cover art, dating back to 2009, stirred controversy for its portrayal of Mary Jane.
Critics argue the art exemplifies problematic depictions of female characters in comics.
J Scott Campbell reinterpreted the controversial pose in Marvel Comics #1000.

J. Scott Campbell's pencils for the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #601 sold at auction for $144,000. Heritage Auctions sold the item last week, and it is a high price for pencils for a cover. Usually, an inked cover would gain the bigger bucks.

"J. Scott Campbell Amazing Spider-Man #601 Mary Jane Cover Original Art (Marvel, 2009). One of the best-known Spider-Man covers of the 21st century! It's a poignant scene as Peter and Mary Jane's relationship is a hit-and-miss situation at this point. But it sure is a lovely cover! So lovely, it was also used as a lithograph print. Created in pure graphite on bright white Bristol board with an image area of 10.25" x 15.5". Signed/dated in the image, and again in the top right margin. Lightly toned and in Very Good condition."

This is how the cover to Amazing Spider-Man #601 looked back in 2009. Over time, it was picked on as a symbol of much that was wrong with comics. CalebH/Discordia (Head Editor of G33k P0p) posted,

"The cover… has made me angry since I first saw it, since it showcases everything wrong with the comics industry as a whole, not just Campbell's art. Mary Jane Watson is one of the strongest supporting characters in the Spider-Man universe, she runs her own club, she has saved Spidey countless times and even gained spider powers of her own in the Spider Island event. Yet here she is shown as being the stay at home wife who worries about her husband constantly and has nothing else to do, but still manages to contort her body to show off her impossibly thin body and other… features… Campbell has drawn a lot of Spider-Man covers over the years, not all of them are this bad, many are quite normal, others are worse. One key feature in most is that the woman is featured prominently, often from an angle that looks down on the woman. I could go full feminazi here and claim that this makes it so that the reader is looking down on women, but I won't. However, I will say that this angle is done so you're essentially looking down her shirt. There is no real hiding it. When a man is the main focus of a cover, the angle is usually facing straight forward, showing him looking all heroic, but the high up angle is used far too often for female characters, almost always in oversexualized positions."

While others tried to copy the pose in question with less than successful results. While other tried to redraw the cover to amend what they saw was weird, wrong or just off about the pose.

including the Hawkeye Pose meme, which sought to take exploitative images in comics and replace the figure with that of Hawkeye to demonstrate how comic book superheroes treated women characters very differently from men.

Ten years later, J Scott Campbell revisited that cover himself in Marvel Comics #1000. He redrew that pose himself, adding commentary from Mary Jane herself…