"You could say that we were a very animated family," says 45-year-old J.R., recalling his comics-dominated upbringing. On car trips the Romita family would dissect new plots and characters. On weekdays, at least until his father started working in Marvel's Manhattan offices, J.R. sometimes stole up to the attic to watch him draw.

He hadn't been interested in his father's earlier comics work -- romances, westerns and detective stories, mostly for DC -- but Spider-Man, which his father began drawing when J.R. was 8, captivated him immediately. Spidey was not only an action hero, he was tinged with counterculture and danger. "Spiders were on tattoos and motorbikes in the '60s. It was a very cool image," says the dark-haired and muscular J.R.

Romita Sr. got his start in comics at age 19, inspired by the work of Norman Rockwell. In fact, Romita Sr's nickname, Jazzy John -- "Stan Lee used to give us nicknames instead of a raise," he says -- was ironic; he was conventional, at least by Marvel standards. "They'd always tell me I should smoke a joint and loosen up," he laughs.

A lifelong penciller of rippling muscles and bosomy babes, the soft-spoken and courteous Romita Sr. refers to Shakespeare, the Gershwins and Irving Berlin in discussing his 50-plus years in what is often seen as a lowbrow form. Much of his ability to draw people, an unusual strength in the superhero genre, came, he says, from drawing romance comics: "I was able to do the girls so well, I could pay the mortgage!"

Romita Jr.'s strength, on the other hand, is storytelling, which he says was first instilled by watching films with his father, including classics like "Inherit the Wind," "Twelve Angry Men" and "On the Waterfront." A recent issue of Amazing Spider-Man even had no text whatever, just Romita Jr.'s dark, almost cinematic artwork.

Marvel, which pumps out 20 of the 25 top-selling comic books in America, has four Spider-Man titles, each of which sells about 80,000 copies monthly. The famed "Marvel method," which led to truly visual comics for the first time, was not exactly planned. Lee would often phone Romita Sr. and his other artists with nothing more than a brief outline; he hadn't written a script because he was working on so many titles at once.

The artists told the story first, then words were added. "You were forced to think very methodically," says Romita Sr. "We artists all became great storytellers because we were constantly thrown into the deep end."

The comics industry, and Spider-Man with it, has been rocky for years. After a peak in the '60s, when comics were sold in every corner store and supermarket -- and MTV, computer games and the Internet were many years away -- the form lost much of its luster. Younger, worldlier generations of kids were not hooked on the same adolescent boy-power fantasies that had held the '50s and '60s in thrall.

After the success of Tim Burton's "Batman" in 1989, a three-year binge of comic collecting reached ridiculous proportions -- until the inflated prices led inevitably to market collapse. At the silliest moment, Marvel printed 25 million copies of an X-Men title, its most popular. In 1993, U.S. comic sales were worth $850 million. Six years later that had fallen by more than two-thirds, and Marvel filed for bankruptcy.

There were creative mistakes in the Spider-Man series as well. Over the decades, the web-swinger had become too comfy; he married his sweetheart Mary Jane Watson and moved into a pleasant Manhattan apartment. Romita Sr. believes this was disastrous: "If you marry a superhero off, either the wife dies or it's the end of the character."

Marvel tried to make amends, eventually revealing that the married Spidey was a clone and that the real hero -- all his life issues intact -- had been offstage since 1975. Readers saw this for the cheap trick it was, and sales dropped to a 30-year low. Two years ago the tack was changed again. A new series, Ultimate Spider-Man, was launched at a hipper readership, with Parker reborn as a hip-hop fan with blond, spiked hair who works as an Internet webmaster. (Get it?)

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