Legendary Marvel artist Alex Ross changed a key part of Peter Parker’s costume for Sam Raimi’sSpider-Man 2. Alex Ross was already a prolific comic book artist long before the golden age of Marvel movies kicked off.Ross even provided official concept art for Bryan Singer’sX-Menand Sam Raimi’sSpider-Man, which helped each movie find the first live-action, big-screen costumes for the heroes.
Alex Ross also returned to provide the art forSpider-Man 2’s opening credits, which summarize the events of the first movie. Ross' pieces are accurate toSpider-Man’s most memorable scenes, but there’s one major change that stands out.In his bookMarvelocity: The Marvel Comics Art of Alex Ross, Ross confesses he agreed to draw the credits as long as he didn’t have to include the costume’s raised webbing:
“I would just draw the shadow of it, to stay true to the way I thought it should look.”
Outside his work for Marvel movies,Alex Ross tends to draw every Marvel and DC characterwearing the most classic, timeless versions of their clothes and gear.Alex Ross has also stated that he"hated"the raised webbing in Sam Raimi’s rendition of Spider-Man’s costume.Ross prefers the classic John Romita homemade suit that reflects Peter Parker’s resourcefulness:
“I hated the raised webbing thing. So even in that, I never really did a shot of Spider-Man that matched what the costume was that they designed.
“Even though I can’t debate, that’s a beautiful design. It didn’t have enough [John] Romita in it for me to feel like the design I’d been desperate to see… I was kind of a difficult boy to deal with. Because I didn’t want to do the main character the way he was.”
Why Alex Ross' 2004 Spider-Man Art Works Without The Raised Webbing
Alex Ross Gives Spider-Man’s 2004 Movie Costume Subtle Texture
Indeed, Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man costume lacks its distinctively thick, shiny, and raised webbing pattern in Alex Ross’Spider-Man 2opening credits. However,as Ross explains in his bookMarvelocity, each image depicting the wall-crawler showcases an ever-so-subtle shadowed texture around the web lines. This creates the illusion that Spider-Man’s costume is made of a single material that’s wrinkled in the shape of the web.
Alex Ross' signature art style combines anatomically realistic characters with fully-faithful, classic costumes. While Ross' traditional costume design would be unpractical in live-action, it works quite well in illustrations.Mixed with Ross' art style, Tobey Maguire’s less detailed costume looks ripped straight out of a comic book page.
Alex Ross' 2004 Spider-Man Art Predicted The MCU’s Costume Design
Spider-Man’s Live-Action Costumes Have Evolved Past Raised Webbing
The addition of raised webbing helped Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man costumes look both realistic and faithful to the source material in the two-thousands and the twenty-tens. However, after two modern takes onSpider-Man’s iconic suit, Marvel Studios went back to basics.Tom Holland’s MCU Spider-Man costumes eschewed the raised webbing for a printed pattern.
The MCU’s Iron Spider suit is quite different from its comic book counterpart, but it uses a similar kind of webbing pattern to the one Alex Ross used forSpider-Man 2’s opening credits. Instead of raised webbing, it features subtle creases. Still, afterSpider-Man: No Way Home, the printed webbing pattern is here to stay.
