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Dan Slott, whose work has been synonymous with Spider-Man for the past decade, has announced that he will be leaving Marvel’s flagship title The Amazing Spider-Man. In an interview with Vulture, he said that his final issue will be The Amazing Spider-Man #801, likely released in July 2018.
“This was a decision that was made way long ago,” Slott told Vulture. “I gotta feel like a jerk, because whenever someone would interview me, or whenever it would come up on panels, I would look out at people and say with a stern look that I was never leaving.”
Specifically, he said that he’d decided when he would leave, and started laying plans for it, in 2014, during the Spider-Verse crossover. Slott had been eyeing the possibility that he might eclipse fellow Marvel writer Brian Michael Bendis’ record for total number of issues of a Spider-Man comic written — but decided that he’d never be able to catch up with Bendis’ ongoing output. Making it to issue #801 would be his final goal.
Then, of course, Bendis made the surprise announcement that he — who’d written exclusively for Marvel for 20 years — had accepted an exclusive contract with DC Comics.
“If I had known,” Slott told Vulture, seemingly with much humor, “if I had only known that Brian was gonna jump to DC I would’ve stayed on.”
Unlike his colleague, Slott will be staying on at Marvel, picking up another of the company’s tentpole characters: Iron Man. Slott simply said he’d be working on the character, without specifying whether he’d be kicking off a new series or picking up a currently running one. Whatever his Iron Man book is, it will likely kick off right around the time his run on The Amazing Spider-Man comes to a close this summer.
“More than any character in the Marvel universe, he is the self-made man,” Slott said of Iron Man to Vulture. “You take him out of that suit? He’s a normal man. He makes himself the superhero. He makes himself into the thing he wants ... his abilities came from his own two hands. He made it, and he stands amongst the gods because of what he can imagine and what he can make. That’s exciting.”
For the full, lengthy interview with Slott, check out Vulture.
