Torment: the first Todd McFarlane arc that changed Spider-Man

In August 1990, Marvel made an unusual bet: handing an entire title to an artist, with full control over the writing. The artist was Todd McFarlane, he was twenty-nine, and he had just spent two years on Amazing Spider-Man where his line had already transformed the way the character was drawn. The new title was called simply Spider-Man. Its first arc is called Torment, it runs across five issues, and it would become one of the best-selling objects in the history of the comic book.

August 1990: Marvel hands the keys to its star artist

The context matters if you want to understand what this arc represents. In the late 1980s, McFarlane was drawing Amazing Spider-Man and imposed a new silhouette: contorted poses, enormous mask lenses, and above all webs drawn as organic tangles rather than as the neat grids inherited from Steve Ditko and John Romita Sr.. That seemingly minor graphic detail became his signature.

Marvel then offered him what few artists ever get: a fourth monthly title devoted to the character, with him as both writer and illustrator. The editorial team was small - Rick Parker on letters, Bob Sharen on colours for the first three issues, McFarlane himself on the fourth, Gregory Wright on the fifth, Jim Salicrup editing. The five issues ran from August to December 1990.

What Marvel was buying was not a story. It was a name. And McFarlane knew it: he built Torment as a demonstration rather than as a classic narrative. That graphic demonstration still runs through the visuals sold today, from posters to tapestries.

The story: the Lizard, Calypso and a hunt through the sewers

The plot fits in a few lines. The Lizard reappears in New York and commits a series of murders that do not look like him at all. The man behind the monster, Doctor Curt Connors, has always been a tragic scientist - a researcher who loses control of his own creation, never a methodical killer. That shift is the engine of the arc, and it is all the more unsettling because we know the price his family has already paid, starting with his wife Martha.

The hero steps in, and gets beaten. The Lizard poisons him and throws him off the top of a building. That is the second surprise: the web-slinger spends much of the story weakened, feverish, unable to think straight. We then discover that Calypso, a voodoo priestess connected to the circle around Kraven the Hunter, is controlling the Lizard through hypnosis and driving him to kill.

The ending sees the hero overcome them both, believing the Lizard to be dying from the effects of the hold placed on his brain. The resolution is brief, almost rushed. Anyone looking for a dense plot will come away frustrated - and that has been a recurring criticism of this arc for more than thirty years.

Atmosphere before plot

What Torment does achieve is something else. The arc works like a horror film: little dialogue, entire pages without text, an obsessive repetition of the word doom as onomatopoeia, panels where the Lizard appears only in fragments. The reading is physical rather than narrative. It is a deliberate choice, and it explains why this arc still divides readers today.

To place that choice in the character's history, compare it with the arcs that do bet on dramatic construction: If This Be My Destiny, the death of Gwen Stacy or Kraven's Last Hunt. All three tell a story. Torment, by contrast, shows.

FIGURES AND COLLECTABLES

Spider-Man Figure

The dynamic pose McFarlane imposed on the character, turned into three dimensions for your display shelf.

69.90 €

Discover →

What this arc changed in the way the hero is drawn

The graphic legacy is the real contribution of these five issues. Three elements settled in for good, and you still find them today in the comics as much as on film posters and the posters sold in the shop.

Organic webs

Before McFarlane, webs were clean geometric lines drawn with a ruler. In his hands they became stringy, irregular masses, almost alive. The technique costs a considerable amount of drawing time, but it gives the character a texture nobody had attempted before him. That signature has spread well beyond its author.

The eyes of the mask

McFarlane enlarged the white lenses of the mask until they took up half the face, and warped them according to emotion. The mask became expressive even though it does not move - a feat that the animated adaptations and the replica masks have borrowed ever since.

The impossible poses

Crouched on a street lamp, torso twisted a hundred and eighty degrees, limbs folded like a spider's: the silhouette stops being human. It is probably the most visible, and the most imitated, contribution of that period. Contemporary collectable figures still carry the mark of it.

This visual vocabulary then spread across the whole medium. It came shortly before the graphic creation of Venom, whose definitive look McFarlane fixed - outsized jaw, lolling tongue, shapeless black mass - starting from the symbiote suit introduced in The Alien Costume Saga.

POSTERS AND WALL ART

Retro Spider-Man Poster

The retro 1990s line, framed: wall format, crisp printing, made to hang above your desk.

16.90 €

Discover →

The commercial success, and the bubble it set off

The figures for this launch remain among the highest ever reached by a comic book. The first issue sold around 2.5 million copies, which makes it one of the best-selling comics of all time. An order of magnitude that has become unreachable in today's market.

That total does not come from a single print run. Marvel issued the cover in several versions: a silver-ink edition printed at around 1.2 million, a polybagged silver variant at 125,000, a green newsstand edition at 800,000, a polybagged newsstand version at 125,000, plus reprints. The mechanism is explicit: push the same reader to buy the same issue several times over.

The start of the speculative era

It is precisely that mechanism that makes this launch a turning point. Multiple covers, inflated print runs and the idea that a comic book is an investment rather than something to read all took hold at that moment. The bubble that followed filled the early 1990s before bursting sharply, taking part of the specialist distribution network with it.

The second effect was industrial. Buoyed by this success, McFarlane left Marvel the following year with six other star artists to found Image Comics, a structure where creators keep ownership of their work. That break permanently changed the balance of power between publishers and creators. For the character's place in the history of Marvel, this episode is as significant a milestone as the sales themselves.

A word of caution, though, about what these figures do not say. Two and a half million copies shifted does not mean two and a half million readers: a large share was bought twice or three times over by the same people, and another share never left its polybag. Comparing that total with today's sales therefore makes only limited sense. What the bubble left behind is a merchandise market that never closed again - from collectable figures to mugs.

Should you read Torment today?

The answer depends entirely on what you are after. If you want a solid plot, characters who develop and a satisfying resolution, there are far better entry points - our selection of comics to start the Spider-Man universe with offers several, and the overview of the major story arcs places each one in the timeline.

If, on the other hand, you are interested in the history of the medium, this arc is a document. It shows the exact moment when the image takes precedence over the story in the mainstream comic book, and when the market tips towards speculation. You can find the result a failure and still recognise its importance: both judgements coexist in most readers, and that is what makes it interesting to read.

What to read next

To stay in the same graphic vein, the arc Planet of the Symbiotes extends the dark aesthetic of the period. To understand how the character crosses the decades without freezing in place, Spider-Man: Life Story offers the exact reverse shot: a story where everything is narrative construction. And for the other great arc built around a hunter, Hunted picks up the Kravinoff thread, while the inconsistencies in the major sagas put a few legends back in their place. The Lizard remains one of the few villains to exist both as villain figures and on t-shirts.

T-SHIRTS

Vintage Spider-Man T-Shirt

The retro 1990s artwork on heavy cotton: a straight cut that works just as well at a convention as on any ordinary day.

34.90 €

Discover →

McFarlane's place in the line of artists

To gauge what this arc shifts, you have to place it in a succession. Steve Ditko invented in 1962 a thin, nervous, almost unsettling silhouette, with spider-like poses that were already highly recognisable. John Romita Sr. took over in the mid-1960s and softened everything: the hero became athletic, handsome, closer to a romantic serial than to a story of dread. That is the version that settled in for two decades and still defines the popular image of the character.

McFarlane arrived after a long period of graphic stability. His break was not about the face or the musculature, but about movement and matter. Where his predecessors drew a man in a costume, he drew a creature. The proportions stretch, the joints bend in improbable directions, and the web stops being scenery to become a character in its own right.

That shift explains the longevity of his influence. Thirty-five years on, most mainstream depictions - posters, video games, animation, stickers and tapestries - borrow more from his grammar than from Ditko's or Romita's. The line has aged in places; the silhouette has not.

The Lizard, an opponent chosen for good reasons

The choice of opponent is no accident. The Lizard is the only major villain in the pantheon who is both monstrous and pitiful. Curt Connors is an amputee surgeon trying to regrow his arm by taking his cue from reptiles; his scientific success is also his sentence. Every appearance replays the same dilemma: the hero has to neutralise a creature while saving the man trapped inside it.

For an arc built on atmosphere rather than on dialogue, he is the ideal opponent. The Lizard does not hold forth, does not monologue, does not lay out his plan. He hunts. That frees up entire pages where the artwork alone carries the story - exactly what McFarlane was setting out to prove.

Why Calypso changes everything

Adding Calypso as a puppeteer brings in the only real writing idea of the arc. Without her, the Lizard goes back to being the usual unlucky scientist. With her, he becomes an instrument, and the story tips towards ritual horror rather than scientific tragedy. The character was tied to the circle around Kraven the Hunter, which quietly places the arc in a continuity that readers at the time knew how to spot.

That lineage is worth following: the Kravinoff clan has since produced a whole line of characters, from Ana to Sasha, and on to the vast manhunt of Hunted.

What the critics say, thirty-five years on

The verdict on these five issues has barely moved since they came out, and it is remarkably consistent: weak plot, repetitive dialogue, rushed resolution, but memorable pages and undeniable historical importance. Few arcs see readers and commentators agree so clearly, including in their disagreement.

The most common criticism fits in one sentence: McFarlane wrote like an artist. The scenes exist to make an image possible, not the other way round. Those who come to the comic book through story see a fatal weakness; those who come to it through the image see a liberation. Both readings are defensible, and that is precisely what keeps this arc in the conversation.

One last point deserves to be stated plainly, because it often comes back in distorted form: the commercial success of this launch says nothing about its literary quality, and the reverse is just as true. The two dimensions are independent. Confusing them is the most frequent shortcut in discussions of this period - just like the loose claims that circulate about the major sagas.

Where to find this aesthetic today

The influence of this period is not read in the comics alone. It spread into animation, into video games, and all the way into objects. The video game adaptations adopted the spider-like poses and the stringy rendering of the webs very early on; the films took longer to get close to it, as the overview of the film adaptations shows. Spider-Verse ended up making it a fully owned signature, pushing the distortion into an all-out graphic statement.

On the merchandise side, the period remains one of the most reused. The posters and tapestries with a retro line draw directly on these pages, the figures take up their impossible poses, and the t-shirts as well as the mugs recycle their most recognisable framings. Even the stickers and the masks carry the mark of those oversized eyes that did not exist before 1988.

For anyone discovering the universe through the merchandise rather than through reading, this is often the first contact with the style of that era without knowing it. The page devoted to the universe of characters and the one on the casts then let you trace the thread back, from the original drawing to the faces that played him on screen. And for those who prefer to start with the pages themselves, our selection of reading to start with remains the safest entry point.

What to remember

Five issues published between August and December 1990. A single artist in charge. A thin plot, a striking atmosphere, and a graphic vocabulary that redefined the character's silhouette for thirty years. Around two and a half million copies sold on the first issue alone, a speculative bubble set off, and the birth of Image Comics in its wake.

Three things explain why it is still talked about. The first is the graphic break, which outlived its author and still shapes the character's silhouette. The second is the economic tipping point, which turned the comic book into an object of speculation before it was something to read. The third is the founding of Image Comics, born directly out of this success, which permanently changed the balance of power between publishers and their creators. None of those three consequences was predictable in August 1990.

It is not the best web-slinger story, and nobody claims it is. It is, however, one of the most consequential. To explore the rest of the gallery, the page on the iconic enemies and the one on Peter Parker complete the picture, and the t-shirts, stickers, soft toys, LEGO sets and mugs let you keep a trace of it in everyday life.