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

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

August 1990: Marvel hands the keys to its star artist

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 eyes, and above all webs drawn as organic tangles rather than the regular grids inherited from Steve Ditko and John Romita Sr.. That seemingly trivial graphic detail became his signature.

Marvel then offered him what few artists get: a fourth monthly title devoted to the character, with him as both writer and illustrator. The editorial team was a small one, with Rick Parker on lettering, Bob Sharen on colours for the first three issues, McFarlane himself on the fourth, Gregory Wright on the fifth and 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 a conventional 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 takes very few lines to tell. The Lizard reappears in New York and goes on a run of killings that do not fit 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 rather than a methodical killer. That shift drives the arc, and it is all the more worrying given the price his family has already paid, starting with his wife Martha.

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

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

Atmosphere before plot

What Torment does succeed at is something else. The arc works like a horror film: little dialogue, whole pages without text, an obsessive repetition of the word doom as an 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 opinion 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 one.

FIGURES & COLLECTIBLES

Spider-Man Figure

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

69.90 €

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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 become stringy, irregular, almost living masses. 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 far beyond its author.

The eyes of the mask

McFarlane enlarges the white lenses of the mask until they take up half the face, and distorts them according to the emotion. The mask becomes expressive even though it does not move, a feat the animated adaptations and the replica masks have picked up ever since.

The impossible poses

Crouched on a lamp post, 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 this period. Today's collectible figures still carry the trace.

This visual vocabulary then spread across the whole medium. It sits right alongside the graphic creation of Venom, whose definitive look McFarlane fixed, with its oversized jaw, lolling tongue and shapeless black mass, from the symbiote suit introduced in The Alien Costume Saga.

POSTERS & PRINTS

Retro Spider-Man Poster

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

16.90 €

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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 roughly 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 the current 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.

The start of the speculative era

It is precisely this mechanism that makes the 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 deflating abruptly, taking part of the specialist distribution network with it.

The second effect is industrial. On the back of that success, McFarlane left Marvel the following year with six other star artists to found Image Comics, a company where creators keep ownership of what they make. 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 much of a milestone as the sales themselves.

A word of caution, though, about what these figures do not say. Two and a half million copies sold 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 collectible figures to mugs.

Is Torment worth reading 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 universe with offers several, and the overview of the major story arcs places each one in the chronology.

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 image takes over from story in the mainstream comic book, and when the market tips into 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 carries on the dark aesthetic of the period. To understand how the character crosses the decades without freezing, Spider-Man: Life Story offers the exact counterpoint: 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 great 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 thick cotton: a straight cut that works just as well at a convention as it does every day.

34.90 €

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McFarlane's place in the line of artists

To measure what this arc shifts, you have to place it in a sequence. 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 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 is not about the face or the musculature, but about movement and texture. Where his predecessors drew a man in a costume, he draws 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, from film posters and video games to 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 inspiration 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.

For an arc built on atmosphere rather than 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 whole pages where the artwork alone carries the story, exactly what McFarlane was setting out to prove.

Why Calypso changes things

Adding Calypso as a puppet master brings in the only real story idea of the arc. Without her, the Lizard goes back to being the usual unhappy scientist. With her, he becomes an instrument, and the story tips into 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 recognise.

That lineage is worth following: the Kravinoff clan has since produced a whole line of characters, from Ana to Sasha, right up 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 indisputable historical importance. Few arcs see readers and commentators agree so clearly, even in their disagreement.

The most frequent criticism fits in one sentence: McFarlane wrote like an artist. The scenes exist to allow an image, not the other way round. Those who come to the comic book through story see a crippling weakness; those who come to it through 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 clearly, because it often comes back in distorted form: the commercial success of this launch says nothing about its literary quality, and the reverse holds too. The two dimensions are independent. Confusing them is the most common shortcut in discussions of this period, much like the approximations doing the rounds about the great sagas.

Where to find this aesthetic today

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

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

For anyone who discovers the universe through the objects 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 artwork to the faces that have played him on screen. And for those who would rather start with the pages themselves, our selection of reads for beginners remains the safest entry point.

What to take away

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. Roughly 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 shift, 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 of this success, which permanently changed the balance of power between publishers and their creators. None of those three consequences was foreseeable in August 1990.

It is not the best Spider-Man 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 villains 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 day to day.