New Brevoort Formspring

That change began in the late 1970s, and it was John Romita in his role as art director who instigated it. He had realized that spiders’ legs didn’t go the way everybody had been drawing them on Spider-Man, so he instituted a campaign–somewhat haphazardly–to get this fixed. Many of the classic Spidey licensing images of the era were corrected to reflect the proper spider. In fact, in my first week on staff, my boss Bob Budiansky read me the riot act for sending some licensee shots of Spidey with the old spider on them. At that point, I (and most readers, I think) had no idea there was a difference.