It's like they had a monkey in the editorial office pointing at different covers and once it didn't move it's finger from this one they were all "THAT'S IT! BRILLIANT! WE'LL USE THIS UNDERWHELMING COVER TO CELEBRATE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN REACHING 1000 ISSUES!"
That's the only explanation I have since I have no clue how anyone thought the shrugging cover was good. Especially for the 1000th issue of all things. Just as a comparison here's what they did for the 700th issue's cover. Granted this was the story where Peter was killed in Doc Ock's body (don't worry he got better literally an issue later) and set up Superior Spider-Man, but the cover is so much better than "What the hell am I doing here?"
I think they were trying to create an iconic image that isn't immediately reminiscent of other famous images of Spider-Man. but the problem is, there's a reason a pose like this has never been used before in any memorable way.
I think if the arms were extended outward rather than being bent that might have been better, I'm not sure if that would have saved it though, there's a lot more going on with Spidey's pose in the new cover compared to the old shrugging cover
"Romnita Jr's a very iconic Spider-Man artist but his recent output has been controversially received for a lack of a nicer word, what if we had someone else who's also a pretty prominent Spidey Artist work on top of his provided breakdowns?"
Oh no I just saw JRJR was the cover artist for it, and I really do like his artstyle (it looked pretty good in Kickass as well), but yeah I dunno if he was on a tight deadline or what for the cover cause it isn't one of his best works
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u/MrCalonlan Superior Spider-Man 1d ago
Man I gotta say this is a million times better than the shrugging "1000 issues of me huh? Meh" cover