By Eric Goldman
The end of an era is here, as Don Slott will be ending his epic run on THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN with issue #801 – as the writer prepares to begin guiding the next chapter of Tony Stark’s life in the pages of IRON MAN.
Slott spoke to Vulture.com about this big change, saying, of his decision to leave AMAZING SPIDER-MAN after a decade of writing the series (and 189 issues!), “I could always see the next furlong, I could always see what was ahead. Like, Get this far and I’ll make it to the next wave of ‘Brand New Day’ writers, then, ‘If I make it this far I get to one out of every five issues of AMAZING [ever published]. If I get it to this far, I get to [issue No.] 700.’ And so on. So I kept having these benchmarks to hit. And then I realized, once you hit ten years and then issue 800, the next benchmarks were way too far away. [Laughs.] So I always knew that was the zone.”
He goes on to explain that he’ll likely need to adjust to not telling Spider-Man stories, because having written the book for so long, “There are days where everything gets seen through the Spider-Man filter first. If I’m walking down the streets in New York and I notice something, I’d go, ‘Oh, how would Spider-Man deal with that?’ It’s a reflex muscle in the back of your head. Or you read a news story. Something happens and you go, ‘How would Spider-Man deal with that? What is that? What if that was Mysterio?’ When you do this for ten years, that’s just the way you’re wired.”
As for his new gig on IRON MAN, Slott tells Vulture, “I’m all excited. They’d asked me to do IRON MAN a while back, but by then I was at [SILVER] SURFER and I had Spidey and I was already overcommitted, so it kept gnawing at me. Like, ‘Oh, man. I really do want to do Iron Man. This would be fun.’ And when that came around again, it was like, ‘Okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I want IRON MAN. I want this. I want this really bad.’”
Regarding his thoughts on Tony Stark, Slott explained, “Reed Richards explores the universe. He wants to know everything and go everywhere. Tony Stark builds the future. It’s not that he’s not out to discover the next big thing. But he’s gonna take his own two hands and he’s gonna build where he wants to go, or what he wants to do. He looks at a challenge and goes, ‘How do I machine my way out of this?’”
Slott promises, “There will be a very unique cast in this book of characters: Iron Man characters you love and Marvel characters that you haven’t seen folded into the Iron Man cast.”
For much more of Dan Slott’s observations on wrapping up his run on AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, his favorite stories he told with the character, and moving to IRON MAN, check out the full interview at Vulture.com!
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