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Sneak Preview of the Show
Written by Tom Russo
You already know Spider-Man, the comic-book hero and star of this magazine. Now meet Spider-Man, the TV star!
Starting this fall, you favorite wall-crawler is swinging onto your TV screen in a new animated series. You can follow the web-swinger's television adventures Saturday mornings on the FOX KIDS Network (the same channel as X-Men).
Stan Lee, the man who created Spider-Man, and his writers and artists have tried to make the TV show just like the comic books. "We are going to make sure everything is as true as possible to the classic Marvel characters," says Stan. In other words, it's going to be a very cool show to watch. But all of this takes a lot of work -- enough to make even a super hero tired!
First, Stan and his partners sit down at the Marvel cartoon headquarters in Los Angeles to choose story ideas. But Spider-Man has had hundreds of adventures over the years. Stan and his team can't turn all of these adventures into shows, so they have to decide which ones are the very best. Stories with really great villains like Venom and Hobgoblin are some of the team's favorites.
The original look/design of Peter Parker
Once the team picks the stories they want to use, the writers start working on scripts. A script tells what kind of action is taking place, and what the characters are supposed to say. For instance, the script might say, "Spidey swings down and shoots his webbing at Venom. Spidey shouts, 'Hey, gruesome! Eat web!'"
Some of the scripts are written by people who also write comic books. Others are written by people who write TV shows, like Star Trek.
After the writers finish, Stan's art team does drawings that explain the action in pictures. In our example, the pictures would show Spidey firing his web-shooters at Venom. Then, other artists called "animators" do the pictures over again, this time with more details. The animators do thousands and thousands of drawings, known as "cels." When the cels are shown in order, the images appear to move. What you see is a cartoon -- the Spider-Man cartoon, to be exact!
Will the show be a hit? Just ask John Semper, the guy in charge of all the writers.
"For Spider-Man fans," John says, "I think this is going to be the greatest television show ever invented!"
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