The first McFarlane issue has a cover date of March 1988. The last Frenz issue was from January 1987. It wasn't sudden, and in the interim we had such stellar pencilers as Kupperberg, Larsen? (yes, it's him) and Saviuk. The two issues drawn by Romita, plus Kraven's Last Hunt, were the only respites. By comparison, McFarlane was good. I also left the book during his tenure, but more because of Micheline's writing than anything else.

In my previous post, I mention Larsen (ASM #287), and you can see it there.

Perez did go out of his way when he returned to Avengers in the late 90's to give every member distinct facial features. I wasn't always a fan of the faces he gave the team, but I appreciated the effort, anyway.

Credit where credit is due, McFarlane's contribution to the Spider-Man artistic lexicon will always be the webbing and the contorted poses. I think it says something that even today, artists are still employing that webbing and those poses. I would even submit that the live action depictions of Spider-Man's web swinging have some of the McFarlane influence:





That said,  I was never a fan of the way he drew faces.  Always thought he made the eyes a bit too big, like a bad imitation of manga/anime.  And I don't like how he employed so many lines and hatching on faces.  In fact, that's something a lot of those Image guys were guilty of back then.  As a kid, I think I thought it was cool but now I much prefer cleaner line work, particularly on faces.

There were things I liked and didn't like about it as a kid. I liked the mask, because displaying emotion with a sock over your head is difficult. What I didn't like was the head and face was all a perfect egg shape, like a watermelon on his shoulders. No evidence of a jawline or a nose or anything. I also didn't like how ripped Spiderman got. He was supposed to be a nerd, right? Not a super ripped body builder. If you've ever seen someone as ripped as McFarlane's Spiderman in office clothes, you can still tell the dude is super jacked. My doctor is like that, and the button down shirt isn't hiding all that muscle. People would have known. I also didn't like the fawn foot thing, which I mentioned in another thread. The leg was short, the foot was long and looked like a hoof, and the ankle was up really high, so they looked like fawn legs. I did like the legs looking all backwards like a spider though, kind of like he could contort and move like a spider. I was very young during McFarlane's ASM run, and liked it at the time, especially Venom bringing the alien costume back. I was always a black costume fan. But I quit reading early in Erik Larsen's run, which was just more McFarlane than McFarlane was.

If you ever change your mind on demonic superhero types and want to give Spawn a try, I'd skip straight to the David Hine run. There's some questionable art, but Hine is the first (and pretty much only) writer to give Spawn a sustained intelligent storyline.