Who are the best writers for Spider-Man in the comics?

You can do a ranking, or just say a single writer.

1. Stan Lee

2. J. Micheal Strazynski

3. Roger Stern

4. J.D DeMatties

5. Tom DeFalco

6. Peter David

7. Gerry Conway

8. Nick Spencer

9. Chip Zdarsky

10. Roy Thomas (newspaper strip ghost writer)

1. Stan Lee
2. Brian Bendis
3. Roger Stern
4. Tom DeFalco
5. JD DeMatties

1. Stan Lee
2. JMS
3. Bendis

@ursaber: @animehunter: Very interested to see your lists guys

1. JMS
2. Gerry Conway
3. David Micheline
4. Tom DeFalco
5. Bendis (first volume of USM)

@animehunter: What about you my friend ?

@ursaber: @thor_parker82: @zariusii:

In no particular order

• Stan Lee
• JMS
• Nick Spencer
• Tom DeFalco
• Roger Stern
• Ron Frenz - Spider-Girl
• Gerry Conway - Renew Your Vows
• Roy Thomas of the Newspaper Strip.
• I also like Bendis when he start USM, but then he just went downhill

@animehunter:

I liked almost all of USM Vol 1. It was in Vol 2 with the status quo change, the Gwen romance and the atrocious new art that broke me

You mean Vol. 2 ?

I mean, sure the quality declined, but he still gave us 90+ issues of excellent quality prior to it, which amounts for like 3 runs from nowadays.

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Great list btw.

I haven't read the entirety of his run on Spider-Man, but I plan to read all 800 issues of Spidey before 2020 ends and will probably do a list of best writers by then, and probably a Top 20 arc.

No particular order, but my favorite Spidey runs to read as well as revisit include:

• Stan Lee (obviously),
• JMS,
• Stern,
• DeMatteis,
• first half of Slott's run,
• Conway,
• PAD (more on Spider-Man 2099 than ASM/FNSM though),
• Mantlo, and
• Joe Kelly - while he hasn't really had a proper full run, I'll include him here as well since I revisit a lot of the stories he's written as much if not more than anyone else on this list. Hopefully he gets a long enough uninterrupted run on Nonstop Spider-Man, since that unfortunately didn't really end up happening on Spider-Man/Deadpool thanks to all those terrible filler stories.

Which ones ?

@thor_parker82: Well, he's barely written any Spider-Man, but I find myself revisiting his Spider-Man/Deadpool run, American Son, Gauntlet & Grim Hunt extremely often. Grim Hunt especially is kind of a guilty pleasure for me when it comes to Spider-Man stories I like to re-read.

Huh ? Why would it be a guilty pleasure ? It's amazing and a vast majority likes it from what I know.

IDK, I think The Gauntlet is generally praised but I feel like I hear a lot of people on CV shitting on Grim Hunt. I personally think it's really good obviously, but I was under the impression that most people disagree.

@dcandmarvelcomicfan: Off the top of my head

• Stan Lee
• Brian Michael Bendis
• Dan Slott

Edit: All of the Spider-Man/Deadpool writers too. It was an enjoyable run

- Stan Lee

- JMS

- Brian Bendis Pre Miles (enjoyed Bendis’s Miles work but it wasn’t as strong as the initial Peter Saga imo)

- Dan Slott Pre 2014 relaunch (post Superior his run really fizzled apart from Spider Verse and his final arc)

- Tom Taylor

- PAD

- Heard nothing but great things about JMD but haven’t read his work yet.

I've honestly never seen that, and from most of the comments I read everywhere else, Grim Hunt is very well liked.

To me, the Kraven trilogy is easily some of the best Spider-Man stories, you could read it back to back, despite being decades apart one from another, and get a complete and very fulfilling story.

By trilogy I mean:

• Kraven's Last Hunt
• Grim Hunt
• Hunted

@thor_parker82: IDK then, maybe opinions have changed about the story? But yeah, I completely agree with you regarding the fact that Kraven has a pretty great character arc through those 3 stories despite not being a super-iconic Spider-Man villain himself. I'd say his character arc is possibly the best out of any Spider-Man villain (only Venom, Ock or Osborn could be better and those guys all keep getting rebooted so that loses them a ton of points in my eyes).

I don't know about the opinion changing, I think it's always been well liked, but like ANY story, it obviosuly has detractors and flaws, and people who don't like it.

Agreed, Kraven has one of the best arcs out of any Spider-Man villain, hell, any comic book villains.

Is'nt Frenz principally the artist? It was Tom DeFalco who wrote most of Spider-Girl

You're right, you're right, don't know why I thought he was the writer.

Fair enough. I wonder what's going to happen with the Kraven clone in later stories.

Out of curiosity, what do you guys think about Grim Hunt? @animehunter@zarius@ursaber

@blackspidey2099: since it was BND era story I have not read it

I didn't read ASM again until about Spider Island and only loosely

It's definitely one of the better stories to have come out within the last 10 years before Spencer took over and I would have given it 100%, if they hadn't used the death of Mattie Franklin for shock value, even if it was used as a plot device, which actually makes it worse.

You need to let go of that mental block friend, just imagine it's an alternate universe Spider-Man, not all the stories in there were bad. I share your anger, we all hate the retcon, but that doesn't mean all of BDN was bad.

You haven't read Big Time then ? That was after BND and prior to Spider-Island, it's Slott's best work.

@animehunter: Yeah, I think they had a couple of shock value deaths in there. Mattie, old Madame Web, Ezekiel, and (almost) Kaine.

Now that MJ and Peter are back together, i'd definitely recommend you go back and take a look at it. It's pretty reminiscent of JMS' run in a lot of ways IMO.

I'll see about that

Ironically, some of the best stuff in Brand New Day at the time was from Slott. He worked better as a team player than the guy steering the ship.

And BND to present day Spidey will always be an alternate universe until OMD is addressed and fixed, there is no true timeline anymore...the closest to that is MC2 because Peter's older there and all of the traditional stories still matter, the only stories that are ignored by MC2 are the ones in the 2000s, which is just ten years missing from over 40 plus years of better stuff.

As for my own thoughts on Grim Hunt...it revived Kraven and I was very much against that. So it was a big fail for me. Couldn't enjoy it at all, even if it did kill Mattie (who I've never cared for and associate with another lousy era of Spider-Man)

I'll have to disagree with this, JMS was a thousand times better and his overall tone and mood for his stories were quite different.

IIRC Waid did pretty decent during BND as well.

I very much disagree, 2000-2007 was one of the best eras for Spider-Man, written by JMS who is widely considered one of the best Spider-Man writers.

JMS's era is great, but kind of peaks with "The Book Of Ezekiel" and the departure of John Romita Jr, after which you get a bit of a shakedown where JMS didn't really stand out much, where as Ultimate Spider-Man, Marvel Knights Spider-Man, Peter Parker: Spider-Man, and Spider-Girl went from strength to strength.

That, and you got the worst of JMS' run at the time like "Sins Past" (which I like for my own reasons), "The Other", and of course "One More Day". Towards the end the only storyline people praise from the latter half was the excellent "Back In Black". It's arguable the JMS era's true endings were "The Book of Peter" and "To Have And To Hold", neither of which were written by him.

Cool, let me know your thoughts if you end up reading it.

Fair enough. I agree with you on most counts actually. Slott was easily my favorite writer during BND, and I also would have preferred Kraven stay dead after KLH. However, I still really enjoy the story on its own, ignoring its wider ramifications.

I just meant that Grim Hunt harkens back to a lot of concepts introduced by JMS - ie. the whole spider-totem stuff, Ezekiel, a mystical tone, etc. TBH, I think Kelly handled the mysticism a lot better than JMS did, though of course you can't compare a single story to an entire run.

I agree JMS best era was with Romita Jr, but even after that the quality still stayed pretty strong with the exception of Sins Past and OMD, which were the only bad arcs, it's just that comic book fans (and especially us Spidey fans) are very spoiled, we get a phenomenal run from JMS and the second it pulls some brakes people get mad, sure it didn't have the same strength that it previously had, but issues # 502 onwards were still pretty good and better than most of what we've gotten after JMS left.

I don't think "The Other" was bad, quite the contrary, I enjoyed it a lot, a dark take that barely any writer dares to explore on Peter, but again I think us (Spidey fans) are extremely intolerant to any slight changes and immediately reject it, either way, from what I've gathered by reading many opinions on several forums and review sites, "The Other" is very divisive, it's not widely disliked and neither is it widely liked, it's like half love it and half hate it, I personally fall on the former. The New Avengers arc was pretty good and refreshing, the Civil War tie ins were also phenomenal and some of my personal favorite, and like you mentioned, Back in Black was pretty strong and universally liked, one could consider that the end of JMS run, since OMD was editorial mandate.

Currently re-reading JMS run, the guy was a genius and understood the character really well.