He began to miss deadlines, requiring guest artists to fill-in for him on some issues. In 1990, after a 28-issue run of "Amazing Spider-Man", McFarlane told editor Jim Salicrup that he wanted to write his own stories, and would be leaving the book with issue No. 328, which was part of that year's company-wide "Acts of Vengeance" crossover storyline. In July 2012 the original artwork to that issue's cover, which features Spider-Man dispatching the Hulk, sold for a record-breaking $657,250 USD, the highest auction price ever for any piece of American comic book art. McFarlane was succeeded on "Amazing Spider-Man" by McFarlane's future fellow Image Comics co-founder Erik Larsen. Wanting to appease McFarlane, Marvel gave McFarlane a new, adjectiveless "Spider-Man" title for him to both write and draw. "" #1 (August 1990) sold 2.5 million copies, largely due to the variant covers with which Marvel, seeking to capitalize on McFarlane's popularity, published the issue in order to encourage collectors into buying more than one edition. This practice was a result of the comics speculator bubble of the 1990s, which would burst later that decade. McFarlane, unbeknownst to his parents at the time, was making about a million dollars a year. McFarlane wrote and illustrated 15 of the series' first 16 issues, many issues of which featured other popular Marvel characters such as Wolverine and Ghost Rider in guest roles. Despite his acclaim as an artist, fans found McFarlane's writing to be clumsy, unsophisticated and pretentious, and questioned the wisdom of allowing him to write a new "Spider-Man" title in the first place. At the same time, editorial had problems with the dark tone of the stories McFarlane was telling, beginning with the inaugural "Torment" storyline, which depicted a more vicious version of the reptilian villain Lizard under the control of the voodoo priestess Calypso. Subsequent storylines such as "Masques" featured Spider-Man confronting the demonic Hobgoblin, while "Perceptions", which involved Spider-Man dealing with police corruption, child rape and murder (a hint of the work he would later do on "Spawn"), led some stores to refuse to stock the book. This created further tensions between McFarlane and editorial, which viewed Spider-Man an historically light-hearted character marketed to young readers. Editor Jim Salicrup in particular was required to make a number of compromises for McFarlane's work, including enforcing McFarlane's minor costume changes across the entire line of other Spidey comics, placing limitations on his choice of villains for his stories, and dealing with strong disagreement on the handling of the character Mary Jane Watson.