The Terrifying Spider-Man Variant You’ll Never See On Screen

The grotesque hero is the result of Spider-Man’s classic origin turned upside down. The Peter Parker of Earth-11580 was a promising young science student when he accompanied his best friend, Gwen Stacy, on a visit to Horizon Labs. While there, the pair observed an experiment in which a giant colony of spiders was being bombarded with radiation.

What happened next was far more gruesome than the Spider-Man origin we’re used to. Peter Parker somehow fell into the colony of radioactive spiders and was devoured whole by the tiny monsters. Somehow, the creepy crawlies absorbed Peter’s consciousness as they fed on him, resulting in a group of spiders with one singular hive mind. Thus, Spiders-Man was born!

Picture the classic red and blue Spider-Man suit filled with thousands of intelligent arachnids arranged in the vague shape of a man. That’s Spiders-Man in a nutshell. He’s just a constantly writhing mass of legs and mandibles, AKA an arachnophobe’s worst nightmare.

But wait, there’s more!

Spiders-Man can’t truly be the creepiest Spider-Variant without an insatiable taste for human flesh, can he? Of course not! Spiders-Man is such a nightmare of a character that he actually once compared a child Spider-variant to veal—conceivably while thousands of little mouths started drooling in unison.

And that’s not a one-off joke, either. The very first panel of Spider-Geddon #3, in which Spiders-Man is introduced, shows him asking the other Spider-Men if it’s okay to eat their enemies. “We can eat them right?” he asks in a voice that we can only assume sounds like a million tiny voices speaking at once. “Asking for a friend,” he adds as if anyone would ever believe him.

In addition, Spider-Man’s spider suit is always drawn with spiders either falling out of it or crawling up it, looking for a tear in the fabric they can enter through. The character is really just pure nastiness, and his very existence leads us to assume that someone at Marvel gets a kick out of triggering readers’ arachnophobia. Somehow, it’s even worse knowing that the guy is a hero.

The individual spiders that make up Spider-Man are capable of splitting off from the main group and operating independently while maintaining the same level of intelligence. This was shown at one point when Spider-Nor-Man (a Norman Osborn variant who became Spider-Man on his Earth) sent one of the Spiders to spy on Otto Octavius—something the spider did while Octavius was having a romantic night with a lady friend. Even as a single spider, Spiders-Man can’t help but be a creep.

Thankfully, the character has only made a handful of appearances since Christos Gage and Jorge Molina created him for 2018’s Spider-Geddon crossover event. Marvel has given no indication that they intend to give the Jumble of Insects his own book anytime soon, and we hope it stays that way. As one step up from a gag character, Spiders-Man is already absolutely terrifying. We don’t want to imagine what the sickos at Marvel would come up with if they had to fill a whole comic book with sentient spider shenanigans.