Marvel Is Fumbling Spider-Man’s New Series
Disney recently announced a new Spider-Man series at D23, and I’m already calling BS. Marvel deserves credit for finally producing something outside the main MCU timeline, but that’s where my praise ends. Once again, to no one’s surprise, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is set during Peter Parker’s high school years. Yawn.
Always Back To School
Do you know how much of Stan Lee’s original Spider-Man run was devoted to Peter’s high school years? Three years. By my calculation, that means the character graduated 59 years ago.
Over half a century of adult Spider-Man stories to adapt, and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man insists on going back to the Midtown High well. Why?
The Show Otherwise Looks Promising
It’s especially upsetting, considering everything else about the new show seems new and fresh. Spidey’s origin in Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is apparently tied to Venom and Doctor Strange.
The show also makes Norman Osborn Peter’s mentor, another big change from the usual canon.
Clearly, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man isn’t afraid to put a new spin on the Spider-Man mythos, which makes the decision to use high school Spidey even more baffling.
I’m not asking for a middle-aged Peter Parker with thinning hair and a paunch. But even the move to a college-aged Peter would be a step in the right direction.
Peter B. Parker
But no, everyone wants to keep Spider-Man in a permanent state of arrested development. The only adult Parker we’ve gotten outside of the comics in over a decade was Peter B. Parker from the Spider-Verse movies.
And he only exists because A) Miles Morales needed an older mentor and B) he was already filling the obligatory “High School Spider-Man” role.
So why is Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and everyone else afraid of adult Spidey? I blame Sam Raimi.
Not for making the first Spider-Man movie an origin story obviously. No, I blame him for doing such a good job that everyone after him decided high school should be Peter Parker’s default state.
Sam Raimi
Prior to 2002’s Spider-Man, Peter Parker hadn’t been portrayed as a teenager outside of those early comics. Both Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (1981) and the ’90s Spider-Man animated series starred a college-aged Peter in his early twenties. All of that changed with Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie.
Post-2002 high school-Peter Parker appears in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), The Spectacular Spider-Man (2008), Ultimate Spider-Man (2012), the Disney XD series Spider-Man (2017), and now the upcoming Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
Even Sony’s hugely popular 2018 Spider-Man game had Peter fighting crime in between classes. You can’t convince me that the guy doesn’t have enough credits to graduate by now!
Hope To Be Proven Wrong
Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised when Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man debuts on Disney+ later this year. Who knows, maybe it will even find a way to do something new with the high school setting.
Anything’s possible, after all. But the series is going to have to be knock-your-socks-off good for me to overlook its stale premise.
Marvel Comics has put out so many cool Spider-Man stories in the last 59 years. It’s a shame none of them will ever get adapted for the screen. How could they when Hollywood won’t stop fetishizing Peter Parker’s high school days?
Maybe someday we’ll finally get an adult Spider-Man, but with projects like Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man constantly setting the clock back to 1965 I won’t hold my breath.
