Not Kosher: Marvel Announces Spider-Verse

We’re a little late to the party on this one, but Marvel is already starting to hype the first big event of the soon-to-be freshly Peter Parker-centric reboot of The Amazing Spider-Man… because God knows that you need to market the living shit out of a book where you completely blow up the status quo to, well, return to the status quo. Jesus, Marvel and writer Dan Slott threw a pudgy, nearsighted, vainglorious motormouth into the Spider-Man suit for the past 15 months and have set sales records; I doubt you need to set the world alight to get people to read a Spider-Man book featuring the original dude.

Frankly, just seeing Peter Parker back in the saddle is enough of an event to get me excited… and yet this one sounds ambitious and kinda interesting. It’s called Spider-Verse, it’s gonna be written by Dan Slott with art by Olivier Coipel, it’ll be coming out in November starting in The Amazing Spider-Man #9, and it’s gonna feature Spider-Man.

Whaddya mean, “which Spider-Man?” Spider-Man! You know… all of them. Ever.

Seriously: check it out:

Click for full size (if it gets cut off on the image page, click it again to get just the image)

Kicking off this November in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #9 (with a special lead-in story on Free Comic Book Day), Slott and Coipel assemble an legion of Spider-Men from every corner of every universe. Peter Parker, Miguel O’Hara, Miles Morales and many, many more must unite to stop a seemingly insurmountable super-powered foe. Morlun, an incredibly powerful villain has returned with a singular and terrifying goal: exterminate every Spider-Man in every universe! It will take thousands of spider-powered heroes to battle back the greatest threat to this universe or any other!

Morlun, if you have forgotten, was a villain introduced during J. Michael Straczynski’s run on The Amazing Spider-Man from the early 2000s through the One More Day reboot of the character. It was a run that started with a big story that called into question Peter’s real origins, had a middle chapter that called into question Peter’s relationship with Gwen Stacy, and ended with the character’s overhaul. And while the run gets a really bad rap, there were actually consistently good characterization and some pretty solid stories in there… you know, other than the beginning, middle and closing chapters. Which were really kinda crap.

So what’s the scope of what we’re looking at?

“The scope of this event is so big, the word ‘epic’ just doesn’t do it justice,” says editor Nick Lowe. “The story is just huge and heartbreaking and has necessitated spreadsheets to organize all the Spider-Men. Luckily we have a writer who has proven time and time again he can thread impossible story-needles [Slott] and the most versatile character artist in the business [Coipel].”

While the story kicks off in The Amazing Spider-Man #9, apparently we’ll see hints of it not only in the first issue, but in the Free Comic Book Day issue of Guardians of The Galaxy issue. So there’s plenty of time to set up how we get all these version of Spider-Man into one story.

And based on what we can see in that big image, we really are talking about all the versions of Spider-Man. Just off the top of my head, there’s Peter Parker, there’s Ben Reilly (both when he took over for Peter, and from when he was (groan) Scarlet Spider), there’s Spider-Man Noir, we’ve got Spider-Man 1602…

…and yes, I see Peter Porker: The Spectacular Spider-Ham.  This story could be written by committee in the depths of Arkham Asylum’s Pant-Pisser ward, and I would read it just to see Miles Morales try to get his head around Peter Porker.