Warning: this article contains full spoilers for the first two episodes of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, which are streaming now on Disney+. You can also check out IGN's spoiler-free review of Season 1.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is the latest animated series to follow the exploits of everyman hero Peter Parker (voiced this time by Hudson Thames). But while this series definitely takes some cues from the MCU - and, in fact, was originally conceived as an MCU tie-in - it also veers in its own direction with Peter and his world. If there’s any takeaway from the first two episodes, it’s that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man isn’t afraid to make some significant changes to the source material.
From Spidey's origin story to his revamped supporting cast to the surprising role of Norman Osborn, let’s break down the most important ways in which Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man changes the classic Marvel mythology.
The Death of Uncle Ben
One thing the new series shares in common with the MCU is that it downplays Uncle Ben’s role in the story. 2016’s Captain America: Civil War and 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming tiptoe around Ben’s death and its role in shaping the hero Peter Parker has become. 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home goes even further by having Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May, not Ben, be the one to impart the all-important lesson about power and responsibility.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man follows a similar approach. In fact, it bucks the usual Marvel trend by killing Ben off before Peter even becomes Spider-Man. When the series opens, Ben is already dead before Peter is bitten by the spider. That iconic moment where Peter allows a thief to escape, refusing to use his power responsibly and thereby sealing Ben’s doom, will never happen in this universe.
It’s hard to say why the series went this route with Uncle Ben (beyond, again, the fact that it takes many cues from the MCU), but we assume there’s a good reason. The biggest takeaway here is that Peter has yet to have his big “power and responsibility” moment. He hasn’t yet suffered the death of a loved one that casts a lasting shadow over his actions as Spider-Man.
But sooner or later, that tragedy will happen. It’s a fundamental pillar of Spider-Man’s story, after all. The only question is who will become the Uncle Ben of this animated universe.
Peter Parker’s Spider Bite
The specifics of Spider-Man’s origin story always differ slightly, but usually the basics remain the same. Peter is on a class trip to a scientific facility when he encounters an escaped radioactive spider. One painful bite later, Peter gains the proportionate strength, speed, and agility of a spider.
One of the common threads (no pun intended) with Peter’s origin story in all its forms is that the spider that bites him has been transformed by science. It’s a lab specimen. But in Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, the spider that bites Peter is mystical in origin. In the series premiere, Peter is caught up in a battle between Doctor Strange (Robin Atkin Downes) and a strange monster from another dimension. That monster sheds a spider which bites Peter, sparking his transformation into Spider-Man.
The series has made a point of giving its Spider-Man a supernatural origin story rather than a scientific one. Here, too, we assume there’s a larger story to be told. In recent decades, Marvel has blurred the line between science and magic when it comes to Peter’s powers, introducing the Spider-Verse and revealing that Peter and his fellow Spider-People are all connected to the mystical Web of Life and Destiny. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is simply leaning harder into the magical side of things.
It’s also worth pointing out that the monster Strange battles looks an awful lot like Venom, right down to the black-and-white color scheme and distinctive eyes and gaping jaws. Is this monster somehow connected to the symbiotes of Klyntar or the symbiote god Knull? Is this version of Spider-Man tied to Venom in a more fundamental way? Whatever the case, it seems safe to assume we’ll see Peter’s black costume appear in the series sooner rather than later.
The Midtown High Cast
We’ve seen plenty of different incarnations of the Spider-Man franchise explore Peter Parker’s high school years, and one element that always seems to change is the circle of friends and rivals who attend Midtown High. Sometimes Peter is classmates with Mary Jane Watson; other times they don’t meet till college. The same for Gwen Stacy. Usually, Flash Thompson is there as the designated class bully, but not always. And in the case of the MCU, Spider-Man: Homecoming veered way off the beaten path by focusing on characters like Jacob Batalon’s Ned, Laura Harrier’s Liz Toomes, and Zendaya’s very different take on Mary Jane.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man definitely blazes its own trail here, in part because Peter doesn’t even attend Midtown High here. The high school cast is also very different from anything we’ve seen before. Here, Peter’s BFF isn’t Ned or Harry Osborn, but Grace Song’s Nico Minoru. Peter and Nico aren’t characters with a strong established history in the comics. Meanwhile, Peter pines after Cathy Ang’s Pearl Pangan and butts heads with school jock Lonnie Lincoln (Eugene Byrd).
It’s important to note that Nico, Pearl, and Lonnie are all super-powered characters in the comics. Nico is a mainstay of the Runaways comics, where she becomes a spellcaster named Sister Grimm and rebels against her supervillain parents. Pearl is a superhero named Wave with the power to control water. Lonnie, meanwhile, is better known as Tombstone, an ivory-skinned crime boss with superhuman strength and razor-sharp teeth.
The series seems to be making a concerted effort to surround Peter with friends who will eventually become superhumans themselves. Will we see Nico start hanging out with Doctor Strange and learning the ways of magic? Will Pearl suddenly start manipulating water? And what about Lonnie? Will this happy-go-lucky football star be doomed to fall into a life of crime and corruption? Given how much the series seems to be interested in exploring the roots of urban crime, we have to assume Lonnie’s story will be an important one going forward.
Producer Brad Winderbaum confirmed as much in an interview with IGN, revealing that the Peter/Lonnie dynamic in the series is inspired by the way Batman: The Animated Series handled Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent’s relationship and the latter’s slow downfall.
“If you know who Lonnie Lincoln is and you know who the character, Tombstone, is, you know that there's a tragedy looming on the horizon for him, which allows us actually to fall in love with him even more at the beginning because you know what the destiny is,” Winderbaum tells IGN. “But certainly with Lonnie, it's a character who lives on the razor's edge of balancing his own needs with his own morality. And he, in his heart, has a very strong moral compass, but the world is constantly working against that, which makes him a really tragic and, I think, really incredible character to watch grow.”
From Tony Stark to Norman Osborn
Traditionally, Spider-Man is a mostly self-taught hero, and one who never seems to receive the same level of fame and public adulation as the Fantastic Four or Avengers. The MCU changed things by giving Peter various superhero mentors like Robert Downey, Jr.’s Tony Stark and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange. Only by the end of No Way Home does Tom Holland’s Peter truly break out on his own.
This is another area where Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man seems happy to follow the MCU’s lead, but with an important change. This time, it’s not Stark or Strange guiding and molding Peter, but Norman Osborn (Colman Domingo). Osborn’s debut in this series is clearly an homage to the scene where Peter first meets Tony in Civil War. And just as Iron Man was responsible for designing Peter’s tech and first proper super-suit in the MCU, Osborn seems poised to lend a helping hand to Spider-Man as he continues his superhero adventures. For now, at least, Osborn is going to be a positive force in Peter’s life, and we’ll surely also see a friendship form between Peter and Osborn’s son, Harry (Zeno Robinson).
But how long can this alliance truly last? One of the few true constants in the Spider-Man franchise is that Norman Osborn is always Peter Parker’s greatest enemy. He’s destined to lose his grip on sanity and become Green Goblin. He seems to have noble intentions at the moment, but even if there’s good in Osborn, the evil always wins out in the end.
The fact that Osborn already knows Spider-Man’s secret identity is a bad sign, as it puts characters like Aunt May (Kari Wahlgren) and Nico at risk when Osborn inevitably goes off the deep end. The only question is whether that happens at some point during the course of Season 1, or if the series is playing a longer game with Norman Osborn. And maybe the series will be like Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, where Harry becomes a supervillain before his father. We’ll just have to wait and see how this tragedy in the making eventually shakes out.
Oscorp’s Heroes and Villains
The series introduces a secondary supporting cast for Peter once he becomes an intern at Oscorp. At that point, we meet his fellow interns Amadeus Cho (Aleks Le), Asha (Erica Luttrell), and Jeanne Foucault (Anjali Kuanpaneni), along with his scientific mentor Dr. Carla Connors (Zehra Fazal) and lead researcher Bentley Wittman (Paul F. Tompkins).
Once again, these are all characters with deep roots in the Marvel Universe, and all eventually become heroes or villains in the comics. Amadeus started off as a sidekick to Hulk before becoming a Hulk himself. Asha gains the ability to absorb and deflect light and fights in service of her nation of Wakanda. Jeanne is a polymath with photographic reflexes who becomes a hero known as Finesse.
The same goes for Peter’s instructors. Dr. Connors is a gender-bent version of Curt Connors. In most versions of the Spider-Man mythos, Connors’ obsession with harnessing the power of reptile DNA to regrow their missing arm leads to them becoming The Lizard. As for Dr. Whitman, he becomes a techno-powered villain known as The Wizard and frequently battles the Fantastic Four.
With the producers already planning out Season 3 of the series, we have to imagine there are plans for all of these characters to graduate from supporting scientists to more active players in Spider-Man’s adventures. Perhaps not in this season, but sooner or later. It’s no coincidence that pretty much every supporting character in this show is someone with the potential to become a superhuman.
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Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/5-ways-your-friendly-neighborhood-spider-man-transforms-peter-parkers-origin-story