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The Big Two comics are in a great place right now. DC’s Absolute Universe has completely shaken up the market, injecting new ideas and fun into a genre that tends to stay pretty stagnant. It’s been a resounding success on every front, with DC’s newest limited series even being extended to double its length. The Absolute Universe is DC’s biggest success in decades, so it only tracks that Marvel would want to get in on the action and launch their own creator-driven, darker universe. That being the Midnight Universe, which launches this October with dark new twists on the Fantastic Four, X-Men, and, importantly for today, Spider-Man.
The Midnight Universe promised to reimagine Marvel’s best heroes as grittier, monstrous reincarnations. The X-Men are vampires, the Fantastic Four are agents of cosmic horror, and Spider-Man has been transformed into a horrific man-spider hybrid that battles against equally horrific takes on his greatest villains. We’ve been living in suspense about these new takes on these iconic heroes, but Marvel has finally given us our first look at Spider-Man, and a special variant even gave us a special preview of another iconic character: Black Cat.
Heroes Reimagined in the Darkest Ways Possible
The premise for Midnight Spider-Man is that the villainous Oscorp Corporation is on the hunt for eternal life, and the young Peter Parker is caught in their web and transformed into a spider-person hybrid. With success on the horizon, Oscorp uses everything it learned from Peter’s experiment to duplicate it and create other animal-people hybrids. Peter, for his part, understands that this is as much his responsibility as it is theirs, and uses his unnatural powers to stop them before they damn more people to live like him.
How does Peter live? Well, with our fresh look at this new Spider-Man, we can confidently say that he lives terribly. He doesn’t just have a single bite. Instead, the massive radioactive spider has bonded to Peter’s chest. This creature is the size of Peter’s torso, digging its fangs and legs into his chest, which twisted to look like pulsating veins. The rest of Peter’s veins are bulging out of his skin, like they’re about to burst. He doesn’t even wear a shirt or shoes, instead throwing on pants, fingerless gloves, and a mask that looks much more like it’s meant to restrain him than protect his identity.
The fact that we still haven’t seen Peter’s face implies that he definitely has some kind of monstrous deformity. I wouldn’t be surprised to see fangs and venom that drips from his mouth. In fact, he could have developed monstrous instincts that spur him to rip into people, hence the mask. On top of our not-so-Friendly-Neighborhood Spider-Man, we also got our first look at the Midnight Black Cat on a special Peach Momoko variant cover. Felicia looks mostly human, even sporting cat-shaped glasses, but she has claws, with pieces of her skin turning gray. Her nose is covered, which could even imply a cat’s nose.
Overall, the first look at Midnight Spider-Man has left us feeling more terrified than ever. This Spider-Man’s life will truly be much, much worse than anything the original Peter has gone through. He’s set to face horrific challenges from just his powers and body alone, and I cannot wait to be horrified by everything else that this Peter goes through on this journey to become either a hero or a beast.
Which Midnight Universe series are you most excited for? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the Forum!
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