• The Amazing Spider-Man (Lee & Ditko) (1962-1966) — The original run of Spider-Man by its co-creators has many of the most iconic and often reproduced elements of the entire mythos. This includes Amazing Fantasy #15, Spider-Man's iconic Origins Episode originally published in the last issue of an anthology comic but an immediate success and hit. The iconic cover by Jack Kirby, the art by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee's dialogues created one of the greatest stories, with a fable-like simplicity about how Peter's life goes on a rollercoaster from nobody to somebody and then comes crashing down when tragedy strikes him. The success of this story led to Spidey's flagship title, Amazing Spider-Man #1-38. It featured the first and seminal appearances of many classic Spider-Man villains, Spider-Man's supporting cast, and showing the character growing and maturing almost in real-time from high school student to college student which happened in what's considered the masterpiece of this era, If This Be My Destiny, aka the Master Planner arc.
• Lee and Romita Sr.'s Spider-Man (1966-1972) — John Romita Sr. took over Ditko's role as artist and plotter after he left. As in the case of Ditko, the works were in the Marvel Method and Lee adapted himself to Romita Sr's strength and wavelength (i.e. romance comics) albeit Lee also took a stronger hand in this time owing to the latter's unfamiliarity with plotting out stories by himself. Comprising Issues #39-110, this marked the end of Stan Lee's involvement with the regular Spider-Man continuity, he would contribute to the Spider-Man newspaper strip (and indeed write far more for that than he ever did in the main comics). This era codified Peter Parker's dominant comic look, crystallized his supporting-cast (Harry Osborn as his best friend, Flash Thompson as Vitriolic Best Buds), and the Breakout Character that is Mary Jane Watson, as well as The Kingpin.
  • Green Goblin Unmasked Romita hit the ground running with this (ASM #39-40) story which finally answered and resolved the great mystery of the previous run, the truth behind Spider-Man's most mysterious and dangerous enemy.
  • Romita Sr. initially tried to be consistent with Ditko's art-style. It was with Issues 42-44 however, which had Mary Jane Watson's first appearance that Romita established the new style. Spider-Man would no longer be the story of just Peter Parker and his closed world as in the Lee-Ditko era but it would now encompass a regular supporting cast, love triangles, and a more social and less hostile atmosphere. In short, Spider-Man would be Lighter and Softer and later Spider-Man runs often celebrated this college-era as a time of innocence and sweetness embodied by the Love Triangle of Peter, Mary Jane, and Gwen Stacy, he latter of whom became Peter's First Love. However, this is only the most famous part.
  • Spider-Man No More: Spider-Man's 50th Issue is legendary for its famous cover and for its single-panel splash image of Peter throwing his costume in the trash as he walks away (recreated in Spider-Man 2 among other places). It also featured the first appearance of the Kingpin, who in time would become the major crime boss of the Marvel Universe menacing Spider-Man, the Punisher, and especially Daredevil. Not able to take the stress of being Spider-Man, Peter decides to quit once and for all. Unfortunately, the costume he dumps in the trash reaches Jonah who prints it on the front page. News of Spider-Man quitting electrifies the underworld starting a crime-wave which the Kingpin exploits to finally become ruler of the criminal underworld.
  • The Death of Captain George Stacy: The first major Character Death since Amazing Fantasy #15 albeit overshadowed by the one that came after that. It happened in Issues #88-90 and its fallout shaped the end of the era. Doctor Octopus escapes and holds a plane hostage but after a confrontation with Spider-Man, he flees. A tense battle takes place across New York between the foes. While fighting on a rooftop, Spider-Man pours chemicals on Ock's arms that short-circuit it and drive it out of control making it knock a chimney. The rubble would have hit a nearby child but Captain George Stacy pushes the kid away at the cost of his life. He dies, but not before telling Peter that he knows his secret identity while asking him to look after Gwen.
  • Green Goblin Reborn!: Also known as the "Drug Trilogy" (ASM #96-98). This landmark comic was published in 1971 when the U.S. Department of Health approached Marvel and asked them to do an anti-drug storyline. There was one little problem: The Comics Code forbade drugs anywhere, both good and bad. Marvel decided to write a three-parter where Harry Osborn was shown to be popping pills and ignore Comics Code approval for those three issues. Along with Green Lantern/Green Arrow doing a heroin storyline the same year, this was one of the first signs of transition to the socially- and politically-conscious Bronze Age of Comics.
  • The Six Arms Saga: Taking place in Amazing Spider-Man #100, Peter decides to do Spider-Man No More yet again and creates a potion that removes his powers, only to give himself extra hands. This story is notable for introducing Morbius, the Living Vampire.
  • The other notable element of the Lee-Romita era was the decision to start including greater diversity. Issue #51 saw the introduction of Joe "Robbie" Robertson, the first and still the most notable and important African-American supporting character in the series, who was the Hypercompetent Sidekick to Jonah and in the course of the series would become another important Parental Substitute and mentor to Peter Parker. The other major character was the Prowler, aka Hobie Brown, a small-time hood who Spider-Man converts into an ally and friend. In Issue #87, the Prowler became the first character other than Peter to wear the Spider-Man outfit (no costume replicas), and certainly the first POC to do so. When Brian Michael Bendis created Miles Morales, Spider-Man's most prominent Affirmative-Action Legacy character, he made his character's Arch-Enemy into Prowler II, Aaron Davis, in allusion to the original Hobie (whose heroic aspect was given to Jefferson and Miles Morales).
• Gerry Conway's Spider-Man (1972-1975) — Stan Lee was followed by Gerry Conway, a former fan turned writer who at the age of 18-19 had the daunting task of stepping in Stan Lee's foot-steps. Where Lee worked via the Marvel Method, Conway had a strong voice as writer and while working with artists it was his views and ideas that made it to the story. As such he's seen by some as Spider-Man's first actual writer in the traditional sense. He wrote issues 110-149, nearly the same amount of issues that Ditko did, and in many ways, the issues were just as important and defining for stories going forward. Conway introduced a slew of iconic characters and concepts — Hammerhead, The Punisher (who ultimately became his sub-franchise), the Jackal, and the now-infamous Spider-Mobile.
  • The Night Gwen Stacy Died — Conway's most important contribution. A landmark story that ended the Silver Age of Comics, published in 1973. Peter Parker's life had settled down a bit. He was in a steady relationship with Gwen and started getting some respect from the people around him but there was that snag. Norman Osborn was part of his supporting cast, demoted to an amnesiac lame dad for most of the previous run (save the drug issue) but a walking time bomb waiting to go off as far as Peter was concerned. For issues 121-122, Osborn relapsed into the Green Goblin and decided to hurt Spider-Man again, and then he just happened to run into Gwen Stacy... leading to a confrontation atop the George Washington Bridge. Spider-Man arrives, just in the nick of time, like the song goes... except this time he doesn't save the victim. Gwen Stacy dies. Never before had a superhero failed like this. This also resulted in the first major fan backlash among Spider-Man readers and arguably the first real fan controversy about a superhero storyline ever.
  • The First Clone Saga — Conway's other lasting contribution, including the elevation of Mary Jane Watson as Spider-Man's long-term Love Interest. His run documented the slow maturity of MJ, and Peter's growing feelings for her, with the two falling in love with each other around the time of the major story that closed Conway's original run, which Conway created as a response to the Gwen Stacy backlash and as a Bookend to his major story. A clone of Gwen returns to Peter's life just when he and MJ are moving on. This tests their bond and feelings but in the course of a crazy mind-bending adventure that somehow combines the Silver and Bronze Age (intense scenes of longing, grief, and guilt mixed with goofy confrontations with villains in empty stadiums), Peter realizes that he's no longer the same man who fell for Gwen. He goes back to Mary Jane and the two of them commit to their love for each other at the end of Amazing Spider-Man #149. Conway's final run is by and large considered the end of Spider-Man's Coming of Age Story from teenager to man (what with the final panel implying that he crossed the final rite of passage).
  • Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man (1976) — After completing his run, Conway wrote and edited the first-ever inter-company non-continuity crossover, where Spider-Man and Superman fight and team up against Luthor and Doc Ock. In the end, Peter, Clark, MJ, and Lois go on a double date. The story confirmed Spider-Man's status as one of the big three, or rather big two.^note At that time Superman was more popular than Batman. Spider-Man is granted equal stature in this comic, whereas Batman was still treated as second banana in Superman team-ups, a situation which Frank Miller overturned later.
• Len Wein and Marv Wolfman's Spider-Man (1976-1980): A slew of writers took over from Conway, including Archie Goodwin (who wrote Issue #150) before Len Wein started an extended run, followed by Marv Wolfman. Most of Conway's story threads and plots were carried forward. Important changes in this period included the wedding of Ned Leeds and Betty Brant (where Peter and MJ served as Best Man and Maid of Honor, respectively), Aunt May's unexpected flirtation with Civil Rights Activism and elderly rights, and other melodramatic turns. Wolfman, wanting to shake the title up, saw fit to end the Peter and MJ romance by having Peter propose to her and having MJ turning it down as a Ship Sinking (in Issue #182). The couple broke up in Issue #192 (exactly 100 issues before she and Peter would get engaged and married for real). The important landmark issue is Issue #200 where Peter confronts Uncle Ben's killer, who escaped from prison, and Peter achieves a measure of catharsis over Uncle Ben's death. Also important is the first appearance of Felicia Hardy, the Black Cat, who would go on to be Peter's third great romance.
• Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man: The title "The Spectacular Spider-Man" was originally used for a short-lived magazine in late 1968, in which Lee and Romita wrote black-and-white stories dealing with Peter, Gwen, MJ, and Norman Osborn. A story from this magazine was later adapted into the pages of Amazing during Conway's first issues. In 1976, owing to the greater demand for Spider-Man, and with the blessing of Stan Lee, Gerry Conway launched Spider-Man's first, and longest-lasting, second title (Volume 1 lasted from 1976 — 1998, dropping the "Peter Parker" portion with #134 {January 1988}; Volume 2 lasted from 2003 — 2005; and Volume 3 — with the re-added "Peter Parker" prefix — from 2017 — 2018). Bill Mantlo became the most prominent writer during its first 100 issues. Mantlo would never write the main title, but he established the prestige of the second series writing smaller character-centric stories, which were often innovative. Mantlo's most famous story is The Owl/Octopus War (#73 — #79), which had Spider-Man and Black Cat caught up in a gang war between The Owl and Doctor Octopus, getting Black Cat injured in the process; the battle between Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus is considered one of the classics. Another notable issue is when Peter revealed his identity to Black Cat, to her consternation that her supposed "idealized match" was a simple guy from Queens. During his run, Mantlo brought in White Tiger, a character he had co-created earlier, as Spider-Man's regular sidekick and ally. He also created and introduced Cloak and Dagger in Issue #64, who later went on to become prominent side characters and spin-offs. Other writers who cut their teeth on Spectacular include Roger Stern and J. M. DeMatteis, and the title became known and celebrated as a proving ground.

• Dennis O'Neill's Spider-Man (1980-1981) : A brief run of 16 issues between ASM #207-223, O'Neill (known for his work on Batman), moved Peter Parker to the Daily Globe, a rival of the Bugle, and shuffled his regular cast. His run is mainly notable for introducing the villains Hydro-Man and Calypso, as well as Madame Web, a blind psychic who would in later stories and adaptations become an occult center in Spider-Man's mythos.
• Roger Stern's Spider-Man (1981-1984) : Roger Stern originally worked on the smaller, character-centric Spectacular title before taking over Amazing. He had contributed a fill-in issue (#206) between Wolfman and O'Neill's runs but officially took over from #224 onwards. His run is notable for pitting Spider-Man against other villains in the Marvel Universe, including the Foolkiller (an enemy of The Defenders), the Juggernaut (from the X-Men) Mister Hyde (an enemy of The Avengers) and The Mad Thinker (an enemy of Fantastic Four). He also outlined the origin of the Vulture, introduced the Felicia and Peter romance, and brought Mary Jane back to the regular continuity, dropping the first hints of her backstory (which Stern conceptualized and outlined):
  • Nothing Can Stop the Juggernaut (Issue #229-230): One of the greatest battle issues and fights in Spider-Man's career. The Juggernaut and Black Tom Cassidy hunt for Madame Web, with Marko causing destruction along the way. Spider-Man does his best to halt him and save Madame Web's life.
  • The Hobgoblin (ASM #238-251): A Story Arc the sustained the closing issues of Stern's run, featuring the major signature villain that Stern created. Low-rent hood Georgie Hill stumbles onto one of Norman Osborn's hideouts across the city, alerting his unseen and mysterious partner about his findings. Said partner kills Georgie and, over the issues, steadily hijacks Osborn's gear and resources to make himself the Hobgoblin as authorities and Spider-Man try and solve his identity. Stern decided to quit before revealing the Hobgoblin's secret, starting a problem for the character under later writers that resulted in a mess that would not be resolved until Stern returned in The '90s to write Hobgoblin Lives! ^note According to Stern, he told DeFalco that it was Roderick Kingsley, but the latter and other writers were disappointed by the culprit's identity and so they, with Stern's half-hearted consent, milked and spun wheels within the mystery until the story became confusing, waiting for him to return later and fix it.
  • The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man: A small side story published in a single issue (Amazing #248), it ended up overshadowing the A-Story and is celebrated as one of the most humanistic and stirring moments in the entire mythos. Spidey visits one of his young fans and just spends time chatting, even revealing himself as Peter Parker and explaining his origins to a total stranger. It's only at the end that we learn that the boy is a Littlest Cancer Patient with days left to live, wishing to meet his hero before he passed on. Notably, the story was adapted for Spider-Man: The Animated Series, with the patient being Gender Flipped.
• Secret Wars (1984): This landmark first crossover event had Spider-Man play a major role. Tie-in issues by Roger Stern leading-in and leading-out of the event proved to be his final issues, while plot threads dealing with its major developments became the opening story arc of the succeeding run. The Beyonder plucks Spider-Man and other heroes by drawing them to the sheep farm in Central Park, where an alien construct and transporter takes them to the edge of the galaxy to Battleworld. Spider-Man and his rogues Doctor Octopus and the Lizard feature in the story. After one major fight with supervillains maxes out his web-shooters and tears his costume, Spider-Man goes to a secret room in the conquered Doombase, where a machine, in response to his desire to fix his costume, drops a mysterious black goo. This ends up covering Spider-Man completely, changing into an all-black outfit with white eyes, giant white spiders connected on the front and back, and unlimited webbing. The symbiote was originally a proposed new costume design pitched by a fan, which EIC Jim Shooter (who wrote Secret Wars) purchased, and since the miniseries was a merch-driven tie-in, having Spider-Man get a new costume made sense. The actual nature of the Symbiote, its mysterious powers and origins would become a major Story Arc of Spider-Man titles for the next 15 years or so.
• Tom DeFalco's Spider-Man (1984-1987): DeFalco originally served as an editor to Stern, before succeeding him as writer and worked with Ron Frenz (who also collaborated with Stern, most notably on The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man) on an extended run. The period of this run was affected by editors such as Jim Owsley (better known as Christopher Priest (comics), more celebrated for his work on Black Panther) and EIC Jim Shooter. Working with artist Ron Frenz, Defalco's biggest contributions are #257-259, the storylines expanding on Mary Jane's past and backstory (revealing that she was Peter's Secret Secret-Keeper for some time) and making her Peter's confidant and best friend. He also incorporated Spider-Man's major costume change, starting The Alien Costume Saga. He and later writers would make this costume into a symbiote that was attempting to permanently merge with Peter. He also co-created Silver Sable in this time, who would become a Spider-Man fixture and spinoff character in her own right. Also notable is the battle issue with Firelord, the herald of Galactus, and a story that expanded on the backstory of Crusher Hogan, the wrestler Peter fought in AF #15. DeFalco and Frenz were abruptly removed from the title before the end of their run, with many loose threads and elements halted in place, most notably the Hobgoblin mystery which Defalco had inherited from Stern and whose wheels he had been carefully spinning. Instead, Jim Owsley, through his one-shot Spider-Man V. Wolverine and Gang War, randomly revealed the Hobgoblin's identity to be Ned Leeds, to the confusion of Peter, the fandom, and fellow writers. This created a mess that would only be resolved when Roger Stern completed his Hobgoblin Lives! miniseries in The '90s. A year or so later, DeFalco took over as EIC, a position he would occupy until the Mid-'90s, ending when he oversaw the Clone Saga. He continued with the Spider-books afterward for a time, working on Spider-Girl.
• During the same era, Peter David contributed a few seminal Spider-Man stories in both the main title and the satellites. He would return periodically after from time to time during later runs, including the Mackie and Byrne era as well as JMS (where he wrote Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man). He also created the Legacy Character Spider-Man 2099 and worked on its original series.
  • The Commuter Commuteth: A fill in-issue published during Defalco-Frenz's run (Amazing Spider-Man #267), this is still considered to be a rather iconic Spider-Man-outside-Manhattan story. The gimmick — New York suburbs don't have the high-rise buildings that are easy for web-swinging — was adapted scene-for-scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
  • The Death of Jean DeWolff: Published in Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #107-110, the story arc finds Spider-Man's friend, police captain Jean DeWolff, murdered in her apartment. The hunt for DeWolff's murderer becomes the impetus for an exploration of moral relativism among superheroes, the flaws of the criminal justice system, the desire for vengeance, and the clash of values between the idealistic Daredevil and the pragmatic Spider-Man. This was Peter David's first professional Comic Book writing assignment and is noted for subverting the comic-book stereotype of Heroic Sacrifice in character deaths. Likewise, it made Daredevil and Spider-Man comrades in the superhero community, with both of them learning the other's identity in the course of the story.
• David Michelinie's Spider-Man: Fresh off his extended run on Iron Man, Michelinie, who worked on the then-new Web of Spider-Man, was handed the keys to the kingdom starting with Amazing #290. His run on the title lasted until Amazing #388, and coupled with his earlier issues on Web of Spider-Man, Michelinie ended up breaking Stan Lee's record as the writer of the most Spider-Man stories, a position he held until Dan Slott's tenure. Michelinie's run also marked a new trend in Spider-Man titles. Before, writers had short runs and short periods, but afterwards, Marvel preferred writers to work extensively on one title, setting the pattern for Michelinie, JMS, and Dan Slott. His run is most notable for his collaborations with artists (and future Image Comics founders) Todd Mc Farlane and Erik Larsen (of Savage Dragon fame), as well as for introducing characters like Venom and others. His run also saw many events overlapping with his title.
  • The Spider-Marriage: The biggest change in Spider-Man's continuity since Issue #28 (when Peter graduated from high school) happened when Peter got married to his long-time love interest, Mary Jane Watson. This marked the start of an extended run on the title by David Michelinie who took over from Issue #290 and whose run on the title lasted until Issue #388. Michelinie wrote "The Big Question", the three-part issues (#290-#292) that showed Peter proposing to MJ a second time, her initial rejection, their adventure in MJ's hometown dealing with her sister Gail and her father Philip, and MJ finally saying "Yes" after a confrontation with a Spider-Slayer. This was followed by "The Wedding" (Amazing Annual #21). At a convention, Stan Lee and EIC Jim Shooter had been asked by fans if they would have Peter get married to Mary Jane (referring to the newspaper continuity where the two were long the Official Couple as opposed to the regular continuity which stuck to a permanent melodrama and rotating love-interest model). Lee, crowd-pleaser that he was, shrugged and said he was okay with it, and Shooter, having been put on the spot, said he was okay with it too. The response was picked up by the media and it was widely popular among fans and general readers, including those who had long given up on reading Spider-Man in the regular continuity for years having grown tired of the static nature of his stories^note Both Shooter and Lee hashed out a plan immediately for the big event to coincide together. For brand reasons, Shooter felt that having Peter Parker marry in the newspaper strip and not in the regular continuity, with the former having a general readership beyond comics fans at the time and Lee's name, potentially delegitimized the regular continuity and led to Marvel losing a major coup with the first major superhero wedding ever (at a time when Superman and Batman in their main continuities were still single). Besides, it was also a very popular decision among fans since this was a major status-quo they wanted but it was polarizing among writers and regular comics readers (a smaller number in terms of demographics but more regular and reliable in the long run).. So the marriage had to happen in the regular continuity, even if Peter and MJ at this time were friends with strong feelings for one another but also hesitant about starting a relationship again leave alone a marriage. The result was a series of issues in 1987 that saw MJ over three issues resolving her family baggage and saying yes to Peter followed by the famous Annual, published in 1987, plotted by Jim Shooter himself, scripted by David Michelinie, featuring cover art by John Romita Sr, and artwork by Paul Ryan.^note Not to be confused with the politician of the same name.
  • Kraven's Last Hunt: The period of the marriage was immediately followed by a series of iconic storylines starting right out of the gate with this one by J.M. DeMatteis. This landmark story was published over two months in every monthly Spider-Man title being a kind of crossover in Spider-Titles and it became the first Spider-Man story to be collected in hardcover (or trade paperback, for that matter), and one of Marvel's first collections. Kraven the Hunter sets out to prove that he's a better man than Spidey, and starts by shooting him and burying him. It was the first major story featuring Spider-Man as a married man.
  • Best of Enemies: Another important story from this time is Spectacular Spider-Man #200 which deals with the death of Harry Osborn, written by J.M. DeMatteis. Harry Osborn the wayward friend of Peter, rejected suitor of MJ, tortured son of Norman, and troubled young father, relapses into becoming the Green Goblin one more time over his grief and nostalgia for his long-gone college youth and the innocence that he, Peter and MJ lost. He finally attains a measure of redemption before dying in a classic story.
  • Parallel Lives — Gerry Conway, like Lee, would never quite become a major writer on Spider-Man again, but he returned later to contribute for some smaller side stories, notably dealing with Robbie Robertson. Parallel Lives one of the first "graphic novels" published after Peter and MJ's wedding is a tribute to the love story at the heart of Spider-Man which Conway did more than anyone to bring to fruition.^note Even if Conway disagreed with the decision to marry Spider-Man in the regular continuity.
  • Venom: This landmark Story Arc (beginning from ASM #299-300) introduced Spider-Man's third great Arch-Nemesis and the most influential Spider-Man villain since Steve Ditko's departure. The Symbiote that Spider-Man had driven away by exploiting its Achilles' Heel, sonic attacks, and loud noise in general, whereupon it merged with a reporter Eddie Brock who felt Spider-Man had wronged him and became the recurring villain Venom. Venom was a runaway hit but he went from villain to Anti-Hero Substitute, leading writers to create Venom's very own Venom, leading to Carnage, who debuted in ASM #361, albeit his alter-ego Cletus Kasady had debuted in ASM #344.
  • The Cosmic Spider-Man Saga: Running across Spider-Man titles (Amazing Spider-Man #326-329, Spectacular Spider-Man #158-160, and Web of Spider-Man #59-61), this story arc tied into the Acts of Vengeance crossover. It featured Spider-Man gaining the powers of Captain Universe and becoming a cosmic player, which allows him to face against powerful heavy-hitters such as Magneto and the Tri-Sentinel.
  • Maximum Carnage: An event from 1993; Carnage recruits C-list villains into a Legion of Doom, and Spidey recruits several heroes (and Venom) to stop them. Mainly of note for being the highest-selling multi-title comic series in History (displacing Crisis on Infinite Earths) until Civil War - the reason for such a large mega-run was summarized by writer/E.I.C. Tom DeFalco as being a test to see how a multi-title series would function in the Spidey-verse, something that was tried before, but with a much smaller cast.

• The Clone Saga (1994-1996): Gerry Conway's original Clone Saga was an emotional roller-coaster and farewell to Gwen Stacy and the nostalgia she represented. That was what he intended at any rate and that was how it was received originally. But near the end of his story, there was a bit where Spider-Man fought a clone of himself in a stadium and for a brief moment Peter had Cloning Blues and readers wondered if the Peter we saw was the clone all along.^note In the actual story, Peter reasons logically that since he's in love with MJ and the clones are fixated on Gwen Stacy and were created after Gwen's death, that meant he was the real deal since if he was a clone he would be stuck in the past and not able to get over, grow and mature. A moment of emotional truth about the nature of Character Development and not fixating on the past expressed in comic book metaphors, that unfortunately got lost in the shuffle of fan theories about logistics. Inspired by The Death of Superman and Knightfall stories that expressed a tragic attitude to its iconic heroes by temporarily removing them and replacing them with Anti-Hero Substitute, an attempt was made to give Spider-Man his equivalent. It was also felt that this would be "back to basics" and temporary. Peter was now married and a new character could be the hip former single Spider-Man of the past and contrast with Peter's present. That was the original idea for a six-month story. What followed, thanks to a period where marketing and merchandising was inspiring creative as well as a period of weak editorial oversight was a story stretched out for three years with endless backtracking, padding and spinning of wheels as Ben Reilly, Kaine, the Jackal (the villain of the original Saga who died at the end of it and was forgotten until the second one) returned to wreak havoc on Spider-Man's life along with a slew of characters that were hard to keep track off. Mary Jane also became pregnant, Aunt May died in Issue #400 written by J. M. DeMatteis (which despite later retcons is still considered a classic story in its own right, and works as a standalone). Meanwhile, Marvel dropped the bombshell and triggered the second backlash in its creative history (the first being Gwen's death). The Spider-Man we'd been following for the past twenty years was a clone.^note Conway's response on this retcon from a story that hilariously misread his own story to start with: "When I did find the gist of the story, that the previous ten years of Spider-Man stories didn't happen, I thought, this is a wonderful thing for a writer, because it means when I left the title, the book stopped." The response to this story (that the Spider-Man who fought the Juggernaut, romanced Black Cat, met the Kid who Collected Spider-Man, wore the Black Suit, grieved over the death of Captain DeWolff, married MJ and survived Kraven and fought Venom and Carnage wasn't the real deal) was loud and negative. Even if Ben Reilly was positively received by some, the entire project fell apart and the whole thing was hastily undone through a series of retcons and quietly swept under the rug — with the main consequence that the original Green Goblin was back among the living. (Oh, and providing a possibly-dead baby to become Spider-Girl in an alternate timeline.) Aunt May also came back at the end.
• Post-Clone Saga (1996-2000): The immediate aftermath of the era saw writers trying to grapple with Norman Osborn returning to Spider-Man titles, while at the same time downplaying the events of the Clone Saga itself. A notable story in this period is Identity Crisis where Norman Osborn who has bought out the Daily Bugle and is now technically Peter's boss, frames Spider-Man for murder. To clear up his name and get payback, Peter, with the help of Mary Jane who designed the costumes, creates a new series of costumed alter-egos with power-sets that he can fake as Spider-Man — Hornet, Prodigy, Dusk, Ricochet. These alter-egos in time became picked up and spun off into legacies in their own right. This period was also notable for a brief attempt at a Continuity Reboot Setting Update, John Byrne's Spider-Man: Chapter One which despite initial notices was quickly retconned and canceled over to fears that it was an attempt to replace the original story. It was followed by Howard Mackie's run which led to the brief death of Mary Jane Watson at the demand of editors, followed by Peter Parker at his lowest and most depressed period in his life. Green Goblin, the revived Norman Osborn decided to catch up and get his Arch-Enemy mojo back in Revenge of the Green Goblin by Roger Stern, a bleak, angsty and violent story where the Goblin tortures and gaslights Peter Parker into becoming his heir only for him to refuse. Near the end, Mary Jane was alive after all and she and Peter returned, but the trauma of her period of captivity and resulting PTSD leads her and Peter to separate for a brief period. She would leave New York and go to LA and recover in the meantime. In 2000, Brian Michael Bendis wrote Ultimate Spider-Man another attempt at a Chapter One Setting Update but this one proved popular and influential, starting the Ultimate Marvel sub-franchise which dominated the turn of the millennium.
• The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski)(2001-2008): J. Michael Straczynski took over from Amazing Spider-Man Vol 2 #30 and would continue a run that lasted for 7 years, the longest since David Michelinie. He introduced a series of new concepts and ideas. Namely the Myth Arc of the Spider-Totem, which was unfurled in the opening "Coming Home" storyline that pitched Spider-Man against Morlun, his new villain who was tougher, relentless, and mysterious than many of the villains Spider-Man was used to. Peter also became a high school teacher at this time, returning to his original roots but now from the other side and often spending much of his time helping students and others in the friendly neighborhood even as his stories started flirting with Magic Realism. He also wrote the 9/11 response issue in ASM-36, V2 (which became famous for the entirely black cover by John Romita Jr). His run became celebrated for "The Conversation" (ASM-38), the comic where Aunt May after discovering Peter is Spider-Man finally has a heart to heart talk with her nephew about the lies he has told her since the age of 15 (which much like the retconned Aunt May death issue^note where it was revealed she knew Peter was Spider-Man all along and intended as such in that story is still considered a classic). In Issue #50, Spider-Man and MJ reunite and commit to their relationship again. His later run was affected by a series of stories by other writers, such as Spider-Man officially becoming an Avenger, and having his identity revealed to the world in Civil War (2006) by Mark Millar which revealed Spider-Man's identity to the world and the consequences of that story led to Back in Black where Spider-Man and his family became outlaws on the lam. His run ended with One More Day (co-written by EIC Joe Quesada who wrote the final two issues) which sparked the third major backlash of Spider-Man history culminating in the end of the Spider-Marriage via an editorially mandated Deal with the Devil. Supplementing the main series were other storylines in satellite titles:
  • The Spectacular Spider-Man by Paul Jenkins, was the second volume of the longest-lasting second series which lasted until 2005. Jenkins' important stories include his villain Fusion who is angered by Spider-Man out of Misplaced Retribution. He also wrote flashback issues showing Uncle Ben's backstory, as well as one-shots such as "Read 'Em and Weep" which involves Spider-Man meeting other superheroes on poker-night. A Death in the Family was also a notable Green Goblin and Spider-Man story, being a sequel to the Revenge of the Green Goblin story.
  • Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man by Peter David, which focused on smaller slice-of-life stories, mostly revolving on the experiences of Aunt May and Mary Jane in Avengers Tower, and covering the aftermath of the Civil War identity reveal on many of Peter's supporting characters.
  • The Pulse and New Avengers by Brian Michael Bendis involved Spider-Man joining the Avengers for the first time in his publication history. Jessica Jones at the same time gets involved with the Daily Bugle's new supplement "The Pulse" and her first big scoop involves teaming up with Luke Cage and Spidey to take down Norman Osborn and put him in prison for the first time in his 40 year real-time publication history. A decision that would ultimately lead to Norman becoming a Marvel wide villain.
  • Marvel Knights: Spider-Man by Mark Millar. A 12 issue series that has Peter, Aunt May and MJ engage in a conspiracy headed by the imprisoned Norman Osborn, his catspaw Mac Gargan, several other rogues, and maybe a sinister cabal of businessmen who fund supervillains to keep Spider-Man from going after white-collar crime. Maybe. MK was later converted into The Sensational Spider-Man volume 2 briefly written by Reggie Hudlin followed later by Robert Aguirre-Sacassia who wrote from #32-40 tying into the Civil War and Back in Black era in particular. Sensational Spider-Man Annual #1 ("To Have and to Hold") was written by Matt Fraction, being a coda about Peter and Mary Jane's marriage and its history and legacy.
• Brand New Day (2008-2010): The era immediately following OMD was headed by a team of writers (Dan Slott, Marc Guggenheim, Mark Waid, Fred van Lente, Bob Gale, Zeb Wells). The decision was taken to cancel the second series (Sensational Spider-Man and Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man) and instead publish ASM three times a month. Different writers would rotate and contribute different arcs and stories. Important developments in this time were the introduction of new members to Peter's supporting cast — Lilly Hollister, Norah Winters, Carlie Cooper, and J. Jonah Jameson Sr. (Flat Top's Dad, and the future Mr. Aunt May, which meant that Peter and Jonah were officially related, to their mutual chagrin). New villains introduced are Screwball, Mister Negative, Jackpot, Menace, and Overdrive. Other important developments are Flash Thompson whose origins were now retconned, changing him from a Vietnam veteran to a veteran of the Iraq War and a paraplegic, setting the foundation for his conversion to Agent Venom. Notable stories include Mark Waid's "Unscheduled Stop" (ASM #578-579) and Dan Slott's "New Ways to Die", "The Gauntlet" and "Grim Hunt" which saw the resurrection of Kraven the Hunter, several classic rogues returning in a Darker and Edgier fashion, as well as a revival of the Sinister Six led by a Doctor Octopus whose body was now decaying, driving him to go postal. The retcon of the removal of the marriage led to Mary Jane being Put on a Bus for some 40 odd issues (the second time following the Wolfman-O'Neill era), and the mechanics of the new status-quo was explained in One Moment in Time by Joe Quesada. By the end of this era, many of the original writers moved on to other projects, while Dan Slott was given the go-ahead to become the main writer of ASM. Another notable feature was Stan Lee writing back-up stories — "Spidey Super Sundays" (art by Marcos Martin) which were non-canon short strips printed as a backup feature (and later printed as a separate volume collecting all of it). These stories often had Lee making jokes about the ambiguity of Spider-Man's continuity and its many changes.
• The Amazing Spider-Man (Dan Slott) (2010-2018): Writing bi-monthly, Dan Slott ultimately became the major writer of Spider-Man and with more than 200+issues on Spider-Man in main titles, secondary titles, mini-series, and other stuff, he has become the most Spider-Man writer ever on 616. His arc began with "Big Time", which saw Peter join Horizon Labs and work as a scientist under Max Modell. Slott followed this up with several event stories, including Spider-Island, an event story from 2011 which spanned all of the ongoing Spider-Man satellite books as well as much of the Marvel Universe. The aftermath saw Kaine acquire his ongoing book series (Scarlet Spider). This was followed by Ends of the Earth and Superior Spider-Man, a 2012-2014 Spider-Man event that saw Peter Parker disappear from his title for the longest gap in his history. Following that, there was Spider-Verse where Spider-Man teams up with many, many other people with Spider-powers as well as Alternate Universe counterparts of himself to stop a danger that threatens them all. Features massive amount of Continuity Porn as Spider-Men from previous AU storylines (such as The Clone Saga and House of M), Spider-themed spin-off books, What If? one-shots and from animated adaptations. This was followed by the Worldwide arc which saw Peter Parker elevated to a rich businessman. Slott ended his run with Go Down Swinging published in 2018, stopping at Issue #801.
• After BND and during the start of Slott's run, a decision was taken to make The Amazing Spider-Man the main series, but published bi-monthly, and cancel all second series titles. As Slott's run advanced and he developed many spin-offs a new writing team came on board to help him including:
  • Christos Gage, who scripted some 40 issues plotted by Slott in Amazing and the closing issues of Superior Spider-Man. He would write Spider-Geddon, the sequel series to Spider-Verse and later volume 2 of Superior Spider-Man.
  • Chip Zdarsky meanwhile revived Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man as the second series starting in 2017. His run included subplots such as Teresa Durand, who might or might not be Peter's long-lost sister. His run also included "My Dinner with Jonah" (Issue #6) where Spider-Man sits down for an interview with J. Jonah Jameson and at the end of which he reveals his identity to him after which they become allies albeit of a very vitriolic kind.
  • Brian Michael Bendis who had created Miles Morales in the Ultimate Marvel Alternate Continuity eventually imported him wholesale into the mainline 616 Universe, laying the groundwork with Spider-Men (a crossover between Post-OMD Peter and Post-Death of Spider-Man Miles). He then wrote a series of his adventures as the street-level Spider-Man to contrast Peter's move up the ladder to corporate super-heroics before ending his run, and his time in Marvel with Spider-Men II which ensured that Miles would remain in the 616 from here on out.
  • Gerry Conway, a Spider-Man veteran, likewise returned with Spiral printed as a limited series that serves as a Lower-Deck Episode to Slott's Worldwide arc (printed as Amazing Spider-Man #16.1, 17.1, 18.1, 19.1, 20.1), that focused on Spider-Man's relationship with Captain Yuri Watanabe as they investigate and cover a gang war, a storyline that was ultimately adapted in part for the DLC of Spider-Man (PS4).
  • Nick Spencer also wrote the highly popular cult series The Superior Foes of Spider-Man to show the Lower-Deck Episode of Spider-Man's Rogues Gallery. Eventually, Spencer would succeed Slott at the end of 2018 as the mainline Spider-Man writer.

• The Amazing Spider-Man (2018): Following on from Slott's extended run. Spencer's first story arc promised "Back to Basics" with Peter Parker downgraded back to graduate student after a plagiarism scandal undoes some of his recent successes, though Peter acknowledges that said successes were unearned. Spencer also reignited the Peter and Mary Jane love story in the mainline continuity after a ten-year absence (the longest period in which Peter and Mary Jane were apart after they started dating in earnest in the Conway era). A new mysterious villain, and a story-arc dealing with Boomerang, a villain Spencer had touched on in his Superior Foes series forms the focus of the initial arc. 2019 introduces Hunted, Spencer's first event.
• Following Zdarsky's success on Spectacular Spider-Man, Marvel stated that it continues its commitment to the second series, with Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, a title that had last been written by Peter David during the JMS era, revived under Tom Taylor starting from 2019. Meanwhile, Spider-Man's legacy characters will continue their adventures under new teams, with Saladin Ahmed writing Miles Morales Spider Man and Christos Gage writing the sequel series to Superior Spider-Man.
• Spider-Man Beyond: In 2021, following the end of Nick Spencer's run on the title with ASM #74, a rotating set of writers consisting of Kelly Thompson, Saladin Ahmed, Cody Ziglar, Patrick Gleason, and Zeb Wells take the story of Spider-Man in an interesting direction when Ben Reily takes over the title of Spider-Man starting in ASM #75
• The Amazing Spider-Man (2022): For Spider-Man's 60th Anniversary, Zeb Wells and John Romita Jr. take over the series, relaunching with a new volume.
• Spider-Man (2022). As part of the wider 60th anniversary events, the adjective-free Spider-Man title is relaunched, with Dan Slott and Mark Bagley as the initial creative team. The series begins with the End of the Spider-Verse event.
• Spider-Man: The Lost Hunt: A 2023 comic that acts as a loose sequel to Kraven's Last Hunt set during The Clone Saga.

Current Titles

• The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) (Vol. 6) (April 2022 - present)
• Miles Morales: Spider-Man (2022) (December 2022 – present)
• Spider-Man (October 2022 - present)

Former Titles

2020s

• Miles Morales: Spider-Man (2018) (December 2018 – September 2022)
• Spider-Man Beyond (Vol. 5) (October 2021 - March 2022)
• The Amazing Spider-Man (2018) (Vol. 5) (July 2018 - September 2021)
• Deadly Neighborhood Spider-Man (October 2022 - February 2023)

2010s

• Spider-Man Noir: Eyes Without a Face (2010)
• Spider-Island (Started August 2011)
• Scarlet Spider (Started January 2012)
• Superior Spider-Man (Started 2013)
• Spider-Gwen (Introduced September 2014, began February 2015)
• Spider-Man and the X-Men (Started December 2014)
• Spider-Man: Life Story (Started May 2019)
• Ghost-Spider (2019) (Started August 2019)

2000s

• The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski). Started in 2001.
• Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do. Series started in August 2002, concluded in 2006.
• Spider-Man: Blue. Series began in July 2002 and concluded in April 2003.
• Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. Series started in December, 2005.
• Spider-Man Noir (2009)
• Spider-Man: Reign. Series started in December, 2006.
• Ultimate Spider-Man. Series started in November, 2000.

1990s

• Scarlet Spider
• Spider-Girl. First appeared in February, 1998.
• Spider-Man 2099. Series started in November, 1992.
• Spider-Man and Batman: Disordered Minds. Published in September, 1995.
• Spider-Man: Chapter One. Series started December, 1998.
• Spider-Woman

1960s

• The Amazing Spider-Man (1963). The series began in March 1963 and concluded in November 1998.

• Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962)
• The Amazing Spider-Man (Lee & Ditko) (1962-1966)
• If This Be My Destiny...! (1965)
• The Night Gwen Stacy Died (1973)
• Secret Wars (1984)
• The Death of Jean DeWolff (1985-1986)
• Kraven's Last Hunt (1987)
• Spider-Man versus Wolverine (1987)
• Maximum Carnage (1993)
• Spider-Man: The Mutant Agenda (1994)
• The Clone Saga (1994-1996)
• Untold Tales of Spider-Man (1995-1997)
• Spider-Man: Identity Crisis (1998)
• Revenge of the Green Goblin (2000-2001)
• The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski) (2001-2007)
• Spider-Man: Blue (2002-2003)
• Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do (2002-2006)
• Civil War (2006-2007)
• One More Day (2007-2008)
• Brand New Day (2008-2010)
• Grim Hunt (2010)
• One Moment in Time (2010)
• The Amazing Spider-Man (Dan Slott) (2010-2018)
• Spider-Island (2011)
• Spider-Men (2012)
• Ends of the Earth (2012)
• Superior Spider-Man
• The Superior Foes of Spider-Man
• Spider-Verse (2014)
• Spider-Man/Deadpool (2016)
• Dead No More: The Clone Conspiracy (2016)
• Spider-Man (2016) (2016)
• Spider-Men II (2017)
• Go Down Swinging (2018)
• The Amazing Spider-Man (2018) (2018-2021)
• Spider-Geddon (2018)
• Hunted (2019)
• Absolute Carnage (2019)
• Sins Rising (2020)
• Last Remains (2020)
• King's Ransom (2021)
• The Chameleon Conspiracy (2021)
• Sinister War (2021)
• Spider-Man Beyond (2021-2022)
• End of the Spider-Verse (2022)
• Spider-Man: The Lost Hunt (2023)

• Spider-Man (Manga) (1970)
• Spidey Super Stories (1974)
• Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man (1976)
• The Spider-Man Newspaper Strip (1977)
• Superman and Spider-Man (1981)
• Spider-Ham (1983)
• Spider-Man 2099 (1992)
• Spider-Man and Batman: Disordered Minds (1995)
  • Batman & Spider-Man: New Age Dawning (1997)
• 101 Ways to End the Clone Saga (1997)
• Spider-Man: Chapter One (1998)
• Spider-Girl (1998)
• Ultimate Spider-Man (2000)
• Trouble (Marvel Comics) (2003)
• Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane (2005)
• Spider-Man: Reign (2006)
• Spider-Man Noir (2009)
• Spider-Gwen (2014)
• The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows (2015)
• Spidey (2015)
• Web Warriors (2016)
• Spider-Man: Fake Red (2019)
• Spider-Man: Life Story (2019)
• Spider-Man: Bloodline (2019-2020)
• Spider-Man: Spider's Shadow (2021)

• Action Dad:
  • Osborn himself, though in recent years he's more likely to strap a bomb to his kid and use them as a human shield than he is to protect them, but the original reason he truly came to hate Spider-Man, and why he killed Gwen Stacy, was because he blamed him for his son's second drug overdose, one that nearly killed him.
  • Peter Parker has his moments in Spider-Girl. Sure, he may be retired and missing a leg, but you shouldn't mess with his kids.
  • Kaine also shows this trait from time to time when his "niece" is in danger. Must be genetic.
  • Every incarnation of Peter Parker has this to some extent.... Granted, most versions don't have children, but they all have a big blinking button somewhere in their psyche labeled "someone hurt my loved ones", and the majority of the New York underworld can tell when some idiot has pressed it. Hint: the reason the motor-mouthed superhero hasn't talked in the last sixty seconds is because he's using all his superior intellect and enhanced nerve conduction velocity (i.e. ability to think faster than normal) to consider the merits of the 6,000 different ways he intends to hurt you.
  • There's also The Amazing Spider-Man (Dan Slott) #645. He's led to believe an infant he was trying to protect is killed. He then proceeds to go on a rampage. It's so bad, that some of his rogues gallery don't believe it...until he comes for them.
• Action Series: One of the most well-known bits of escapist fiction to date, and no doubt one of the most flagrant examples of the trope.
• Actually a Doombot:
  • Spider-Man's enemy Mysterio uses this trick a lot too. Seeing as Mysterio is also fond of holograms and illusions, Spider-Man often cannot tell if he facing the real Mysterio, an illusion, or a robot, and even worse, the same often goes for a lot of other stuff he has to fight when the villain is involved.
    • This has become more complex since the original Mysterio acquired a couple of imitators who also use this identity. And they don't really get along with each other. A storyline in Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #11-13 (October-December, 2006) had all three Mysterios independently seeking a confrontation with Spidey, resulting in a rather complicated Mêlée à Trois scenario. Spidey has trouble telling which is which and is further confused because the original was supposed to be dead.
    • In Spider-Men, Mysterio doesn't actually have a Ultimate Marvel counterpart. "Ultimate Mysterio" is actually a robot double he was controlling all along.
    • One reason this trick works so often is that Mysterio is a well-established technical genius. His robots are incredibly realistic, so much so that in the Guardian Devil story arc by Kevin Smith, he manages to convince Daredevil, the man who can hear heartbeats, into believing that Mysterio is dead.
  • Perhaps the most infamous usage of this trick in Spider-Man history is the first "death" of Aunt May. She peacefully died of old age in a realistic and tasteful manner; Peter and the other characters mourned her and eventually moved on. However, later editor-in-chief Bob Harras demanded that she be brought back to life. So, Aunt May was found alive and it was revealed that Norman Osborn had hired an actress to impersonate Aunt May perfectly, and kept up the charade even on her deathbed, meaning Peter (and the readers) cried over a total stranger. Even worse it contraindicated the one-shot Osborn Journal, presented as Norman's private account detailing his plans behind the Clone Saga, which had Norman specifically state he had nothing to do with May's death even if he wished he had.
  • Another famed Spidey villain who does this trick in the Hobgoblin, Roderick Kingsley. Despite being souped up with the Goblin Formula, he isn't stupid — he'll send out random schmoes powered up and brainwashed to do his bidding and if they die, no skin off his back. If they do good, then he's more than willing to let them keep going, but if they screw up, he'll step in personally and kill the schmook himself. Just ask Jason Macendale... oh, wait...
    • And one early issue has Roderick send an actual robot, then a brainwashed dupe, to attack people.
  • In the storyline Hunted, it is suggested that all appearances of Kraven the Hunter since the end of Grim Hunt was actually one of his 87 clones. This seemingly includes an appearance in Scarlet Spider where he tried to force Kaine to kill him and his appearances in Unbeatable Squirrel Girl where she tried to help him along with a Heel–Face Turn.
• Affably Evil:
  • Otto Octavius, better known as Spider-Man's nemesis, Doctor Octopus, once rented a room from Aunt May, and behaved like a perfect gentleman, even helping her around the house. He also came very near to marrying her, after she somehow inherited a nuclear plant. May's inability to understand that he was a bad person was a running gag for a long while. It became Faux Affably Evil during The Ends of the Earth and the following Superior Spider-Man arc.
  • The Venom symbiote is like a lost sweet little kid who though bloodthirsty and arrogant wants to help its hosts unlike its corrupted kind who take complete control of their hosts than draining them of vitality killing them in the process and it can be very friendly to those who are innocent along with the ones that it cares about and loves the most like Spider-Man, Eddie Brock and Flash Thompson. It prefers to be honest with people instead of lying to them since it hates lying to them about things and it does not try to use lethal force unless it has to. It also likes being a superhero which makes it very adorable because it’s a fan of them.
• Alliterative Name: Stan Lee was the Trope Codifier for the trend because he found names easier to keep track of if he used alliteration as a mnemonic device.
  • Peter Parker/Spider-Man. Among others, he had to deal with J. Jonah Jameson and Dr. Otto Octavius/Doctor Octopus. Jonah himself has a son named John Jameson from his first wife, Joan, he later married Marla Madison, his editor-in-chief is Joe "Robbie" Robertson (who has a son named Randy), and secretaries have included Betty Brant (whose brother was called Bennett) and Glory Grant. The Bugle staff absolutely adores alliteration. In fact, JJJ is actually J. Jonah Jameson, Junior. We have also Curt Connors/the Lizard, and Cletus Kasady/Carnage. This reached the height of absurdity with a splash page showing the characters attending a Bugle funeral. Of the ten characters named, nine had alliterative names, with only Aunt May not fitting in.
  • Based on this, there was a Funny Animal version, named Peter Porker, The Amazing Spider-Ham, who worked for J. Jonah Jackal.
  • The novelization of Spider-Man hung a lampshade on this, by having Jameson name the Green Goblin in a headline. This resulted in a brief discussion on alliteration between J. Jonah Jameson, Peter Parker, the Bugle's editor Robbie Robertson, and Jameson's secretary Betty Brant... none of whom seemed to notice they were examples. The same point is made in Spider-Man 3.
  • In the popular Ultimate Marvel line, Peter Parker's successor as Spider-Man is tiny thirteen-year-old Miles Morales.
• Alternate Company Equivalent: Peter Parker is a more up-to-date take on Clark Kent, an orphaned kid raised by foster parents. A nerd who works at a daily newspaper office for a grumpy boss but secretly fights crime in a red and blue costume. Even the wisecracking nature of the character and being chased by the police have roots in Superman's early days. His love life and woes with him/Gwen/MJ/Felicia can also be sourced to Superman and the girls who had crushes on him (Lois and Lana). Likewise, Spider-Man and Superman both share the distinction of actually marrying their long-time girlfriends. Spidey was originally conceived as a teenager, so Peter Parker was essentially picking up where Billy Batson (who had been planned as a child and aged into his teens, and was out of print when Lee and Ditko created Spidey) left off. Whenever Spider-Man teams up with Daredevil, their dynamic echoes the World's Finest team-up albeit on a much smaller scale.
  • Virtue was basically an extended Take That! towards Superman for as long as he lasted, though his story was more Goku from Dragon Ball in that he was a member of a still active, if endangered, group of warmongers who did not know his true origins or purpose.
• Always Save the Girl: Subverted with Gwen Stacy in The Night Gwen Stacy Died.
• Always Someone Better:
  • The Human Torch played this role in early stories. No one character plays the role now. Torch and Spidey eventually switched the roles for awhile. Peter was smart enough that he could keep up with Reed's scientific lectures, developed a friendly rapport with Sue and Ben, and was even good with watching Franklin. There was a period where Johnny resented the fact that Peter was practically more of a member of his own family than he was. They eventually worked this out, though, and became best buddies, until One More Day caused an identity reset. While they're friends again, sort of, now that Peter's again revealed his identity to the Four, they aren't near as close as they once were.
  • The symbiotes appear to have this as a biological rule, as each symbiote inherits the powers of it's parent to a greater degree. Venom is outclassed by his spawn, Carnage, who in turn is outclassed by his spawn, Toxin. This element was downplayed and eventually phased out completely as the comics continue, however: While Toxin was Put on a Bus, Venom acquired several Superhuman hosts and mutations, while Carnage repeatedly tampered with Multiversal (well, microversal...) energy and Chtonic magic to power himself. Nowadays, whenever the Symbiotes brawl there never seems to be a "definitive" stronger one.
• Alpha Bitch: Liz Allan started as one of these before she was Put on a Bus. Like her ex-boyfriend Flash (see above and below), she becomes much more mature when Peter runs into her several years later. Then there's Gwen Stacy in the Ditko era before rewrites changed her personality.
• Amazonian Beauty: Stunner, looks like a bodybuilder wearing a skin-tight leotard. True to her name, she is described as breathtakingly beautiful, and in her first appearances, brags about how beautiful she is to some patrons at a bar, who judging by the smiles on their faces, didn't disagree.
  • The reason why Stunner is so beautiful is that she's a virtual reality construct (tangible hologram) controlled by Angelina Brancale. Angelina is an obese woman who wanted to be thin and beautiful, so Doctor Octopus, another Spider-Man villain and her lover at the time, gave her a machine that allowed her to be Stunner.
• Ambiguously Gay: Mysterio is sort of this. In the mainstream comics he's rarely, if ever, shown any interest in women and has had a few hints over the years (plus the Spidey standard of occasional Ho Yay). Some novels dropped the ambiguously part and made him explicitly gay; said novels are dubiously canon at best but pretty much everyone out-of-universe assumes he's gay at this point, even if the comics have yet to actually say it.
• Animal Motifs: The series is arguably the Trope Codifier since Spidey and a good portion of his rogues gallery are distinctly patterned on animals, to wit: the Vulture, the Chameleon, the Scorpion, the Rhino, the Beetle, the Jackal, Dr. Octopus. Likewise, Kraven the Hunter, while not having animal powers famously wears a jacket made out of lion fur.
  • Deliberately invoked in-universe with Scorpion, who received his powers and codename so he could hunt Spider-Man: in real life, scorpions prey on spiders.
  • The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski) posited that Spidey is being assaulted by envious pretenders who subconsciously realize that he is a true totemic champion. Spider-Man: The Darkest Hours, a book by Jim Butcher based on this run, introduces the siblings of Morlun, an Implacable Man and Energy Vampire who feeds on this type, and it turns out that every Animal-Themed Superbeing has this connection even if it's not obvious. Black Cat is a Badass Normal; she wasn't bitten by a radioactive cat and given feline powers. Yet, if she wasn't cat enough to be delicious and nutritious to the likes of Morlun, she'd never have chosen the name. That's why Spidey, Cat, and even the Rhino must team up when Mortia, Thanis, and Malos come to town.
  • Hunted, the first story event from The Amazing Spider-Man (2018) Lampshades this when Spider-Man points out that it's "not hard to see the theme here" among the many animal-themed rogues being rounded for Kraven the Hunter's latest evil scheme. Two of the bad guys doing the rounding up, Taskmaster and Black Ant actually discuss in a dark comedic way whether Hammerhead, the mob boss with a metal plate in his skull fits given the shark name but they decide that he hadn't committed, i.e. actually dress up and use gadgets which fit his animal gimmick. When all the rounding up is done, Taskmaster gloats to Black Ant, when he betrays him, that hey an ant is also an animal.
• Animal-Themed Fighting Style:
  • Spider-Man's rogues gallery contains several enemies who follow this pattern to go with their animal motifs. In fact, for a time this was almost the only type of foe Spidey fought. Rhino, Vulture, Doctor Octopus, Kangaroo, Scorpion, Leap Frog, Puma, and Razorback are a very short list of villains who, through one method or another, tend to fight using the same kinds of attacks and tactics as the animals they're patterned after. How effective this is varies.
  • In The Amazing Spider-Man (Dan Slott), Spider-Man's Spider-Sense was temporarily disabled. To compensate for this, Peter underwent martial arts training from Shang Chi to develop a fighting style called "Way of the Spider" which focused on spider-like strength and reflexes.
• Anti-Hero: Spider-Man himself originally could be quite the self-serving jerkass at times. In one comic he gatecrashed Johnny Storm’s house party and picked a fight with Johnny just because he was jealous of the attention the latter got. Fans however complained to Stan about Spidey’s jerky behaviour in the fan mail section and soon Spider-Man’s negative traits were dropped and he became the All-Loving Hero we know him as today. Although certain writers (such as Dan Slott) turn him into a flawed Anti-Hero and even a Anti-Villain when Doctor Octopus took over his body in Superior Spider-Man.
• Anti-Hero Substitute:
  • Venom could count as a rare villain-to-villain example of this. Eddie Brock, the original Venom was certainly a homicidal maniac, but he eventually was tailored into a '90s Anti-Hero of sorts. The third Venom, Mac Gargan (the Scorpion) is more evil than Brock and thus since he pretends to be a hero as part of the Dark Avengers, he's both an Anti-Hero Substitute for Spider-Man (who he impersonates) and Venom. The second Venom (Angelo Fortunato) didn't last long enough to be considered a substitute. Once Flash Thompson became Venom, you could argue for it being an odd reverse villain-hero example; Flash being more heroic than Eddie at his very best. And then it went back to anti-hero again as Eddie.
  • Zig-zagged in The Clone Saga. The original aim of the series, itself a continuation of a Silver Age storyline, was an attempt to roll back the creeping cynicism of the nineties. Whilst Peter Parker continued to spiral ever downward into depression and anger, Ben Reilly was introduced as a Lighter and Softer Spider-Man with the same set of memories as the original, a powerful statement of just how far Peter had fallen.
  • The entire premise of Superior Spider-Man, which sees Otto Octavius becoming a Darker and Edgier Spider-Man after performing a "Freaky Friday" Flip with Peter Parker and then leaving him to die in Ock's frail body. As Spider-Man, Otto spies on criminals 24/7 with automated "Spider-bots" equipped with cameras, employs a private mercenary army called "Spider-Patrol 7", and even has his own force of eight-legged Humongous Mecha decked out in Spider-Man's classic red and blue. Notably, where Peter was the classic Hero with Bad Publicity who was frequently treated as a criminal nuisance by the cops and the press, Otto frequently gives orders to the police and city hall.
• Anti-Villain:
  • Puma serves in many ways as a Punch-Clock Villain, only killing people he's hired to murder as a paid assassin. He originally crosses paths with Spidey after a mob boss hires him to murder the wall-crawler, but later on comes to Spider-Man's aid on several occasions. He only kills people he's paid to, and otherwise functions as a perfectly legitimate businessman in his day job, his major concerns being his own personal welfare and the needs of his people.
  • Mr. Negative is a ruthless crime lord who runs drugs, weapons, prostitutes, illegal immigrants, protection... His alter ego, Martin Li, is a saintly billionaire who has dedicated his life to charitable pursuits. He feels this is necessary for the sake of balance - if a man who does great evil doesn't also do great good, his spirit will never know peace.
  • Regent in The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows. The reason he has taken the powers of every other hero in their slice of the Marvel multiverse is because he believes this is the only way to protect their Earth from destruction should the events of Secret Wars (2015) spill into their reality. When he tells this to our heroes, who are completely unaware of said multiverse war, they dismiss him as being completely insane.
• Arachnid Appearance and Attire: Spider-Man is a notable example in that unlike regular spider-themed characters, he's known for being very colorful, except when he's wearing his black costume. He and other spider-heroes also usually crack jokes or act silly when fighting bad guys, further subverting this trope. Peter Parker is "Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man", after all. However, when the situation becomes dire enough for these various Spideys to stop quipping, they become absolutely terrifying opponents that practically codify this trope.
  • There's also Venom, Carnage, and Toxin as symbiotes that copy Spidey's powers, and the various Spider-Women.
  • Madame Web also counts.
  • Lesser-known Spider-Man foes include Tarantula and Black Tarantula.
  • The two Scarlet Spiders, both clones of the original Spider-Man.
  • Silk and Spider-Gwen are similar in temperament to Peter, but their default costumes are much closer to the black-and-white color motif associated with this trope.
• Arch-Enemy: Three villains contest for the role: Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, and Venom. The reason for this is that the Green Goblin died in the '70s and spent a good 20-odd years dead before he came back to torment his foe, which is probably the record to beat for dead A-list villains. In the meantime, Doctor Octopus and Venom filled the roles in the '70s and '80s/'90s, respectively. However, in recent decades, Venom became more of an Anti-Hero figure with his hatred of Peter toned down. At the same time, both Osborn and Octavius really hurt the wall-crawler in their own nasty ways, so if there is a contest for a mantle of Spider-Man’s greatest enemy, it’s between these two. As Stan Lee put it himself: "The Green Goblin is Peter Parker's greatest enemy, while Doctor Octopus is Spider-Man's greatest enemy.”
  • To elaborate on the quote: Doctor Octopus is the archenemy of Spider-Man in a very classic sense. Otto and Peter have a lot in common, both being scientists, who were bullied in school, and later got caught up in freak accidents that dramatically changed them forever. Both received a lot of power and both decided to channel that power by adopting an alter-ego based on an eight-legged animal. The difference is that Peter chose to be a superhero and use his powers for good, while Otto chose to become a criminal, who tries to get back at the world. Doctor Octopus is the most recurring villain of the franchise, challenging the very idea of Spider-Man and being responsible for some of the most dramatic incidents in Peter’s career as a superhero: his first defeat, near death, death of Captain Stacey, the establishment of Sinister Six and outright identity theft. At the same time, Otto never really cared about the man behind the mask and kept his rivalry with Spider-Man on sort of “gentlemanly” level, actually making a point of trying not to hurt Peter’s loved ones.
  • Norman Osborn is a different story. For him, being a supervillain with a secret identity has never really carried any pragmatic benefits and has not served any goal aside from channeling his psychopathic and sadistic urges while maintaining a façade of respectful businessman. Since his very motivation as the Goblin (and later as Osborn himself) is to play out power fantasies, he was angry that someone stood up against him and swiftly decided to punish the person behind the mask. This dynamic between the characters eventually led to a lot of tragedy and pain in Peter’s life over the years as he saw numerous deaths and tortures of his loved ones, starting with Gwen Stacy, at the hands of Norman. Needless to say, it’s a very personal conflict between the two and Peter hates no one as much as he hates Osborn. He even had to stop himself from killing the latter several times. If Otto challenges the idea of Spider-Man as a superhero, Norman Osborn challenges Peter’s morality itself.
• Arc Welding:
  • A most notable case is Gerry Conway's Parallel Lives, which while often seen as a Retcon or Revision, was actually an attempt to merge different parts of Mary Jane Waton's characterization over the Spider-Man continuity in a way that made sense, while reconciling gaps in her characterization:
    • Originally Lee/Romita introduced Mary Jane as an insensitive airhead who was constantly flirting and chasing after Peter in a way that was both a little insensitive and mean to Harry and Gwen, and which annoyed Peter to no end. Then Conway himself in his run building on Lee-Romita's characterization tried to develop her into a more compassionate, and courageous, person, as well as a loyal friend and companion who genuinely cares for Peter and loves him, and with whom Peter can be truly happy and relaxed in a way he couldn't with Gwen. After Conway left, Len Wein generally kept the couple as static while occasionally for the sake of drama having MJ be mean to Peter by flirting with Flash in Operation: Jealousy type gambits that left him confused, with many noting that MJ was "Gwen with sarcasm and sass" in this period, rarely building on Conway's work. Marv Wolfman, who followed Wein, had Peter propose to her and MJ reject it a little callously, seeking to end the relationship and shake the status-quo, but the second series (The Spectacular Spider-Man), still keeping in line with Conway's characterization, had her say she still loved Peter and was a little worried about taking the next step, and later Wolfman said that she did it because her parents divorced and wrote her out of the book.
    • When Roger Stern came and brought Mary Jane back, as a little older and more successful version of her teenage self, he also created a backstory that hinted at both her origins (with Aunt May saying that both she and Peter "have lost so much") and later an outline that as per Stern, Tom Defalco followed correctly, namely that she had known Peter was Spider-Man for a while and it was out of fear for his life and herself that she rejected his proposal and left New York. This explanation contradicted the one given by Wolfman where it was fear about her repeating her parents' divorce, and it didn't explain when she learned the secret and why she chose Peter's proposal to get out, since Spider-Man's adventures didn't impinge on her life in that period to justify her leaving.
    • Conway, feeling that Mary Jane's new backstory explained and deepened her early behavior and characterization, decided to have Mary Jane know from the very beginning since it both demonstrated clearly to readers how much her Lee-Romita facade was clearly an act, it heightened her courage to stay at Peter's side, made her earlier interactions and behavior with Harry and Gwen a little less mean, if still sarcastic and trollish, and provided a better motivation for her rejecting Peter's first proposal (he proposed without telling her his identity which she would obviously feel was indicative that he didn't trust her) and why she chose to reveal her Secret Secret-Keeper status to Peter and her own origins so shortly after she came back when the Puma attacked (since originally she said "I thought I could handle it before", which two issues later became a justification for her leaving New York).
  • The Clone Saga had one moment where Peter is arrested for deaths that were connected to the clone Kaine. To his horror, the times those people were killed were during the time he was buried alive and he has no alibi without blowing his secret identity.
  • The Sins Past storyline infamously Ret Cons that Gwen Stacy secretly had twins with Norman Osborn, though it doesn't try to explain how. Fandom VIP J.R. "Madgoblin" Fettinger, having pored over back issues, posted his theory online of when it could have happened: a certain period when she was on the outs with Peter but after Norman had recently saved her father's life. Maybe she went over to thank him and One Thing Led to Another? He conceded that this wasn't a perfect theory (for example, Gwen doesn't look pregnant when she logically should), but it made more sense than anything else, so the writers made it canon.^note Then a later storyline reveals that this was all false anyway, she never slept with Norman and the twins were clones. Comics!
  • The Amazing Spider-Man (2018) tied Mary Jane's miscarriage at the end of The Clone Saga and Peter's infamous Deal with the Devil in One More Day together with the revelation that they're both part of Mephisto's efforts to prevent Peter and Mary Jane's daughter from being born, as she's apparently destined to dethrone him when he conquers Earth in a possible future.
  • Sinister War revealed that Kindred had been behind Mysterio's revival after the seminal Daredevil storyline Guardian Devil and was behind other events such as Spider-Men. The controversial Sins Past also plays a central role in the story, with the revelation that Harry Osborn was behind it all in a mad attempt to give Norman "worthy" heirs. That didn't pan out because the Stacy twins' bodies were too unstable, but they did come in handy when Kindred needed a body...
  • In Ultimate Spider-Man, several Batman Cold Opens involving him fighting some villain who attacked "Roxxon Industries" were welded together when the CEO of that company (a person rather lacking in common sense) hired some mercenaries to bring him in for questioning about why he was fighting those people.
• Armed with Canon:
  • Years ago, Eric Larsen had the Spider-Man villain Doctor Octopus deliver the Hulk a severe smackdown during the "Revenge of the Sinister Six" storyarc. In the story, "Doc Ock" was given extremely powerful adamantium limbs which made him far more dangerous. Hulk writer Peter David accused Larsen of making a personal attack when he wrote that story and responded with a story written for the sole purpose of mocking Doctor Octopus. Larsen denied this, claiming he had used the Hulk to show how deadly Ock had become in a rather obvious demonstration of The Worf Effect. (And it made sense; what better way to prove a villain has Taken a Level in Badass than have him beat up the Hulk?)
    • This debate kicked up again years later in the letter-pages of Savage Dragon where David wrote in to accuse Larsen of making a personal attack when he wrote the Spider-Man story. Larsen explained that since Doc Ock was using Applied Phlebotinum in the story (he had much stronger adamantium limbs), it made sense to use the Hulk for the Worf Effect. David was not amused.
  • The What If? version of Spider-Man: The Other, by Peter David, basically starts with the Watcher explaining that the fundamental premise of the original story (by J. Michael Straczynski) is flawed, and this version is based on what was really going on.
  • Kurt Busiek's Untold Tales of Spider-Man featured stories set in between and around The Amazing Spider-Man. It stuck closely as possible to the old continuity of those issues. Many fans considered it the most entertaining Spider-Man book, especially since the series appeared around the time all the regular Spider titles were entangled in The Clone Saga mess. Then John Byrne came along. Spider-Man: Chapter One was his attempt to update the old Lee and Ditko stories and he pretty much disregarded most of what Busiek had done in his Untold Tales series.
    • Not too long afterwards, Paul Jenkins penned a Chameleon story-arc in Webspinners: Tales of Spider-Man - explicitly referencing his first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #1 instead of Chapter One. Note that Jenkins didn't do so based on his own opinions. He simply asked editorial which story he should reference, and they answered with the original. To add insult to injury, this went down while Chapter One was still in progress - Byrne's mini-series being disregarded months before the final issue was on the stands. Additionally, events and characters from Untold Tales have since been mentioned or referenced.
  • When Nick Spencer took over writing The Amazing Spider-Man in 2018, the early issues had some noticeable potshots at former writer Dan Slott's portrayal of the character, with several characters even calling Peter out on irresponsible behavior made during Slott's run. Spencer's very first issue saw the long-awaited reunion of Peter and Mary Jane, with subsequent issues deconstructing their previous reasoning for not getting back together and ultimately refuting it. Unfortunately for Spencer, his efforts were for naught, as the two were immediately broken up again after Zeb Wells took over the comic.
  • In Mighty Avengers (following the conclusion of Superior Spider-Man), Peter mentions having an Ayn Rand phase in college and getting into shouting matches with protesters, which was a jab at Steve Ditko's fascination with Objectivism.
• Art Evolution: While Spider-Man's basic design has stayed pretty consistent, there have been a number of changes throughout the years. When he was first drawn by Steve Ditko, Spidey's eyes were much smaller, and he had web nets underneath his arms. When John Romita Sr. took over drawing the comic, the web wings grew smaller, and his eyes grew a little larger. By the '80s, the web wings were completely gone, and the eyes started being drawn absolutely huge compared to Ditko's art style. Today, the eye size still fluctuates from artist to artist, but hardly anyone includes the web wings. Also, his suit was red and black, rather than red and blue.
  • Steve Ditko's work noticeably improved further into his run. When he was plotting his own stories, his work became more visual.
  • John Romita Sr's work started out as a close copy of Ditko's, featuring nine-panel pages and such. But as Romita grew more confident with his work and as Ditko's run was further back in the memories of readers, Romita began to space out his work a bit more, allowing for more visual panels, and eventually, Romita adopted his own style.
  • John Romita Jr.'s work noticeably improved in the interim between his first run with Roger Stern and his second run after the reboot (mostly with J. Michael Straczynski).
  • Todd McFarlane's work started out fairly standard until proportions and anatomy became more and more exaggerated, some would say for the worse. Erik Larsen followed a similar trajectory.
  • Mark Bagley's issue as guest penciller, The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #345, was rather rough and the proportions were off and Bagley didn't quite have the character design right. But by the time he'd grown into his role as a regular penciller, his work was so iconic that it was featured on just about every piece of Spider-Man merchandise.
• The Artifact: On account of Marvel's decision to set Spider-Man in a Like Reality, Unless Noted New York (rather than DC's Fantasy Counterpart Culture approach) as well as its adoption of Comic-Book Time, some aspects of Spider-Man's lore have become a little anachronistic or dated (which only recently has started to change).
  • Spider-Man is fundamentally a street-level superhero like Daredevil and originally his adventures had a realism because The '60s to The '90s was The Big Rotten Apple era of New York City (where real events like the 1977 blackout occurred in the page), a time of high crime statistics when the idea of multiple street-level superheroes in a single city had a little verisimilitude. Since the era of Giuliani and gentrification, however, street crime level has dropped down while highly restrictive gun laws have been put into effect. Of course, the presence and activity of supervillains don't depend on that for explanation, but fundamentally the reduction of crime should mean that Spider-Man's hero duties putting demands on his personal and professional life needs more justification than "it's New York".
  • The issues of gentrification and high costs in New York, the challenges to print media by digital media, and the rise of cellphones and the internet have also meant that Peter's old job as a photographer for a newspaper, being the guy who "takes pictures of Spider-Man", making a sufficient livelihood off of that (despite being lowballed on the price by JJJ), and still living in New York was harder to accept. It was already dated in The Oughties, that Sam Raimi's adoption of the same in the Spider Man Trilgy came off to more than a few observers as Anachronism Stew (Raimi made it work however by artificially mixing different aspects of New York history). The Amazing Spider-Man (Dan Slott) had Jameson become the Mayor of New York, which essentially updated the dynamic between Peter and Jameson.
    • In the Ultimate Spider-Man series, Peter becomes a web designer (albeit initially entering the Daily Bugle with the photographs) and part of the plot had the Daily Bugle transition from a print to an online magazine. The Amazing Spider-Man (Dan Slott) then had Jameson become the Mayor of New York, which essentially updated their dynamic.
    • Likewise, the idea of "Peter taking pictures of Spider-Man" which is a beloved trope and central to his dynamic of JJJ suffers because Technology Marches On. In The '60s through The '80s, when all photography was done on film and professional photographs were shot manually with analog controls (i.e. selecting f-stop, exposure, ISO with fingers and in-camera in the middle of a shot), it was believable that a superhero like Spider-Man would be too fast to capture and needed an insider as it were to provide the pictures, which made it possible for Peter to gain exclusive rights to Spider-Man's still photographs. But this made it harder with the digital revolution and impossible in the smartphone age, as such the trope started fading in comics in The '90s and The Oughties and has disappeared in The New '10s.
  • Aunt May's original purpose was to be an unwitting obstruction in Peter's life for drama's sake: She was very frail so illness could strike at any moment, she didn't have much money so Peter had to get a job to support the family, and her constant worrying about Peter didn't mean sneaking out to be Spider-Man was tricky but kept Peter from telling her his secret (out of fear she'd die of shock). When Peter finally moved out of the house and was on his own he was free from her smothering while May herself was able to sell her house and move in with her friend, meaning she had a nest egg to live off of and had someone to take care of her. Later writers redefined her as a character. For example, The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski) had her learn Peter's identity and provide him with much-needed advice and moral support throughout his run.
    • Uncle Ben and Aunt May belonged to "the Greatest Generation" and Ben was several years older than Richard, his younger brother (who is Peter's father). This kind of background made sense at that time owing to the trials of the Depression, the war years (Ben was a serviceman), and the generation gap, but after adopting Comic-Book Time, both Ben and May became older as Peter grew younger, making it more of a stretch, leading to recent comics to try and write May into a younger person.
  • Gwen Stacy being killed off is treated by comics fans and other creators as a bold gutsy move to really drive home personal stakes and shake up the status quo by getting rid of a prominent supporting character and Love Interest. The reality is that Gwen Stacy was killed off in an iconic story, The Night Gwen Stacy Died, because the writer and many of its fans saw her as a bland Love Interest, a wet blanket girlfriend, and as such someone who was disposable and fair-game (the original plan to kill off Aunt May was vetoed). She was someone who liked Peter but hated Spider-Man and whom the writer Gerry Conway thought would be more interesting as The Lost Lenore than if she was alive, while the more developed and interesting Mary Jane Watson was established as Peter's real love. The problem starts when other versions, such as Ultimate Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man Series decide to adapt the same story and situation, but depart from the original context (i.e. she was a bland character whose dynamic was more informed than visible) and make Gwen into a fleshed out and interesting supporting character, too valuable and attracting too much investment from the audience for her to be disposed of in a low-stakes story^note i.e. a story which is not intended to be Spider-Man's last adventure or major turning point a la Batman: The Dark Knight Returns or Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?. In the Ultimate comics, they killed her off gratuitously and then brought her back again much later as a clone-but-not-clone-as-good-as-the-real-thing, while the decision to kill off the highly popular and beloved version played by Emma Stone was seen as a stupid move since it removed by far the most beloved and liked character in the film (the plans before the planned sequel was canceled were copying Ultimate in reviving her as Carnage... and also an alternate universe Spider-Woman Gwen, years before Spider-Gwen was actually a thing!).
  • Almost all versions of Venom tend to give the character a white spider emblem on his chest, even though it's been decades since the Venom symbiote got expelled from Peter Parker's body and chose Eddie Brock (and later Mac Gargan and Flash Thompson) as its host instead. In its initial appearance, the symbiote had the chest emblem because it bonded with Peter shortly after his costume was severely damaged, and it took on the appearance of his Spider-Man threads because it (mostly) responded to Peter's mental commands at the time. Nowadays, the design thematically fits with the idea of Venom being a Shadow Archetype/Evil Counterpart of Spider-Man, but he had no real in-universe reason to look like that until the 2018 retcon that it actually represented the symbiotic dragons used by the eldritch god Knull that created the symbiotes, only resembling a spider coincidentally.
• Artifact Domination:
  • When Spider-Man first came into possession of his symbiotic costume he was unaware that it was a living entity. The symbiote, coming from a fairly violent species, slowly twisted Spidey into a more violent version of himself until he realized what was going on and got rid of it. Several other symbiotes exist in the Marvel Universe and the symbiote is a danger to take over its host. However, most of these symbiotes have found sympathetic hosts, so it's not known how much influence they exert or how much is the host's own appetite for destruction.
  • After leaving Spider-Man the first symbiote found Eddie Brock whose own hatred of Spider-Man and violent temper were a better fit.
  • Another symbiote found violent serial killer Cletus Kasady and became Carnage, a mass-murdering supervillain.
  • After Eddie Brock rejected the symbiote, he auctioned it off to Don Fortunato who gives it to his under-achieving son Angelo, hoping the power of the symbiote will finally make him into something. However, when Angelo becomes frightened of his newfound power and refuses to kill a weakened Spider-Man, the symbiote abandons him.
  • Agent Venom (Flash Thompson) is only allowed to wear the suit for 48 hours at a time precisely so it cannot take control of his mind.
• Ascended Extra: Eugene "Flash" Thompson was once a Jerk Jock who bullied Peter Parker, but was a major fan of his web-slinging alter-ego. After the shift away from high school, Flash tended to stick to the background before becoming a soldier. After an accident cost him his legs, he got a second chance in serving his country. He became the Venom for a time, has been a member of the Secret Avengers, and even dated Valkyrie. Now, that's impressive.
• Asshole Victim:
  • After all the hell Sasha Kravinoff put Spider-Man through, including killing Mattie Franklin and Madame Web, not a single shit was given when Kraven snapped her neck.
  • Spider-Man 2099: Aaron Delgato's a huge jerk, and he dies after one of his own bullets makes a tank explode.
  • Spider-Verse: Very few people will miss Patton Parnel, an evil red-headed version of Peter Parker who mutated into a spider-monster before being killed by Morlun.
  • Superior Spider-Man: The bullies that were picking on Anna Marconi for being a little person. Sure what Otto did was Disproportionate Retribution, but those guys were hardly innocents. Same goes for many of the bad guys that Otto has beaten up or killed.
  • Untold Tales of Spider-Man: Played With. Sally Avril was a cruel and uncaring jerkass who mocked and bullied Peter Parker and was desperate to be famous. When Peter's uncle dies, she does not care, and when she sees her friend Liz Allan talking to him (she is offering him her condolences), she coaxes Liz away rather than offer her own sympathy to Peter. Eventually, to become famous, Sally tried to become a superhero and called herself Bluebird, and even tried to blackmail Peter into taking pictures of her superhero identity by threatening to reveal his Spidey photography to the rest of her friends, which forced Peter to announce it himself at school. Sally failed as a superhero because she was not much of a fighter, and her gadgets didn't work most of the time. What causes Sally to quit being Bluebird is that Spider-Man lets thugs beat her as a warning and tells her she can't be a superhero. So Sally decides to try and get famous by becoming a photographer like Peter, only to end up dying in a car crash when she forces Jason Ionello to drive faster than he should to take pictures of a Spider-Man fight. Peter starts blaming himself for Sally's death and acts like she was a good friend whom he failed. It takes the Human Torch to get Peter out of his funk, calling out Sally as a careless thrill seeker who would've probably gotten herself killed much sooner if Spider-Man hadn't held her back. All in all, while Sally's death is sad, she wasn't a nice person, and her own stupidity led to her death.
• Author Avatar:
  • Stan Lee has said that Spider-Man was something of this for him. He also created J. Jonah Jameson based on other peoples' view of him, and as the EIC, Lee had a similar job as Jonah at Marvel. Both he and Ditko were children during the Depression and grew up with memories of poverty and having a hard luck life, which fed into the portrayal of poor working-class Peter, and the portrayal of Aunt May and Uncle Ben as Greatest Generation parental figures based on their memories of their families.
  • Since Ditko drew and designed the comics as per the Marvel Method, some argue that Peter is more reflective of Ditko himself. The original Peter Parker◊ in the comics bears a startling resemblance to Steve Ditko in his high school picture. Like Peter, Ditko was a loner, an outsider, a little aloof though also described as friendly and affable in one-on-one meetings, which mirrored the early Peter Parker to a great degree.
• Ax-Crazy:
  • Norman Osborn, but only when he's the Goblin. He's far more lucid out of costume, but still evil.
  • Back when Eddie Brock was a villain, Venom was unhinged and hellbent on vengeance against Spider-Man, even approaching some levels of homicidal urges. However, after character development, Eddie has grown out of this, to the point that as Venom he tries not to kill criminals anymore.
    • The Venom symbiote's first host Tel-Kar was hell-bent on genocide so it adopted that personality. As its corruption worsened, it became increasingly rage-filled and homicidal, even abandoning the twisted morality it had while bonded to Eddie. However, it can still be tamed by the right host and eventually gets better as it controls its bloodlust along with keeping its insanity in check — unlike its offspring Carnage, who enjoys senseless murder and is extremely bloodthirsty.
  • Carnage. He's the definition of Ax-Crazy, killing people and destroying things not because of any grand master plan on his part, but simply because he can. He's so much of an Ax Crazy that one of the most common manifestations of his ability to reform his arms into weapons is an ax. Not that he wasn't out of his gourd before bonding with the symbiote; he was a Serial Killer who had killed at least eleven people before being caught, and may have killed one or both of his parents.
• Back for the Dead:
  • The original Hobgoblin was absent from the main Spidey titles for more than a decade. The writers eventually bowed to fan demand and brought him back... just in time for him to be killed and his murderer to take his stuff and become the new Hobgoblin. Later subverted when it was revealed that it was Hobgoblin's brother who died, not the real deal.
  • Spider-Verse isn't holding back on this trope, killing off the Spider-Men from Marvel 1602, Spider-Man: Reign, Spider-Man Unlimited (and given Slott, like many people, holds the opinion of Unlimited being a sequel to Spider-Man: The Animated Series, this means that show's Spidey is dead, too), Bullet Points^note Bruce Banner and Peter Parker having swapped roles, and House of M, as well as the Mary Jane Spider-Woman from Exiles and Twinkies-advertising Spider-Man from Howard the Duck, the Prince of Arachne from Marvel Fairy Tales, the Betty Brant Spider-Girl, Arachnosaur, and the Spidey from Marvel vs. Capcom. The Amazing Friends version of Iceman and Firestar, the Unlimited versions of the Knights of Wundagore, as well as Mayday Parker's father is also dead. The sequel Spider-Geddon also kills off Spider-Man Noir and Spider-Man UK. However, the sequel ends with The Other reviving Mayday's father and Noir is also later revived.
• Back from the Dead: Between Carnage and The Green Goblin, it would seem that death is more of an inconvenience than anything. Though the Goblin is notable for lasting twenty-odd years, which seeing as he is an Arch-Enemy is probably a record.
  • Averted in The Amazing Spider-Man (1963), when Peter's parents, Richard and Mary Fitzpatrick-Parker, claimed to not have been killed in an airplane crash, and ended up staying with Peter for a while. It turned out they were impostors. Robot impostors. Zig-zagged with Uncle Ben - he's never been permanently resurrected; however, in The Amazing Spider-Man (Dan Slott) #500, he was brought back to life, as a gift from Doctor Strange... for 5 minutes, to have a conversation with Peter. Since then, however, he's remained in the realm of the dead.
  • The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski) attempted to be edgy when it devoted a 12-part series that ran across multiple Spider-Man titles and ended with Peter Parker getting his eye ripped out by Morlun before getting killed. Of course, no matter how much the arc attempted to convince the readers that Peter was truly dead, he ended up coming back with more organic powers, as well as a new suit built for him by Tony Stark.
• Backstab Backfire: After the Green Goblin killed Gwen Stacy in The Night Gwen Stacy Died, Spidey tracked him down and beat him nearly to death. Spidey was so angry that he wanted to kill the Goblin, but at the last minute stopped himself. He thought that Osborn was no longer a threat, but Osborn, who was still able to remotely control his goblin glider, positioned it behind Spider-Man and hit the gas, hoping to impale him. Spidey dodged the glider and it hit Osborn instead, killing him. At least, that's how the story originally went.
• Badass Bookworm:
  • Peter Parker. Science nerd. Photographer. Spider-Man. Once punched Wolverine through an unbreakable plate glass window to fall to the street 15 stories below when he was mad. The epitome of this trope due to being the first known teenage outcast super hero. He's the master of this trope because, despite being a nerd, he gets all sorts of awesome powers and is a straight up Chick Magnet. Second only to Tony Stark in that area (also a fellow Badass Bookworm), but Parker is the original Nerd Superman.
  • Spider-man's villain, The Shocker. Smart guy and puts up a good fight. Has updated and improved his costume and blast gauntlets based upon past encounters with Spider-Man. Also one of the most professional villains in the rogue's gallery, having an alright win-loss ratio considering that he fights Spider-Man.
  • Otto Octavius is a highly trained nuclear physicist and roboticist who is a very dangerous physical threat to Spider-Man.
  • The Vulture is skilled in the fields of electronics and mechanical engineering which allowed him to create the suit that allows him to fly.
  • Then there's Norman Osborn, who took a drug to boost his own intellect, becoming insane and super strong in the process. His successors (his son Harry Osborn and Roderick Kingsley, the first Hobgoblin) followed suit.
• Badass Family: The Parker family. Obviously, there's Peter Parker himself but it doesn't stop there:
  • His parents are Richard and Mary Parker, S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who worked for Nick Fury and once saved Wolverine's life.
  • Peter's uncle Ben fought in World War II and told his nephew stories of Captain America (it's not certain if he met Cap personally or just knew of him). There is also the pre-Spidey story in which Ben and Peter escaped from a giant monster.
  • His Aunt May once poisoned the Chameleon and was gutsy enough to swipe Wolverine's cigar and tell him to smoke outside.
  • His wife Mary Jane was no slouch in the badass department either since she once handled a hostage crisis, another time beat up the Chameleon with a baseball bat, and still another time cold-cocked sleazy Daily Bugle reporter Nick Katzenburg.
  • Then there's the Marvel Comics 2 reality in which Peter has Plucky Girl daughter May (aka Spider-Girl). Ben Reilly, ex-killer clone Kaine, and Ben's son Reilly Tyne. And Baby Ben will probably go into the family business, too.
    • In yet another alternate future, (Earth X timeline), Peter has another version of May who is no less badass and still takes up superheroing.
  • In the alternate universe series The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows, Mary Jane dons a special costume that allows her to use Spidey's powers, taking the codename "Spinneret" and their super-powered daughter in this universe, Annie May, is given the codename "Spiderling" (despite the girl begging for "Spider-Girl")
• Badass Normal:
  • Mary Jane Watson is the girlfriend of Spider-Man but she is no slouch in this department. Despite not being a Charles Atlas Superpower yet, she has been trained by Captain America and is Subverted in being a Damsel in Distress when dealing with Spider-Man's enemies. She's even saved Spider-Man himself in some instances. Averted at other times such as in Spider-Island where MJ becomes a web-slinging Spider-Woman herself.
  • J. Jonah Jameson. No seriously, name another middle-aged journalist who's survived dozens of encounters from some of the most deadly supervillains on the planet, journeyed through Savage Land, fought the new king of the Mole Men in combat and best of all yelled in Godzilla's face, because for all J.Jonah's faults the man has balls of pure Adamantium.
    • By extension the rest of the staff of The Daily Bugle such as Betty Brant (who knows martial arts and has Eidetic Memory) and Robbie Robertson (who's implied to be a military vet) are this. They've not only aided Peter/Spidey multiple times but frequently survived close encounters with every super psycho from Green Goblin to Carnage. Especially notable given how many other Marvel heroes have had their non-powered allies die in various deadly conflicts.
  • The Kingpin uses both his powerful brains and more powerful brawn to keep the costumed villains in their place, and screw over the heroes.
    • Oddly enough, when he started off as a Spider-Man villain it was specifically stated that he had super strength, the origin of which, was a mystery. It was to the point where it was all but stated he was stronger than Spidey who can lift roughly 10 tons. Once he shifted over to a Daredevil villain, he had a Retcon, explaining that he was just a really strong human. After that, whenever Kingpin showed up in Spidey comics, he curiously turned into a master-manipulator type instead of the brawler he once was.
    • The character also features a deconstruction of the trope, in that no matter how badass he is, a normal person can't be expected to fight highly powerful superhumans head-on and expect to come out on top. Kingpin is often able to fight Spider-Man man to man, but the reason for this is that Spidey has to hold back his full strength when fighting human enemies to avoid killing them. In "Back in Black," one of the Kingpin's henchmen has just shot Aunt May, and Spider-Man comes within an inch of killing the Kingpin in an utter Curb-Stomp Battle. This proves that Kingpin as a Badass Normal can only fight superheroes because they let him.
  • Tombstone originally had no powers, and was, in Spidey's words, "Just a guy." He was just a guy with a tendency to Neck Lift people while strangling them to death — one-handed. When he and Spider-Man finally fought after a several-issue storyline, Tombstone gave the overconfident superhero a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown at first using just his hands and then a metal pipe. Once Spidey realized that he was actually dangerous, he got serious and served up a Curb-Stomp Battle to the mob enforcer. Eventually, he crossed over to become an Empowered Badass Normal with brick powers after his old "friend" Robbie Robertson trapped him in an airtight chamber filled with gaseous Applied Phlebotinum.
  • Chameleon and Mysterio are examples of supervillains that use guile, gadgets, and deception rather than fighting the hero head-on. Mysterio in particular uses psychological warfare, SFX skills, hypnosis, and custom-made gasses to challenge Spider-Man mentally.
  • Kraven the Hunter is a badass normal Super-Persistent Predator who uses both advanced and primitive hunting gear and guerilla warfare to hunt down Spidey as opposed to fighting him head-on. Kraven instead ingests a magical potion to give himself super strength when the time comes to fight Spidey head-on, recognizing that athleticism and advanced combat skills don't exactly cut it next to a guy who can bench press a truck and sense your every move.
  • Shocker, Living Wheel, Beetle, and others derive their powers from their technology rather than having superpowers themselves.
  • Doctor Octopus falls in the same category, although with Doc Ock the argument can be made that he at least has superhuman concentration as a result of his brain rewiring to accommodate four additional limbs. In his original appearances, his arms were stuck to his body and after they were removed he maintained a mental link to them, making him more of a real superhuman, but in modern comics, he basically uses replaceable sets of arms that he can attach and discard as he needs.
  • It's easy to forget but without his Venom Symbiote Eddie Brock still counts as one. Always an athletic prodigy, Eddie started working out obsessively after his career went down the drain. Canonically, Eddie is actually stronger than the aforementioned Kingpin and only a smidgen below Captain America. When separated from the symbiote he is often resourceful (being a former investigative reporter and all that), cunning, and strong enough to hold his own against superpowered menaces until they reunite.
• Bat People:
  • Batwing is a young boy who was exposed to toxic waste in Carlsbad Caverns, causing him to become bat-like. Despite his monstrous appearance, he's still just a child, and Spider-Man tries to protect him from those who hate and fear him.
  • Morbius is an Anti-Hero who became a genetically modified vampire, with bat genes and an Orlok-like appearance. However, in his 3rd solo series and some alternate universes — like in an Exiles story arc and in animated series — he was transformed into a half-man half-bat monster, looking more like an anthropomorphic bat with wings.
• Being Evil Sucks: The Sandman eventually got sick of all the grief that came from being a criminal, and tried to go straight. He stayed a good guy for twenty years, real world time (just a couple of years, comic book time). Then his old evil teammate the Wizard stuck him in a brainwashing machine to make him evil again, causing him more grief. Poor dude.
• Big Applesauce: While New York City is home to a lot of Marvel superheroes, this is his Neighborhood where he does his Friendly stuff. While he can battle the cosmic fights like Fantastic Four, the global fights like The Avengers, and the mystic fights like Doctor Strange, Spidey will always be seen webslinging across the Manhattan skyline.
• Big Brother Bully:
  • Kraven the Hunter was technically this towards his younger half-brother Dmitri (who would grow up to be the Chameleon, his occasional partner in crime) — "technically" because Dmitri didn't know they were brothers at the time, only learning this from Kraven's son Alyosha decades later.
  • The Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do miniseries introduces a minor supervillain named Francis Klum, whose slide into evil began after his older brother started sexually abusing him and then forced him to use his low-level teleportation abilities to help create a criminal empire.
• Superman: Lex Luthor resented his family after being Promoted to Parent towards his younger sister Lena due to his mother's death and his father's alcoholism. He never abused Lena physically, but had no qualms about abandoning her and running off with the insurance money after their father's death to found his corporate empire. In the present day, he goes out of his way to hide his connections to Smallville and remarks that he should've had Lena and her daughter Lori killed. When Superboy calls him out for not doing anything about Lena's terminal illness, he cures her then reinfects her with it to blackmail him into killing Superman for him. He's much kinder to her in most other continuities.
• Big Brother Mentor: Spidey tends to act like this for the younger heroes, especially those who feel they can't really trust the adult superheroes. A large reason is that Spidey started his superheroics at their age so he can relate to the struggles of balancing superheroism and teenage life. As a result, a lot of the young superheroes look up to him and he in turn tries his best to advise them on what he has learned as a former teenage superhero.
• Body Horror:
  • Spider-Man himself, after all the mutations he's undergone, from gaining more arms, to transforming into a Giant Spider (with a description of his feelings in the process) and what happened to him when he was killed.
  • The alien symbiotes.
  • Swarm the Nazi-Made-Of-Bees was a Nazi scientist studying bees who exposed them to radiation, only for them to mutate and devour him down to his bones. These bees apparently had a Hive Mind, which he became, and lived on as a man made of bees, sometimes wrapped around his human skeleton, sometimes not. This has never really been explored, perhaps because of the absurdity of a colony of telepathic bees with Nazi sympathies but being devoured and becoming a colony of bees sounds like it would be pretty damn traumatic. Venom eventually ate the skeleton, but because you can't keep a good Bee-Nazi down, Swarm can now create new bodies by possessing a queen bee and using her hive. He's gone from horrific to pure Paranoia Fuel, a rather impressive feat for a fairly lame villain.
  • The Tarantula is subjected to an attempt to give him spider powers. It gradually turns him into a monstrous mutated tarantula and he commits Suicide by Cop.
  • Many Spider-Man villains in general to varying degrees. Doctor Octopus and the Scorpion's artificial appendages are fused to their spine physically and mentally. The Rhino's suit is permanently melded to his body. Sandman and Hydro-Man are living masses of earth and water who can only maintain human form for so long. The Lizard's mutation unwillingly turns him from a nice scientist into a feral, deformed reptile monster. Carrion is a failed clone resembling a living corpse with a touch that withers his victims to dust. And then there's the Thousand, a sentient swarm of spiders with the mind of a Psychopathic Manchild who eats his hosts from the inside out. Probably for the best he was a one-shot villain.
• Bragging Theme Tune: Sing along, kids! Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can. Spins a web, any size. Catches thieves, just like flies. Look out! Here comes the Spider-Man.
• Briefer Than They Think:
  • Spider-Man's origins as a Kid Hero in high school are given a huge amount of emphasis in the character's portrayal in various media, including recent movies and animated series. Considering this was one of the things that originally made him so unique and relatable, it makes sense to a degree. However, Peter actually graduated from high school and went to college (the fictitious Empire State University) in The Amazing Spider-Man (Lee & Ditko) #28 — only two and a half years after his first appearance. The classic period of Spider-Man as Wake Up, Go to School, Save the World lasted a very short time indeed, and most of his comic exploits from then on were as an early 20s young man, with it taking thirteen years for him to graduate college.
  • The Betty and Veronica Love Triangle between Peter Parker, Gwen Stacy, and Mary Jane Watson that everyone remembers was actually very short, only lasting a few issues (The Amazing Spider-Man #44-#52) before Peter settled on Gwen and Mary Jane became Beta Couple with Harry Osborn, though she would still flirt with Peter and make passes at him later on, which Gwen usually replied with cutting barbs. Her teasing and flirting dialed down when she realized his commitment to Gwen was serious and then MJ was Put on a Bus returning semi-regularly starting in The Amazing Spider-Man #87 where her dynamic with Gwen was closer to Vitriolic Best Buds or "frenemies".
  • The alien costume period. Spider-Man started wearing the black costume in 1984 and wore it until 1988 and it is immortalized in notable stories like "The Death of Jean DeWolff" and "Kraven's Last Hunt," cementing it in fans' minds as a long-term thing. But in all of those stories, the costume was actually cloth. The actual alien costume was first worn in #252 and was removed in #258 before making a one-issue return in Web of Spider-Man #1. In fact, by the time Secret Wars #8 was published, which showed how he got the costume, he had already ditched the costume and was using the cloth copy.
  • Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, tends to be seen as Spider-Man's greatest foe, but his actual time in the spotlight was relatively short. He appeared in-costume in The Amazing Spider-Man (Lee & Ditko) #14 (1964), and went on to show up in around three stories (one being a two-parter) before issue 40 (1966) revealed his true identity and had him suffer Easy Amnesia that made him forget his time as the Goblin. After that point, he didn't appear in-costume until ASM #96-98 in 1971, and his next story, #121-122 in 1973, had him killed off (taking Gwen Stacy with him). So that's around eight appearances, and he was only showing up regularly during a two-year period—and he was hardly the biggest fish in the pond at the time, with Doctor Octopus having a much better claim on the "Spider-Man's greatest foe" title. Much of the reason Gerry Conway made Norman the one to kill Gwen Stacy was that after the mystery of his identity had been solved and the question of "what if he comes back?" had been answered, there wasn't a lot left to do with the guy, meaning Conway felt he could kill him off without too many issues. After that point, the role was carried on by a number of Legacy Characters, many of whom had considerably longer tenures, before Norman was brought back in The Clone Saga... at which point he'd been dead far longer than he'd been alive.
• The Bully:
  • Flash Thompson. The Ultimate Spider-Man version of Flash is even worse, having none of the depth as his mainstream counterpart and taking far more pleasure in seeing Peter humiliated for no good reason. While the Flash Thompson of Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane is quite different inasmuch as he gives Peter Parker a wedgie in the second issue but stops engaging in that kind of behaviour shortly thereafter due to character development.
  • Tombstone was one as a teenager and only got worse as an adult, becoming a hitman by trade, with his tendency to bully people weaker than himself still obvious.
  • In the comic book Spider-Man’s Tangled Web, Schoolyard Bully all Grown Up Carl King, now the supervillain The Thousand, mentioned that he made the loser protagonist Peter Parker his homework slave and punished for him for messing up his math paper by giving him a swirlie, dangling him from the Williamsburg bridge, pointing a knife towards his crotch and forcing him to eat dog poop.
• Butt-Monkey: Some writers seem to think that the biggest appeal of Spider-Man is that things constantly go wrong for him. As a result, we get countless stories of Peter suffering humiliation, lack of money, sickly aunt, girl trouble, and just all around unpleasantness, to the point that reading the stories can actually get a little depressing. Note that after John Romita Sr. started working on the title with Stan Lee, the book became much Lighter and Softer than it had been recently, a move which led most fans to label it as the golden age of Spider-Man.
  • Originally, Peter Parker and Scott Summers of the X-Men had something in common, their characters were supposed to be guys whom things often tended to go wrong for, but not just for the sake of that, and they were impressive, each in his own way, in how they dealt with it. But too many writers just can't grasp the difference between that and 'kick them harder!'
  • J. Jonah Jameson, the Shocker, the Jason Macendale Hobgoblin, and others have all shared this role at different times over the years. Jason Macendale had it worse as it seemed he couldn't do anything right, up to getting a power boost from a demon. He was ultimately put down by the Roderick Kingsley Hobgoblin, who thought Jason was an embarrassment to the moniker.
  • In The Amazing Spider-Man (Dan Slott) #1, it hasn't even been ten minutes since being Spider-Man again before he has his suit unraveled by a villain's power, and having him nude except for his mask being posted all over the internet. This convinces '''everyone''' that the real Spider-Man is back.
  • This seems to apply to anyone who takes on the Spider mantle. Gwen Stacy has it even rougher in the alternate reality where she's bitten by the radioactive spider rather than Peter Parker. Her life is so bad that she has to travel to an alternate universe to improve her situation.
• Call It Karma: J. Jonah Jameson's attempts to capture and destroy Spider-Man have given him no end of grief over the years.
• Capitalism Is Bad: While not an Aesop that Stan Lee^note Creator of Iron Man as specifically a good-guy capitalist after seeing Marvel's general anti-establishment trend and seeking to balance it and certainly not Steve Ditko^note An Objectivist with right-wing views though Ditko's tracts often wax more on the self-righteous idealism rather than Rand's economic ideas intended, the overall subtext of Spider-Man as a working-class aspiring scholarship boy does tend to highlight how important a role class plays in his life, and the stories by later writers also play this up:
  • In the Lee-Ditko era, wealthy characters are shown as being jerks of some kind or other (Harry Osborn, Gwen Stacy, J. Jonah Jameson, Norman Osborn) with the only exceptions being academics and professionals (such as the doctor who operates Aunt May in If This Be My Destiny who makes it clear that he sees Peter as a real hero compared to Spider-Man). This got played down in the Lee-Romita era where Peter has friendly relations with the Osborns, romances Gwen and befriends her father George Stacy, but even then, and especially when Gerry Conway came on board, Peter is presented as a foil for Harry, the poor up-and-coming kid as opposed to the rich kid who is nothing without his father's name and inheritance, which leads him to turn to drugs to cope with his insecurity.
  • A number of Spider-Man's villains over the years tend to be wealthy types, such as the Kingpin, Norman Osborn, and Roderick Kingsley.
  • An interesting example of this trope is how writers tackle the idea of a successful Peter Parker. Dan Slott had Otto Octavius hack Peter's body and develop Parker Industries as an Anti-Hero Substitute which the revived Peter Parker ended up running as a Honest Corporate Executive albeit one so honest that he ended up dismantling his company when a virus threatened the world. Nick Spencer who followed Slott, has Peter ruminate about the ethics of grappling with a position of unearned wealth and the consequences of Peter accepting Ock's status quo on a silver platter, cementing the idea that the richer Peter gets, the less pure he becomes.
• Card-Carrying Jerkass: In high school, Carl King was an even more vicious bully to Peter Parker than Flash Thompson; in the present, he revels in the memory of how much he made Peter's life miserable and freely admits he was a "rotten kid." As the Thousand, he's crossed the thin line into Card-Carrying Villain.
• Carnival of Killers: The Spider-Man: Identity Crisis Identity Crisis]] storyline is about Spider-Man being framed for murder with a $5,000,000 bounty on his head, dead or alive. Eventually, he assumes several different costumed identities so he can keep up the superhero game without being harassed, but before he thought of that he was fighting off dozens of bounty hunters every day. The guys after the 5 mil ranged from mundane gun nuts and thrill-seekers (like the Hunters) to professionals (like Shotgun) to actual costumed villains (like Override and Aura).
• Cat Girl: Black Cat, the Cat-themed cat burglar/sometime love interest for Spider-Man.
• Central Theme:
  • "With great power, there must also come great responsibility"; what it means to have power and to use it in a socially and morally responsible way. It could be said that this theme applies to most, if not all superhero stories to some extent, but none more so than Spider-Man.
  • Being a hero even when there is no reward for being one; it won't get bills paid, it won't help your love life and it won't get you fame and respect. But you do it anyway, because it's the right thing to do.
  • Your actions and choices have consequences, including the ones you didn't intend or expect, and you have to live with them whether you like it or not, and whether it was your fault or not.
  • Everyone has some kind of secret, either a big one or a small one, and there's always more to people than you assume. Just as the world assumes little of Peter Parker and Spider-Man, Peter himself often underestimates or misjudges the people around him.
  • You have to work for everything in your life, whether it's your job, your superhero calling, your marriage, or your relationships. People are complicated, messy, and demanding, and you have to be there for them, make things work, and never take people for granted.
  • Spider-Man: Life Story takes the theme of responsibility and explores how to balance conflicting responsibilities, like those of a superhero with responsibilities towards one's family or country, what happens if we neglect some in favor of others and what that means has changed over the years.
  • Miles Morales takes the themes of Spider-Man and adds to it that all of this remains true regardless of who you are and what way of life you come from. Anyone can be a hero. Power and responsibility will not disappear from your life just because you think you don't have what it takes.
• The Chosen Many:
  • Spider-Man started out as a guy who got powers from a radioactive spider... until it was revealed he was connected to a supernatural force called the Web of Life, which also empowers every other arachnid-themed hero and villain.
  • Venom was originally a super suit that Spidey himself wore to augment his powers. However, it was later revealed to be a sentient alien symbiote... and even later revealed to be just one member of an entire race. It was also capable of self-replicating, and so far several symbiotes have appeared in the comics canon.
• The Chosen One: Peter Parker is not a very powerful character by comparison with the people around him, but he has an odd tendency to discover there are ancient prophecies about him. He was, for instance, destined to stop the "Bend Sinister" (alongside Doctor Strange), and no less a pair of personages than Lord Chaos and Master Order claimed to have guided his life to defeat Thanos.
  • According to The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski), Peter is one of a group of arachnid-themed super-powered individuals empowered by a mystical force called the Web of Life and is the Champion of the totemic spider deity behind the Web of Life, succeeding Ezekiel Sims and to be succeeded by Anya Corizon in the event he turns evil.
• Clothes Make the Superman: Spider-Man's black costume was a living alien being, who got a little... too attached to him. Still, while it was attached to him, it considerably increased his strength and toughness, as well as granting him the ability to instantly shift into any costume he wanted and an infinite supply of webbing. After detaching from him, it retained enough of his genes to roughly mimic his power-set (Super-Strength, super-agility, Wall Crawling, webbing/Combat Tentacles), as well as being able to block out his spider-sense, whenever another wore it.
  • Oh and Spider-Man's Super-Strength is tripled when bonded with a Symbiote as he once Megaton Punch-ed Norman Osborn through two buildings when enraged.
  • Doubles as Clothes Make the Maniac: In most adaptations, it tried to take over Spidey's mind and body, and ever since Venom came into the comics, the symbiote has been portrayed as doing this to its hosts.
  • There has since been an entire race of symbiotes in Marvel, which have resulted in anti-heroes like Venom, villains like Carnage, and the world's best biological weapon that temporarily took over several heroes.
  • The 2013 Guardians of the Galaxy series ends up revealing the truth about the symbiotes: they were created to essentially be super suits to help turn people into the perfect heroes. Something went wrong, turning them into what they are now. Venom's current host, Flash Thompson, ended up returning it back to its homeworld, cured it of its problems, and, in gratitude, permanently chose Flash as a host.
  • One of the spinoffs for Secret Wars (2015), Deadpool's Secret Secret Wars suggested the possibility that the symbiote went nuts after briefly latching on to Deadpool.
• The short-lived team of Spider-Man fanboys known as the Slingers derived all their powers from demon-enhanced outfits, with one exception. Interestingly, the outfits were originally designed for Spidey's use and they just used Spidey's powers to "pretend" they had other powers.
  • This trope at least half-applies to Scorpion; the Super-Strength, Wall Crawling and Super-Reflexes are innate, part of his Evil Counterpart status, but the suit provides him with his deadly tail, which can be used to crush or bludgeon things and shoot Hollywood Acid, energy beams or blasts of electricity.
  • Norman Osborn is a half-example as well. As the Green Goblin, he has innate Super-Strength, stamina, Super-Toughness, agility, Super-Reflexes, and Healing Factor from his Psycho Serum. However, he has plenty of weapons and gadgets related to his suit, like his signature Pumpkin Bombs, and of course, there's the Glider that enables him to fly.
  • Minor Spider-Man baddie The Shocker fits this trope; a Genius Bruiser, he cobbled together his trademark vibrosmasher gauntlets and costume singlehandedly. At its most basic, the costume prevents him from killing himself with the backlash from his own blasts of vibrations. In more recent iterations, the suit is crammed full of "contact plates" that deflect incoming strikes and make his own strikes more powerful due to triphammer vibration.
  • The Vulture, The Prowler, The Jury, Regent, Stilt-Man, freaking Frog-Man... Spidey's had to fight a lot of these guys.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Mary Jane was like this in her earlier appearances. Readers eventually find out there was some Stepford Smiling going on and in the modern era, her character is about 100 times more grounded (still a fun character, just not bat crap crazy). Earlier appearances of Aunt May also indicated that she lived in Cloud Cuckooland (the joke being she was senile). Like MJ, she's since mellowed out a lot, creating some Early-Installment Weirdness for readers who go back and read collections of the old trades.
  • As far as Spidey villains go there's White Rabbit. If the Alice in Wonderland theme weren't a tip off then the fact her first villainous plan was to rob fast food joints despite being incredibly wealthy and demanding her ransom on the city of New York be paid in quarters should send red flags. And no, unlike the above she never has mellowed (and never will).
  • Spider-Man himself is this. He acts as the silly one of every group he is in except with Johnny Storm, who is equally silly, and Deadpool, who for obvious reasons is even sillier. However, beware if you try to hurt his loved ones.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: A few of the characters had their looks patterned on Hollywood icons:
  • The Kingpin was conceived as a homage to Sydney Greenstreet, a character actor in many Humphrey Bogart films where he often played heavy-set bad guys and gangsters. The Greenstreet resemblances were dialed down after Frank Miller got to him, however.
  • Gwen Stacy's original appearance on Steve Ditko's page was based on Veronica Lake. After her character evolution, later writers modeled her design on blonde actresses in Alfred Hitchcock films especially Kim Novak in Vertigo (who as Madeleine wears a similar beige coat akin to what she wore in her final comic).
  • Norman Osborn and his son Harry are dead ringers for Joseph Cotten, down to a similar facial structure and of course the corn-rows wavy hairstyle. Cotten played a number of character parts in Orson Welles movies but a major hit of his was Shadow of a Doubt where he plays a businessman who is secretly a psychopathic murderer, much like Norman.
  • John Romita Sr. admitted that he modeled Mary Jane Watson on Ann-Margret who had appeared in a number of Elvis Presley movies. When Mike Deodato was drawing her, he based her on Liv Tyler.
• Coming of Age Story: In nearly all his incarnations. Spider-Man's origin story includes Peter Parker getting superpowers, using them for profit, and then failing to help stop a criminal who later kills his Uncle Ben. This causes Peter to realize that with great power comes great responsibility. Note that as a coming-of-age story, Spider-Man's origin story is lopsided. It includes the decision to be an adult, but not the learning to be an adult.
• The Commissioner Gordon: Spider-Man: One of the things that set Spider-Man apart was the fact that he never really had a Friend on the Force unlike Batman did or the support of the press that Superman did, which made his superhero/civilian life balance literal murder many times over. That said there were figures who did play this role for Spider-Man but they never lasted long:
  • Captain George Stacy was the first character who really played the role. He was friendly and tried to play down some of Peter's issues with authority. Then he died, and while on his deathbed he revealed he was Peter's Secret Secret-Keeper and approved of him, his death ended up making Spider-Man look bad within the police force and in the eyes of Gwen (who blamed him for her father's death).
  • Captain Jean DeWolff was the other major character who tried to be this for Spider-Man. But then her death left another vacuum in his eyes.
  • Post-BND is Captain Yuri Watanabe, who gives Spidey the benefit of the doubt when it looks like he's killed someone in an issue where several supposedly dead people are reappearing (naturally, Mysterio was behind it all). She later dons the identity of Wraith and becomes a vigilante in her own right.
  • His current police liaison is Carlie Cooper. This is odd because Carlie's discovering Spider-Man's secret identity is what ended her romantic relationship with Peter Parker!
  • Jean DeWolff approached Ultimate Spider-Man as one of these. Averted, as she's ultimately working for Kingpin.
• Concepts Are Cheap: In lesser stories, "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility" becomes this. It was never really Peter's Badass Creed as later comics made it out to be. It was just a caption voiced by the narrator in Amazing Fantasy #15 in classic Stan Lee dated Purple Prose. But the attempt to make this Spider-Man's ethos often leads to much fuzziness about what powers and responsibilities mean, leading to much Informed Attribute. Peter fights crime for the grand glorious cause of Responsibility: he has the power to do it, so he has to do it. (It does spin out of his Origin Story, but still.) This may mean that he was doomed to become a superhero no matter what: he was introduced as a young genius almost on par with the other super scientists of the time like Hank Pym, Reed Richards, and Tony Stark. Thus, he had great power, and thus, great responsibility.
• Continuity Reboot: One More Day is essentially the COIE of Spider-Man dividing the history of 616 Spider-Man into two distinct eras (Pre and Post-OMD). Of course, EIC Quesada and others at Marvel disagree (since it's part of their brand identity they do not Continuity Reboot like DC and they are sure not to call it reboots when they do it). According to Quesada every story Pre-OMD still happened the same way but Peter and MJ weren't married but rather lived together. But as JMS and others note, the post-OMD retcon fundamentally altered and changed the characters and moments of multiple stories for more than twenty years.
  • For instance a flashback to Kraven's Last Hunt from Post-OMD issues implies that it was Uncle Ben's memory that gave him the Heroic Resolve to come out of the grave when in the comic it was MJ and her role as his newlywed wife that gave him his strength. Likewise, Quesada also claims that Baby May never happened when that was a major part of the entire The Clone Saga. The Amazing Spider-Man (2018) opens with a Shout-Out to Matt Fraction's "To Have and to Hold" (an annual that celebrates Peter and MJ's marriage and is fundamentally about it), alludes to it being a dream Peter had about how things should be, which alludes to the fact that the marriage was crucially relevant to several stories that no longer work with a substitute.
  • J. Michael Straczynski pointed out in interviews that as far as he was concerned, his entire run on Spider-Man is erased, since the stories he wrote and the consequences it had no longer make any sense after the reboot. The Other a story where Peter tussled with Morlun and ended up with organic webbing at the end, now exists Post-OMD in an altered version where apparently Peter still battled with Morlun but did not die, and still had mechanical shooters, as described in Spider-Verse.
• Continuity Snarl:
  • The symbiotes. First, the Venom suit was just an alien costume. Then it was retconned into being alive. Then, when the writers wanted to turn it into a villain, it was retconned that the suit made Spider-Man go insane and he had to get rid of it (originally, he was trying to destroy it just because it was attaching itself to him, which is a bit harsh for a guy like Spidey). It was later shown that the suits fed off strong hosts as a sort of Social Darwinist. Then it was revealed to feed off negative emotions such as hate and anger. Then they were shown to live in the Negative Zone... no wait, there was a separate planet full of them. Oh, and Toxin proved that not all of them are born evil after all. Oh, and Carnage has had about three symbiotes get destroyed but no one ever remembers those stories. And now the Venom symbiote itself wasn't evil until it latched onto Deadpool, who tried it before Spider-Man came by and ended up absorbing Deadpool's insanity (at least if you consider Deadpool's Secret Secret Wars canon).
  • Who is the Hobgoblin really? The character was created by writer Roger Stern who strung along the mystery of his identity, dropping clues here and there. According to him, when he created the Hobgoblin he didn't have a set idea of who he was, and only shortly into it did he decide it was a character he had introduced in a smaller title called Roderick Kingsley. Then he left and told his plans to his successor Tom Defalco who didn't like the culprit and Stern told him that he had his consent to come up with someone else. Later writers and editors felt that the Hobgoblin mystery was itself compelling and so spun wheels and Red Herring to extend the story forward, until they and readers got bored and frustrated, and finally it was revealed that Hobgoblin was Peter Parker's friend Ned Leeds, who had already been Killed Off for Real when this reveal happened. It is no wonder years later Roger Stern was allowed to return to the subject in a miniseries which was essentially a Fix Fic in which Stern gave the identity to the person he'd intended all along, and established that Leeds had been brainwashed into acting as a stand-in who was later sacrificed so that the original could retire. It helped that Stern had, in fact, established Hobgoblin's use of impostors during his original run.
  • Post-One More Day, Harry Osborn somehow still being alive all this time but Out of Focus is something that Marvel writers never fully explained since doing so would have to get them to explain what happened in Revenge of the Green Goblin a story arc where Norman tries to torture and gaslight Peter into becoming the Goblin after his revival, an action that was inspired by Harry's death during his exile to Europe and simply doesn't make sense in tone and motivation with Harry somehow still being alive through it all. Writers have simply not alluded to this elephant in the room and merely bypassed it.
  • Part of Mephisto's deal had Peter's identity becoming secret again, but OMD and the follow-up One Moment in Time (which is essentially a reboot and retelling of OMD) created a Continuity Snarl where according to the story, Doctor Strange who erased everyone's memories of Peter Parker being Spider-Man did so for those who didn't know the identity before Civil War, but this doesn't explain how Norman Osborn and Black Cat forgot his identity despite knowing his identity well before that.
  • Spider-Man: Blue: The mini-series has several continuity errors that can be picked up on by avid readers. These include;
    • Robbie Robertson working at the Daily Bugle, despite not being introduced at that point in the original comics.
    • The circumstances of the Green Goblin losing his memory are different.
    • In this comic, Peter comes from a fight with the Rhino to meet Mary Jane Watson and take her to a fight with the Lizard. In the original comic, it was the Rhino he took MJ to meet.
    • The fight with Blackie Drago, the second Vulture, is completely different from its original incarnation, taking place in the wrong time and under the wrong circumstances.
    • Furthermore, Drago's fight with the original Vulture was supposed to be over before Spider-Man got there.
    • The original story featured a subplot with Peter spraining his arm, passing out from the pain, and getting captured by the police, which is entirely cut.
    • It was originally Kraven's intention to attack Harry Osborn; he was not confused in his search for Spider-Man by Harry wearing Peter's aftershave.
    • However, these could be theoretically explained by the series' format of Peter narrating the story on audiotape to himself. Perhaps his emotions got his head a little clouded.
• Corporate Conspiracy: The Life Foundation was basically a corporate Crazy Survivalist group, prepared for the worst-case scenario of the Cold War, and willing to do anything to survive said cataclysm.
• Crapsack World: This has been a hallmark of Peter Parker's life for a very long time, although it's perhaps a little more realistic than most depictions when Peter occasionally catches a break every now and again. Character Development would later show that life was no picnic for many of Peter's supporting cast members and even some of his villains. In general, whenever a new writing team takes over there's always some shakeup to the status quo or other, and then another that follows when the next one takes over, and so on.
• Critical Psychoanalysis Failure: Stan Lee and Marcos Martin's non-canon story "Identity Crisis" (not to be confused with the in-canon 616 story of the same name) printed as a backup Spidey Sunday Stories where Spider-Man goes to a psychologist Dr. Gray Madder (a pun on gray matter) and talks to him about his identity issues, which involve the constant changes and endless retcons to his supporting cast and rogues, such as his Aunt May being alive and dead, his marriage to MJ being retconned in and out, her being pregnant and not, Green Goblin dying and coming back, lampshading the bizarre changes to Spider-Man continuity that actually drives Dr. Gray Madder nuts and has him going to a shrink.
• Crossover: With Peanuts. And it is glorious.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Doctor Octopus, the Green Goblin, the Shocker, and Mysterio all invent remarkable inventions that could have earned them large fortunes if they'd used them legitimately. Later subverted by the Sandman, who becomes sick of crime and tries to go straight. He eventually wound up using his powers to work for the government of Symkaria under Silver Sable. Spider-Man himself would also end up working for Sable for a little while after she offered him $1,000 a day to do so. Also subverted when Spider-Man actually tries to sell his web formula to a chemical company, only for the executives to reject the offer. Further subverted when Spider-Man saves a banker/stock-broker who cuts Spider-Man a check — only for a bank-teller to deny the check since Spider-Man has no identification.
  • Osborn is a very good example of this trope, as it is often lampshaded—most notably by the Hobgoblin—that he could be several magnitudes wealthier if he just marketed his stuff, which would give him a lot of the power he is after anyway. It's explained and justified by the fact that Osborn is crazy.
• Da Editor: J. Jonah Jameson, who is probably the most famous example of this trope by far — even serving as its page image.
• Damsel in Distress:
  • In the early days, Betty Brant and Gwen Stacy would serve this role. Then it was notoriously subverted in the 1973 The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) story The Night Gwen Stacy Died, in which archvillain the Green Goblin kidnaps Spidey's girlfriend, Spidey goes to rescue her... and she dies, turning from Gwen Stacy into the Gwen Stacy.
  • Also subverted, in a different way, by Mary Jane Watson after her marriage to Peter. Whenever she's confronted by obsessive stalkers, she (almost) always manages to escape on her own, without any help from her super-powered husband. Even more subverted by the fact that, more often than not, Mary Jane is the one who bails out Spider-Man whenever one of his opponents has the upper hand in a fight. Even before their marriage, when Mary Jane was witness to a Spidey fight going poorly, she'd often brazenly distract or sabotage the bad guy, relying on her charm and wit to save her from the dangerous consequences.
  • Even Aunt flippin' May has taken out bad guys. When (fairly) recently the Chameleon had assembled a group of Spider-Bad guys to go after Peter Parker (this is just before Civil War, natch) the Chameleon himself disguised himself as Peter to go and kidnap Aunt May. Aunt May opens the door, and lets her nephew in, and gives him some tea and biscuits while she has to finish her knitting before revealing that she drugged the fucking tea cause she'd recognize her beloved nephew anywhere and Chameleon obviously was an impostor, holding up "GOTCHA" written across the sweater she just made in a knitted moment of awesome.
• Damsel out of Distress: Mary Jane Watson. She's not kidnapped very often (even if some adaptations might make you think otherwise), but when she is, she never stays put. There are even more than a few examples where she saves herself with no help from Spidey whatsoever. Or even better, she ends up saving him instead.
• A Day in the Limelight: Different characters related to Spider-Man, such as supporting cast members, villains, and second-tier heroes who first appeared in spider-books have all been developed over the years via subplots and main storylines or even spin-off mini-series.
  • Matt Fraction's "To Have and to Hold" is entirely about Mary Jane Watson and it's considered one of the great Spider-Man stories.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • Spider-Man, to the point of deserving to have the trope named after him. Though really, he spends a lot of time in incredibly-energetic-snarker mode too. His snarkiness is well known even in-universe. In an issue of Excalibur, the members of the Wrecking Crew briefly mentioned Spider-Man's name, eliciting a "I hate Spider-Man" from one of the members. The response: "Everyone hates Spider-Man." In the Secret War miniseries, Spidey met Black Widow out of costume and made a quick joke. Widow suddenly realized who she was speaking with.
    Black Widow: Oh God, I recognize that voice.
  • The Green Goblin is usually able to verbally hold his own with Spider-Man during their battles in the comics and most versions.
  • Played with by Spider-Man 2099, who's terse and straightforward in costume, but a killer snarker in his civvies. When he has to deal with a particularly talkative foe at one point, he wonders if people find his civilian personality annoying.
  • Spider-Girl over on Earth-982 inherited this trait from her father. So did the resident Snark Knight, her "cousin" Darkdevil.
  • Really, it's just easier to assume that most Spider-Heroes in the multiverse carry this trait, if not as civilians, then as soon as they enter battle. It can get to the point where they're capable of annoying each other with the constant snarking when it comes time for a Bat Family Crossover.
• Death by Origin Story:
  • Spider-Man's defining tragedy was the very preventable death of his Uncle Ben, who died at the hands of a man whom Peter purposefully refused to help the police stop earlier that day.
  • To a much lesser extent, Peter Parker's biological parents, as he was introduced as an orphan being raised by his aunt and uncle. Most comic writers and adaptations tend to treat them as a non-factor in Peter's life, with readers knowing nothing about Richard and Mary until a 1968 annual during the Lee/Romita run. Later, there was a story arc in which the two were "brought back", but unsurprisingly, the "returned" parents were revealed to be robots.
  • In the alternate universe of Spider-Gwen, Gwen Stacy got spider powers instead of her best friend and neighbor Peter Parker, becoming Spider-Woman. Like the main universe Peter Parker, she initially begins her career by fooling around with her powers. Meanwhile, Peter, finally fed up with being bullied and admiring Spider-Woman, ends up turning himself into the Lizard and goes on an uncontrollable rampage. Gwen, not knowing that her best friend was the monster, not only fought the beast but purposely prolonged the fight for fun, only for Peter to revert to normal and die in her arms from the injuries. This causes her to take her role as a superhero more seriously.
  • Supporting character Toxin plays around with this a little: Toxin's already an established hero when Razorfist kills his father, and by the end of the series Toxin sees Razorfist put behind bars.
• Deceased Parents Are the Best: Peter Parker is three times an orphan, with his biological parents already dead at the beginning of Amazing Fantasy #15 and his surrogate father, Uncle Ben, killed in that story. It was later revealed that his parents were badass secret agents for S.H.I.E.L.D. who once saved Wolverine. Oh, and Uncle Ben apparently saw Captain America first-hand. Other examples from the Silver Age:
  • Betty Brant was an orphan, to begin with, and then also lost her brother Bennett in a shoot-out. Harry Osborn's mother was also dead from the beginning, in The Amazing Spider-Man #122 he also lost his father, the original Green Goblin (he got better, though). When Mary Jane finally got an origin in the mid-1980s, it was revealed that her mother also is dead. J. Jonah Jameson was introduced as a widower, which of course made his son John a half-orphan. The trope is inverted with Joe Robertson, who once mentioned he had another son, Patrick, who died.
• Depraved Bisexual: The minor villains Scorpia (the Distaff Counterpart of Scorpion, himself Ambiguously Bi) and Joystick.
• Dirty Coward:
  • Subverted by Roderick Kingsley, a.k.a. the Hobgoblin. While his twin brother Daniel really was a spineless wimp who lived up to this trope, Roderick merely made himself look like this to get people to underestimate him. Having his cowardly brother act as his stand-in helped a good deal. This usually led to him sabotaging his competitors' companies and destroying their reputations before buying them up cheap, or to keep anyone from thinking that he could be a cold-blooded Magnificent Bastard like the Hobgoblin.
  • Played straight with Angelo Fortunato, the oft-forgotten second Venom. After he got ahold of the symbiote, he brags about how it puts in the same league of supervillain as Magneto or Doctor Doom and kills a random civilian to prove it. But once Spider-Man gains the upper hand in their one and only battle, he immediately turns tail and runs, disgusting the symbiote, who declares Angelo to be an unworthy host, and it ditches him just as he's leaping between two buildings.
  • Kaine falls into this during the Grim Hunt arc. He's so terrified of the Kravinoffs that after they capture Araña and Arachne, he insists to Peter that they can't win and their best option is to "run and screw the rest." Spidey responds by decking Kaine in the face and giving him a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, absolutely disgusted that Kaine shares his DNA and memories yet acts like a selfish coward. This actually reaches Kaine, who subsequently knocks Peter out, dons his costume, and dies fighting the Kravinoff family in his place.
• Disposable Woman:
  • A male example from the 1960s: Bennett Brant, Betty's lawyer brother, was introduced and killed in The Amazing Spider-Man (Lee & Ditko) #11 so that Betty could blame Spider-Man for his death and thus throw a spanner in the works of her romance with Spidey's alter ego Peter Parker. Bennett practically never was mentioned or made an appearance again after that subplot ended, and if it was it was to work out the Continuity Snarl that developed when Marvel decided that Betty must be around Peter's age. If Bennett behaved as if he was Betty's younger brother, how could he be an attorney when Peter was still in high school?
  • NYPD police captain Jean DeWolff is killed by Stan Carter.
  • Charlemagne, an intel agent and friend of Wolverine, is introduced in Spider-Man Versus Wolverine #1. Spider-Man accidentally kills her, leaving him deeply upset.
  • Mary Jane Watson appeared to die in an exploding airplane in The Amazing Spider Man J Michael Straczynski vol 2 #13. She got better pretty quick.
  • Kamala Khan dies in The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #26 and is used in a way to motivate Peter AND a Heel–Face Turn Norman Osborn.
• Distaff Counterpart: Spider-Man has had five different Spider-Women (Jessica Drew, Julia Carpenter, Mattie Franklin, Charlotte Witter, and an Alternate Universe Gwen Stacy), two different Spider-Girls (May Parker and Anya Corazon), and the heroine Silk (Cindy Moon), who has the same powers as Peter but chose her own codename. Interestingly, the first two Spider-Women, Jessica and Julia, have origins completely unrelated to Spider-Man and had never even met him until after they were already established, their connection to him being purely thematic. Marvel EIC at the time even wanted Peter to have a black costume similar to Julia's, thus, the black costume was made, leading to the creation of Venom years later.
  "All the ladies just want to be me, I guess."
  — Spider-Man, The Incredible Hercules #139
• Divergent Character Evolution:
  • Venom is currently undergoing this in recent titles since much of the role that he originally occupied, as a scary murderous villain, Shadow Archetype and Evil Counterpart to Spider-Man and Anti-Hero Substitute were later given to Carnage, Kaine, Superior Spider-Man, and Ben Reilly alongside a slew of other new characters who have Spider powers like Miles Morales and Silk in the mainline canon. As such Venom is reinterpreted into a new mythos and identity separate by itself.
  • The Hobgoblin was invented by Roger Stern as a variant of Norman Osborn's Green Goblin, a popular villain with many Legacy Character after him taking on the identity but all seen as pretenders to his crown. Stern saw Hobgoblin as a master criminal without insanity and as a new kind of goblin that could be Norman's long-term replacement after he had been killed off. However, by the time of The '90s, Norman had come Back from the Dead, and the new Norman while still insane was also a high-functioning sociopath and master plotter and planner. Not only was the Green Goblin back but the advantages that the Hobgoblin supposedly had over Norman had been erased, and as such Roderick Kingsley is reinterpreted in recent comics as a master-criminal networking fixer who creates identities to loan/borrow/buy for other criminals while Norman has bought out Kingsley's company and established himself as top goblin.
• Don't Tell Mama: The original Green Goblin uses his last words to beg Parker not to tell his son about who he was. Sandman keeps his mother in the dark about his criminal activities, and Spider-Man goes to some lengths to keep Aunt May ignorant of his identity as well.
• Doomed by Canon: Uncle Ben is the poster boy of "Death by Origin Story". His death, an unexpected consequence of Peter being selfish and using his powers for personal gain, made him learn that "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility". That means that any adaptation of Spider-Man where Ben appears from the start (such as Ultimate Spider-Man or the first Sam Raimi's film) will have him die very soon.
• Driven to Villainy: The series is loaded with these: The Lizard is another example, as long as you don't count that time where they implied that Conners was in control the whole time (neither the fandom or writers do, however). Norman Osborn has gone so far as to feign that this is the cause for all his crimes.
  • The Hobgoblin from the year 2211 is revealed to be this. She's the daughter of that year's traveling Spider-Man, who is forced to arrest her due to crimes that she would commit in the future, and placed in a virtual reality prison, which is programmed into her brain to keep her in a fantasy world. Her boyfriend tries to free her with a computer virus, which adversely affects the fantasy, warps her mind, and drives her completely insane. True to form, her imprisonment is what caused her insane criminal spree in the first place. She uses her knowledge as an inter-dimensional researcher to create time-traveling equipment and goes on a history-erasing rampage through time.
• Easily Condemned: As probably the biggest Hero with Bad Publicity, this happens to Spider-Man all the time. No matter how many times he saves the city it only takes one smear campaign or mistaken action seen by the public to turn New York (and a lot of his friends and loved ones) against him and declare he's a criminal.
  • The Superior Spider-Man zig-zags with this trope so hard it's not even funny. On one hand, Peter explaining that his mind was taken over by Doctor Octopus provides him with Easy Forgiveness from The Avengers... and that's about the only people who forgive him, or wish to stay on speaking terms with him/be within a hundred miles of him (or don't do a Face–Heel Turn and want him dead/humiliated) in the aftermath.
• Egomaniac Hunter: This is basically the driving motif of Kraven the Hunter. He's a legendary hunter of dangerous animals who decided to come to New York and hunt Spidey down to challenge himself. Able to hunt down and kill everything and anything up until he gets to Spider-Man; this sole failure is what ends up having him obsessively spend lifetimes hunting after Spidey as a result.
• Electric Slide: Electro does this as a Fast as Lightning way of getting around. As he is a walking power plant, he doesn't have to worry about being electrocuted. Occasionally, he'll be the electricity in the wires.
• Elemental Shapeshifter:
  • The villain Hydro-Man can transform all or part of his body into water.
  • Similarly, Sandman has the ability to change his body into sand.
  • At one point the two got mushed together into a monster called Mud Man.
• Entitled Bastard: Spidey's greatest and best-hidden foe does this quite often. Who is he? J. Jonah Jameson. He manages to publicly badmouth and ridicule him on a daily basis, has created two supervillains (the infamous Scorpion as well as C-lister The Human Fly) and a few evil robots in his quest to kill Spidey, gets into all sorts of fights and kidnappings by Spidey's other foes (who are jealous of him), and Spider-Man always, always pulls his bacon out of the fire... though he does put him in his place with purposely embarrassing rescues. He even gets to become the Mayor of New York, despite how often he's printed complete garbage about Spider-Man that he's later had to retract when it turned out that, yes, it really was Mysterio or Chameleon, and despite the fact he's known to have sponsored the creation of Scorpion, the Human Fly, and the Spider-Slayers.
• Failed a Spot Check: Some common criminals have done this to Spidey. Particularly, doing things like robbing a restaurant he is eating at because they thought the guy in the spidey costume at the corner table was just some guy eating in his pajamas and could not possibly be the real deal.
• A Family Affair: Norman Osborn had an affair with his son's fiancée Lily Hollister. This isn't even the worst thing he's done to Harry.
• Fair Cop: Flash Thompson's dad was one; Flash's mom often remarked how handsome he looked in-uniform. Sadly, it was clearly "only skin deep" as he was also an alcoholic who abused both his wife and son.
• Fanservice Model: Mary Jane Watson is this while also being a model and an actress.
• Fanservice Pack: Betty Brant started out as J. Jonah Jameson's mousy, timid secretary, with a tight, short, curly hairstyle, high necklines, and loose skirts. However, as the series went on, she became more outgoing and more aggressive, grew her hair out into a long, sleek bob, and eventually became a tough reporter who wore skimpy necklines and skintight dresses with high-heeled boots.
• Fat and Skinny: Styx and Stone have it all but stated in their names — Styx is horribly lanky and tall, while Stone isn't necessarily fat, but monstrous and burly.
• Femme Fatale: Black Cat, being the Marvel Universe’s answer to Catwoman, is a pretty classic Femme Fatale, but while very obviously seductive and manipulative her love for Spidey is actually quite genuine and marked her turn from villainess to Anti-Hero. Although, her infatuation for the Wall Crawler managed to bring out the worst in her as well as poor MJ learned first hand.
• Fix Fic:
  • One of the popular stories during the early '80s dealt with the identity of the Hobgoblin. The writer for the storyline, Roger Stern, left the series before revealing the identity. The storyline was passed around between several writers, before being resolved controversially and in a way that left a gaping Plot Hole. Eventually, Roger Stern was brought back to write the miniseries Hobgoblin Lives after editors were made aware of said Plot Hole, which undid the previous resolution and told the story as Stern originally intended.
  • Marvel launched a Fix Fic aimed at one of comics' greatest Audience-Alienating Eras, The Clone Saga, a six-part series named, appropriately, Spider-Man: The REAL Clone Saga. It's written by Tom DeFalco, who was one of the editors of the original disaster and purports to "explore the story as it was originally conceived". The mini-series took several liberties and pot-shots at the Saga and later developments in Spider-Man books, climaxing with the message that Peter Parker should be a proud father by this point in his life.
  • One More Day and the follow-up One More In Time were intended as this by the editorial thing though fans questioned if there was anything broken that needed fixing to begin with.
  • The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows is the official (alternate universe) version of this to One More Day, giving Spidey and Mary Jane the family life that fans wanted with many wishing it was canon. Especially after the events of the miniseries gives MJ technology allowing her to share Pete's powers and fight crime alongside their super-powered daughter Annie as a Badass Family.
  • The Amazing Spider-Man (2018): Nick Spencer took over as the title's head writer in 2018, ending Dan Slott's ten year run. The very first issue ends with Peter and Mary Jane getting back together, after Slott spent his entire run repeatedly baiting and sinking the ship. Additionally, subsequent issues deconstruct and refute Slott's reasoning for keeping them apart.
    • The first issue also sees Peter being found guilty of plagiarism and stripped of his doctorate that was earned while Doc Ock was in control of his body. Peter even admits to himself that it was wrong for him to take credit for work he didn't earn.
• Formula with a Twist: Peter Parker/Spider-Man was the first attempt to create a prominent superhero who was also a flawed, but developing Kid Hero. Stan Lee wanted to avoid the practice of making a Kid Hero into a Kid Sidekick, and also wanted the character to naturally grow older and wiser. While heroic to a fault, Peter Parker was very much still a teenager with selfish concerns, personal insecurities, and life lessons yet to be learned.
• Freudian Excuse: This has been used at times to explain the motives of various villains, and to possibly contrast them with Spidey himself, who did not exactly have the best childhood. The worst example was when Venom was given a cliched tragic backstory (complete with the drunk, abusive father) as part of a bad idea to turn the character into a hero. Some other examples:
  • Dr. Octopus: Bullied as a child, with an overprotective mother who forbade him from pursuing a relationship with the woman he loved, but selfishly tried to pursue one of her own, then died of a heart attack when he confronted her about it. In many ways, his guilt from this caused his carelessness that created the accident that made him a villain. It's also established in Superior Spider-Man that he had an abusive father who used to regularly beat the shit out of him, which is one of the reasons why Ock Wouldn't Hurt a Child.
  • Electro: Abusive father who left him and his mother, followed by his mother being overprotective and discouraging him from pursuing his goals. To make this worse, after she died, a marriage that went sour and ended in divorce only made him more bitter.
  • Tombstone was an albino born to black parents in Harlem, making him a black kid in a white kid's body; as one might expect, his childhood wasn't very pleasant, abused by both his family and his peers. To cope, he bullied the other students in school, and only got worse as an adult, becoming a hitman by trade.
  • The Green Goblin: While some say Norman had very little of an excuse, he didn't become evil on his own. His father was an abusive alcoholic, which made Norman resolve to become a breadwinner for his family. Then things got worse. His wife died shortly after Harry was born, driving him to work harder and neglect his son. Eventually, he framed his business partner Mendel Stromm for embezzlement, used Stromm's research equipment to develop a new line of chemicals, and it all led to the Goblin Formula, and the birth of a nightmare.
  • Flash Thompson wasn't truly a villain, but this was the reason he was such a jerk in high school. His dad was an angry alcoholic who abused both him and his mom. Indeed, a story arc in the 1990s involves Flash succumbing to alcoholism himself.
  • As a child, J. Jonah Jameson's father (later retconned to be his stepfather) was a celebrated war hero — but in private, he would routinely abuse a young Jonah and his mother. Because of this, JJJ was left soured on the very concept of heroes and frequently tears down Spider-Man (and sometimes other superheroes) in the belief that they must be hiding some darker nature.
• From a Single Cell: Sandman and Hydro-Man have this ability — so long as one grain of sand or one drip of water is left in their mass, they can reform like nothing; as long as there's more sand or water nearby.
• From Bad to Worse: Cletus Kasady was an Ax-Crazy Serial Killer serving 12 consecutive life sentences for the roughly 10% of his crimes they could prove. Then his blood got infected with a stronger evolved version of the Venom symbiote. Then it got switched out for a cannibalistic cosmic parasite. Then got robot legs.
• Fully-Embraced Fiend: Cletus Kasady as Carnage is a foil in this way to Eddie Brock and Venom. At least Venom usually remains lucid enough to be an Anti-Hero, or have his own agenda that sometimes sees him on the side of the good guys, even if it's just to preserve himself or the symbiote. Cletus and the Carnage symbiote, meanwhile, are both Ax-Crazy who lean into how much damage, destruction, and death the two of them can cause together. When Venom and Carnage grapple (which has happened more than once, most notably in Maximum Carnage), it's a case of self-serving evil versus pure annihilation.
• The Fundamentalist: J. Jonah Jameson cannot admit that Spider-Man is anything other than a menace even though he has saved Jameson's life dozens of times. Various reasons have been given over the years as to why this belief is stuck in an otherwise good journalist's head, who caught flak several times in-universe for being in favor of mutant rights, among other things: The anti-Spiderman rant sells papers; if Spiderman were to be captured, tried, and imprisoned, the Daily Bugle would fold as soon as the judge sentenced him; Jameson is a muckraker; he's only doing it to boost circulation.
  • Eddie Brock was raised Catholic, and in the 2000s became increasingly fanatical in his beliefs — especially as Anti-Venom, when he believed that God had given him a shot at redemption by choosing him to purge the symbiotes from the Earth. This led to him murdering Hybrid and Scream in cold blood, despite admitting that they were doing good using their symbiotes and that he could have non-lethally separated them.
• Genre-Busting: The series as a whole is a superhero story that is also a classic Coming of Age Story, a high school drama, romance story of all kinds (from teen romance all the way to epic melodramatic Star-Crossed Lovers stuff), kitchen sink working-class drama, a Screwball Comedy, science-fiction, and horror.
• Giving Them the Strip:
  • Mr. Stone, one half of a B-List merc team, tried to slow down the wall-crawler by using his Swiss-Army Weapon to coat the entire floor in glue so as to give his life-draining partner Mr. Styx a chance to use his touch of death. Spider-man easily leaps out of his boots onto the ceiling.
  • Also, Phil Urich, the only lucid man to take the identity of the Green Goblin, did this the first time he encountered Spider-Man, simply discarding his glove when Spidey snagged it with his webbing. (Clearly, Sanity Has Advantages, even when taking on the identity of a villain who's usually Ax-Crazy.)
• Girl Next Door: Played with in regard to Gwen Stacy. Gwen was more of an exotic flower whom Peter only met after he left Forest Hills and "went out into the world", i.e. Manhattan and college. She came from an upper-class background, her father was a respected elder citizen of New York who belonged to the same gentlemen's club as millionaires J. Jonah Jameson and Norman Osborn. Her boyfriend before Peter was Harry Osborn, the prospective heir of Norman, and in her first appearance, she was introduced as a high-school beauty queen. However, as she became the Betty to Mary Jane's Veronica, she moved into this category.
  • Mary Jane, in all versions but the original. Amusingly, Mary Jane was literally a girl next door in the original, as the niece of Aunt May's next-door neighbor, and coming from the same working-class Queens background that Peter did. She literally became this Trope in the Ultimate universe, having lived next door to the Parkers since she was a little girl and, before their Relationship Upgrade, was the geeky best friend of an equally-as-geeky Peter.
• Hand Wave: A particularly famous explanation whenever people ask where Spider-Man could be swinging from with no building in sight and his web line doesn't appear to be attached to anything is that there just so happened to be a helicopter off-panel that he's swinging from.
• Hates My Secret Identity:
  • In nearly every version of the franchise, Flash Thompson idolizes Spider-Man, but he and Peter Parker can't stand each other (at first - in the comics, they grow into good friends). Particularly played for laughs in the Ultimate Spider-Man (2012) cartoon: under the pretext of putting Flash somewhere safe, Spidey shoves him into a locker and then comments how petty it was, but fun!
  • Also the case for Gwen Stacy who liked Peter but hated Spider-Man.
  • Not "hatred", but Anti-Villain Black Cat was attracted to Spider-Man and the feeling was mutual, so Spidey decided to unmask himself as Peter Parker...which horrified Black Cat because she only loved Spidey. Some Character Development helped her appreciate Peter Parker as well.
  • In Marvels, Phil Sheldon has nothing but disdain for Peter, specifically because he respects Spider-Man as a hero and hates how J. Jonah Jameson slanders him, and sees Peter as an opportunistic weasel providing fuel to Jonah's vendetta just to earn a dirty buck with his Spidey photos.
• Head-Turning Beauty: Mary Jane Watson. "Face it Tiger, you just hit the jackpot!" You sure did, Mr. Parker. You sure did. Black Cat matches her in this.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • Venom is a classic case of a Heel Face Turn to create an "edgier" hero. Also because Venom — created and illustrated by Todd McFarlane — was, for a time, considerably more popular than Spider-Man himself, being a giant, hulking, over-designed monster with zero qualms about killing. Quintessential '90s anti-hero, essentially. Flash Thompson and Eddie Brock in his second tenure as Venom have been flat-out heroes, but still lack qualms about being more brutal than conventional superheroes.
  • The Rhino eventually went legit, turning himself in, serving his time, and getting released on good behavior before settling down with a doting Russian woman. It lasted all of one more appearance. The new evil Rhino killed his wife, sending him on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. He put the costume back on, killed the new Rhino, and is back as a villain.
  • Back in the 1980s, the Sandman got sick of crime and went straight. He actually joined the Avengers for a while. That lasted a good twenty years, real-world time. Then his old teammate the Wizard stuck him in a machine and brainwashed him to be evil again. Sigh.
  • In Last Remains, Norman Osborn goes through this as a result of Kindred's influence and becomes The Atoner. How long this will last has yet to be seen, but he decides to become the "Gold Goblin".
  • Overdrive from The Superior Foes of Spider-Man is smart enough that this trope is his entire reason for being a costumed villain. He grew up as a young boy who idolized superheroes, and reasoned that the quickest way to become an Avenger would be to start off as a villain and then eventually reform and fight alongside his childhood heroes.
• Iconic Sequel Character: Many characters iconic to the Spider-Man franchise don't actually appear until much later in the comic's run than one might think, even if they were mentioned early.
  • Mary Jane Watson didn't have her first full appearance until Issue #42, four years into the book's run, and almost half a year after the departure of Steve Ditko: she was established as The Ghost and The Faceless as early as Issue #15, appearing with her face obscured in Issue #25, with another appearance in the Annual, and was built up as a character that Aunt May wanted to set Peter up on a date with, which Peter kept trying to dodge (because he's Peter).
  • The Green Goblin, Spider-Man's Arch-Enemy appeared in Issue #13 after the likes of Vulture, Mysterio, Doctor Octopus, and the rest. The Kingpin comes more than 50 issues later, appears after more than 190 issues in 1979, and [[Characters/VenomTheSymbiote Venom didn't make his first real appearance until issue #299 in 1988, over 25 years of publication later.
  • Special mention goes to Gwen Stacy. Due to being referenced often in flashbacks and Adaptation Displacement, it may come as a shock to some fans to find out that she was Spidey's third love interest (behind Liz Allan and Betty Brant). Likewise, Peter's best friend and eventual enemy Harry Osborn made his debut in the same issue Gwen did, The Amazing Spider-Man #31.
  • Miles Morales, Peter's successor in many continuities, didn't show up until 2011—a whopping 49 years after the first issue. Even within his original series - Ultimate Spider-Man - Miles doesn't show up for 11 years, debuting at the beginning of the 3rd series, 160 issues in.
• Incredibly Obvious Bug: Spider-Man has spider-tracers, red peanut-sized spider-shaped devices he used to track people down. Usually, they are fired from the top of his web-shooter at fleeing villains who are none the wiser. One of the reasons why Spider-Man doesn't use the spider-tracers anymore may be due to the fact the bad guys he attached them to frequently found them and used them against him. Especially bad since they're designed to set off his spider sense, meaning they can be used to trigger false positives in that sense, turning one of his greatest edges into a weakness as Iron Man has demonstrated.
  • The tracers were easy to find, since they were red, shaped like the spider-insignia on his back, and they looked like the kind of trinkets one would find in a Cracker Jack box. His clone, the Scarlet Spider, was much smarter about this: he created Minidot Tracers, which were still red, but were also circular and MUCH smaller.
  • One story arc has a villain with a penchant for paying attention framing Spider-Man for a slew of murders, by leaving found spider-tracers on all of the victim's bodies.
  • In a Brand New Day story, one of them was as big as a CD. The trackee of course noticed it.
• Irrational Hatred:
  • J. Jonah Jameson, while almost never outright villainous, scratches the limits of the impossible in regards to his hatred of Spider-Man. He despises him with extreme passion, constantly referring to him as a menace, nevermind the fact that Spidey has saved Jonah's life, and New York and the world, on a regular basis. Whether or not there's an explained reason for it depends on the adaptation, but even when there is an excuse, it generally falls apart given everything Spider-Man's done for the world. In an early Lee/Ditko story he privately admits he is jealous from Spider-Man's selflessness◊. Though there's a number of other reasons as to why he dislikes masked vigilantes, his hatred is possibly related to the fact that Spider-Man shows up in his newspaper, and just making a crusade after him sells more papers.
  • Eddie Brock's entire reason for hating Spider-Man was that Spidey unwittingly exposed his shoddy journalism, although mentally bonding to the also-unstable Venom symbiote didn't help either party. It took decades in real-time and years in comic book time for Brock to get over it and become a better person.
• I Reject Your Reality: J. Jonah Jameson has an unhealthy tendency to make people who correctly believe that Spider-Man is a hero have second thoughts. Jameson refuses to accept the opinions of others, including his own son, that Spider-Man is a hero, trying to make his confronters second guess themselves. He also refuses to believe that Spider-Man himself is a hero and just sees him as a disruptive force of destruction. In many adaptations, this is one of his Flanderized qualities.
• It Began with a Twist of Fate: It varies based on universe and continuity, but Spider-Man generally gets bitten by a certain spider and gains his superpowers through a genuine twist of fate—by simply being in the right place at the right time. Ezekiel Sims would later claim however that the spider chose Peter as it was dying. It saw Peter's suffering as a benefit, as someone like that once given power would never allow themselves to be a victim again.
• It's All About Me: Peter Parker had this attitude after he got bitten by a spider, saying that all he cares about is himself and Uncle Ben and Aunt May, and the rest can go to hell. An attitude that has its logical and tragic consequence when it leads directly to the death of his father figure. This attitude of selfishness is also something shared by many of Peter's supporting cast and on some level, all his villains. Jameson in particular, though he also navigates it somewhat.
• Jerk Jock: Eugene "Flash" Thompson, one of Spider-Man's foils. He bullies Peter Parker constantly, but is a big fan of Spider-Man, not knowing they're the same person. In a subversion, the comics have him and Peter actually becoming friends after they graduate from high school. How's that possible? He isn't without his bad sides; When he was framed for being the Hobgoblin, everybody believed it immediately.
  • At least until a car accident gave him amnesia all the way back to college, erasing the past 10-20 years or so from his memory (Comic-Book Time).
  • Flash's evolution may have come with his military service after he graduated from high school. When he comes back to the U.S. after his tour of duty is over, he's a lot more circumspect and mature than the arrogant prick he was at the start of the series. This is partly represented by his sincere and heartfelt apology to Peter for all the crap that he put him through during high school.
  • More lately, he became an Ensemble Dark Horse and gets to be the 4th Venom, and he's touted as a through and through superhero, in spite of his evil jock past and the symbiote's usual villain status, meaning that he manages to make Character Development stick.
  • In the Ultimate universe, Peter does try to defend himself from Flash after he gets his powers. He winds up accidentally breaking Flash's hand, and the jerk's parents sue Aunt May and Uncle Ben for the medical costs.
    • In the Ultimate universe, much of the character development Flash would later go through in the regular continuity is instead given to Kong, one of his friends and a fellow Jerk Jock who also picked on Peter Parker... until he, a fan of Spider-Man, came to the (independently-reached) realization that Peter and Spider-Man were one and the same. Over the course of the series, he eventually mended bridges with Peter and became friendly with him, and seemed to break with Flash entirely.
    • A major theme in the Ultimate Spider-Man title is that bad people often aren't seen as bad by society itself and that lets them step on people to get what they want. After Gwen Stacy dies, when Kong tries to claim that Flash isn't that bad of a person, Peter gives a long "The Reason You Suck" Speech about why Flash is ultimately the high school equivalent of this. His position on the football team lets him get away with bullying and be rewarded for acting like a jerk to people who "don't matter" in his eyes, and he when he grows up he'll continue to behave this way thanks to being coddled and indulged. As mentioned, Flash in this series is much more of a dick and his Pet the Dog moments are extremely rare.
  • In Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, Flash is one of M.J.'s best friends. In that series, he's depicted in a more sympathetic light, as he's also frequently belittled and demeaned by his Alpha Bitch-ish girlfriend Liz and nurses a crush on MJ herself. Whilst the other members of the football team are also Jerk Jocks to an extent, and some even bigger ones than Flash (at one point even planning to ruin a drama club performance that MJ was starring in because it happened to be scheduled at the same time as one of their games, until Flash persuaded them not too), MJ and his other best friends are quick to call Flash out on his being a jerk, especially to Peter.

• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: J. Jonah Jameson. Sure, he's short-tempered, tight-fisted, and an often obnoxious loudmouth, but he's also been shown as a tireless crusader supporting everything from labor union rights to mutant rights, going after organized crime figures and corrupt politicians despite repeated attempts on his life, and discreetly supporting various charities and social projects, and even hiring a good lawyer for Peter Parker when Parker was falsely accused of murder. He's been pretty much consistently portrayed as a social liberal whose ideals are wrapped in civil liberty and constitutional rights. despite the fact that he's a mean-spirited douche to the people around him.
  • In the arc where Spider-Man publicly unmasked himself as Peter Parker, Jameson went so far as to refer to Parker as being like a son to him, and that he had always regarded Parker as the "last honest guy in town". What does Jameson do next? Turns around and sues the crap out of Parker for misrepresentation. Of course, he wasn't entirely unjustified in doing this; he was also later confronted by other characters about how much of a jerk he'd been to Spider-Man / Peter over the years.
  • It should also be noted that Jameson's character is interpreted drastically differently, Depending on the Writer. Some writers really tend to push the "heart of gold" aspect, whereas others still prefer to present him as a genuine Jerkass, ignoring any character development to the contrary by other writers. (This usually coincides with alternating interpretations of Jameson as a genuinely competent newspaper publisher and an angry tabloid publisher with an agenda. The latter version is occasionally characterized as clueless and outright sociopathic, too, whereas the former version sometimes borders on hidden philanthropist. It's really inconsistent, to say the least.)
    • It should be noted that during Stan Lee's run on Spider-Man Jameson is always a Jerkass Scrooge who feels that appearing to have a heart of gold is the best way to make money.
  • Mainly though, the character seems to be kind of like Spider from Transmetropolitan. He's a complete asswipe, no doubt, but he surely is also a kind person at heart and has shown this on several occasions. For example he genuinely cares about honesty, integrity and civil liberties and can be quite nice (or at least, less caustic) to his friends, like Peter or his employees, despite being a sarcastic jerk.
  • JJ was once offered a deal: if he stopped bashing Spidey every time he needed an editorial, he'd get an exclusivity deal with the New Avengers. He even got to hear Captain Fucking America tell him Spidey was a hero rather than a monster. His response? After shaking hands on the deal, he promptly went back to not only committing libel, but making accusations of bribery and digging up things like "wanted murderer" (Wolverine), "terrorist" (Spider-Woman) and "convicted drug dealer" (Luke Cage, who was framed and exonerated).
  • These inconsistencies are avoided by the Ultimate Universe J. Jonah Jameson (probably because the only writer was Bendis). He embodies this trope completely. Three examples stick out - firstly, after firing Peter in a temper tantrum, he comes to the kid's house and opens up to him about his son dying, before offering to give him his job back and allowing him to start shadowing Ben Urich so he can get a taste for real journalism. The second is him doing a Heel–Face Turn on the whole Spider-Man thing after the Ultimatum arc when it's not certain if Spidey survived, and writing a heartfelt public apology/obituary for the webslinger. Lastly, he eventually discovers Peter's secret identity and his first reaction is to offer him money. He says he'll pay for Parker's entire college education on the basis that "I'm a rich man, I'd hardly notice."
  • In Marvel Versus DC, when it looks like The End of the World as We Know It, Spidey asks Jameson if he has any last digs to get in. Jonah responds "For what it's worth, I'm sorry", to which Peter can only say a quiet "Oh."
  • In the storyline The Death of Jean DeWolff, Jameson responds to a question about whether he believes Spider-Man deserves to die with "Hitler deserved to die, so do assassins, cop killers, scum like that. Whatever else he is, Spider-Man is not one of those."
• Just Friends: After a tumultuous on-again, off-again relationship, Spider-Man and the Black Cat settled into this. It lasted from the '90s to the mid-2000s before Brand New Day reset them back to sexual partners with Felicia not knowing Peter's identity and then had her become an antagonist as a result of the events of Superior Spider-Man. The Amazing Spider-Man (2018) has seen them reconcile as friends.
• Keep the Home Fires Burning: Mary Jane Watson-Parker struggles between her desire to support Peter Parker in his role as Spider-Man and her real fear that this time could be the night she sent her husband out to die. This is notably a factor in the Kraven's Last Hunt storyline when for two weeks MJ doesn't know if Peter is dead.
• Knight of Cerebus:
  • Carnage serves as a classic example from the main continuity. Being a psychotic serial killer with a symbiote that both runs on and craves blood, he particularly stands out amongst Spidey's colorful Rogues Gallery because he's not interested in money or power; all he wants to do is kill as many people as he can, as violently as he can.
  • Morlun from JMS' run — not for the run itself (because he was the run's first antagonist), but the series as a whole. Because he significantly ramps up the threat level, his mere presence is a sign things are about to turn grim. Spider-Verse takes this up to eleven when his entire family is introduced.
  • In Ultimate Spider-Man, expect things to get dead freaking serious whenever Norman Osborn or anything else having to do with him shows up, possibly even more so then in the main continuity. Venom, too, has this distinction, symbolized by the fact that he's the first villain Peter fights without his Spider-Man costume. Just Venom's suit alone can threaten nuclear war!
• Knight Templar: The high-tech vigilante Cardiac targets people who commit evil and immoral acts, but find legal loopholes to escape justice. And let's face it; a lot of people would take Cardiac's side here. His victims are horrible men who rob people blind and cause innocents to suffer, but find ways to legally do it, always with selfish goals in mind. Even Spider-Man, who tries to stop him when he can, can't help but admire him a little sometimes.
  • Another notable admirer of Cardiac is none other than Otto Octavius, who met the vigilante while going through something of a Templar phase himself as the Superior Spider-Man. Originally outraged when Cardiac stole one of his old inventions, Otto had a quick change of heart when he learned what Cardiac planned to use it for, and the team-up produced what was arguably Otto's most redeeming Pet the Dog moment in the entire run.
• Knockout Gas: Enemies of Spider-Man have used it from time to time. Mysterio, Kraven, the Chameleon, the Hobgoblins, and Green Goblins are all culprits.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • In his origin story Spider-Man allows a burglar to escape from a pursuing policeman. One page later his beloved Uncle Ben is dead, killed by the same man. Not a Tragic Mistake, as this event then galvanizes him to devote his life to heroically fighting crime instead of propelling him towards a tragic catastrophe. This is also why Spider-Man decides not to interfere with the event when he travels back through time in Amazing Spider-Man #500.
  • J. Jonah Jameson's poor treatment of Peter Parker and his financing attempts to capture/kill Spider-Man have repeatedly come back to haunt him.
  • Flash Thompson seems to be an aversion, as he ends up sharing an apartment with Peter Parker. Averted/lampshaded when he loses his legs when serving in Iraq, saving a fellow soldier, fulfilling the jock ending up crippled aspect of this trope.
• Life Drinker: Morlun belongs to a clan called the Inheritors that maintain their immortality by draining life energy from people, especially people who are animalistic totems.
• Lizard Folk: The Lizard, is sometimes a straight up bi-pedal version. After One More Day his villain Komodo is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, a Komodo dragon.
• Lust Object: Mary Jane Watson and Black Cat pretty much fall into this, due to them being among the most beautiful women in all of Marvel. In Mary Jane's case, it's a lot darker due to her attracting stalkers. With Black Cat, it's a bisexual case, with a wide range of male suitors and female lovers she's dated.
• Madonna-Whore Complex: Pops up quite a bit in regards to Peter's romantic life. The women in his life tend to be divided amongst the "Madonnas" such as Gwen, Aunt May, and Carlie Cooper, and those deemed "The Whores" as seen with Felicia and Mary Jane. Characters like Gwen and Aunt May are treated with solemn reverence and treated as the most important women in Peter's life, while Felicia and Mary Jane were derided for their sexual agency and confident personalities and argued for being "Not a good fit" for Peter.
• Magic Meteor: The Looter's whole shtick was stealing meteorites for their power-granting ability.
• Magnetism Manipulation:
  • Electro once had this as his main power, being able to negate his weakness to water by making it evaporate with electromagnetism before it touched him, and he was also able to paralyze people by overcharging their synapses with it. Otherwise, his normal Shock and Awe powers had basic electromagnetic capabilities which he used for things like Wall Crawl and fast travel on metal objects.
  • Spidey himself does this on a lesser scale, as his Wall Crawl powers are explained to be him using electromagnetism to adhere to any surface he desires.
  • Spider-Man's Alternate Universe daughter Spider-Girl had an even more powerful version, as she could use her magnetic field to repel whatever she was sticking to and stick others to walls.
• Make Some Noise:
  • Clayton Cole, a.k.a. Clash, is a self-proclaimed "Superstar of Sound", allowing him to torture Spidey with painful sound waves without causing damage to their surroundings. But he can still demolish walls and even bring down buildings with his sonic pulse generators.
  • Shriek has the ability to fire damaging sonic blasts out of her hands, in addition to giving off a psychic aura that makes people more violent and impulsive.
• Make Them Rot:
  • Carrion can cause organic matter to rot with a touch.
  • DK can cause a person to immediately dissolve by touching them.
• Master of Disguise:
  • The Chameleon. He wears exquisitely made latex masks, is a skilled mimic, and his own mask is equipped with voice changer software. For a time, the Chameleon also used a holographic belt that could instantly create an image of whoever he wanted to pose as. Chameleon is also astounding at being able to imitate someone. When he poses as Tigra, Avengers Academy member Finesse (who prides herself on knowing a person through their fighting moves) is in denial Chameleon could duplicate Tigra's micro-expressions enough to fool her.

    Chameleon: Well...that's why I'm a professional.

  • Aside from his robotics and special effects skills, Mysterio is also an expert at passing himself off as an ordinary person. He used the alias of "Ludwig Rinehart" both in a plot to drive Spider-Man crazy and then as the malevolent manager of a retirement home, and in The Amazing Mary Jane disguised himself as a Prima Donna Director to secure funding to make a movie about himself.
• Master of Illusion:
  • Mysterio falls into this trope, and he even titles himself "The Master of Illusion". Though his illusions are all based on his previous employment in the special effects industry, they can still be terrifyingly effective (though trying it on an Omega Class psychic? is not a good idea). After Mysterio committed suicide in Daredevil, and returned from the dead, his subsequent appearances revealed that he may or may not have Came Back Wrong, with actual illusion-casting powers. In the Old Man Logan storyline, Mysterio makes illusions so real that it tricks Wolverine into killing all of the other X-Men and breaking him when he dismisses the illusion.
  • It's also done on occasion by the Chameleon.
  • The Clone Saga included a mysterious villain named Judas Traveller who appeared to have almost unlimited reality warping powers. After many issues of build-up, it came as something of a disappointment when it finally turned out he was just an illusionist.
  • A minor foe, Mirage, and Fusion, who appeared in only two stories. (Admittedly one of them was awesome.)
• Meta Origin: The spider that bit Peter was revealed to have given powers to two others, Silk (who was also bitten) and the Thousand (who ate it in a bid to become superhuman, explaining what happened to it).
• Monster Modesty: Spidey has had several monstrous villains over the years. While some employ Nonhumans Lack Attributes, we do get characters like The Lizard and Vermin, two monster characters who have varying degrees of intelligence and enjoy running around in torn-up pants (and a lab coat in the Lizard's case).
• Moral Myopia:
  • Norman Osborn runs on this; if it happens to him it's unforgivable, but if he does it to someone else, it's business as usual. Best shown in The Night Gwen Stacy Died; he laughs off killing Gwen Stacy and openly mocks her death to Spider-Man's face, but when Spidey damages his Goblin Glider, he flies into an Unstoppable Rage and swears to make Spidey pay for doing so.
  • Miles Warren, aka the Jackal, often rants about how Spider-Man is "blind to the value of human life" based on nothing more than the death of Gwen Stacy, when the wall-crawler's only role in that event was that he failed to stop the Goblin killing her. Considering that Warren has gone so far as to create multiple clones suffering from cellular degeneration that will inevitably kill them as part of his plans to get "revenge" on Spider-Man, it becomes clear that he is the one with no thought for the value of human life, treating living beings as expendable pawns in his plans for revenge.
  • Felicia Hardy, aka The Black Cat takes any betrayal by Spider-Man, real or imagined, very personally and will often go to extreme lengths to make him pay for it. Perhaps the best example is when she became The Queenpin after Spider-Man (actually Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man's body) sent her to prison for theft and she tried to take revenge on the real Spider-Man by defeating and unmasking him. This is despite the fact that Peter is often very forgiving of Felicia when she violates his trust in some way like when she stole and sold a sample of his blood.
• Motive Decay: None of Spider-Man's villains ever started out with stable motives:
  • Doctor Octopus bobbed up and down from wanting to complete his life's work, world domination, petty thievery, and just wanting revenge on Spidey for past humiliation. Usually excused by the fact that the accident made him plumb crazy, and the AI in his arms was screwing with him. Plus his short foray into trying to cure AIDS! To be fair, in-universe it was believed that he was trying to create some form of biological weapon. Only the readers knew that he was searching for a cure purely to save his first love.
    • Not quite Motive Decay when you consider his original Evil Plan was to... hold some hospital staff hostage, followed by some odd scheme to take over a nuclear power plant and rebuild it in his own image, for a purpose whose details were never specified.
    • In The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski), Doc Ock had a rival who'd stolen his design for the arms. There was a three-way battle between Ock, Spidey, and the rival in a hotel, and when the rival took out some support columns Spidey tried to get people out. Ock braced the falling ceiling and got people out - but then let it fall on Spidey and went off to get at that rival. He never lost sight of his objective and went into "get Spider-Man 'cause I'm a bad guy and that's what bad guys do!" mode. It seems he's gotten out of this. Of course, he'll be back again, and will need a reason.
  • Green Goblin's early motives were to become New York's crime lord, humiliating Spider-Man, and then after being hit with Easy Amnesia, he goes dormant, resurfaces to murder Gwen Stacy, goes underground in Europe, and plots The Clone Saga for, profit? and then since returning, he has become even more erratic than usual.
• Ms. Fanservice: Spidey's love interests are, usually, shown like this.
  • Back when Steve Ditko drew the book, not so much since The Comics Code was in effect and they all wore modest dresses, and most of them were in high school. By college, however, characters like Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson were introduced. Gwen, however, stopped being this par for the course of her Character Development and, y'know, death. Mary Jane, however, kept the revealing clothes and flighty personality even after maturing, though in her case it's justified: She's an actress/model, and it's literally her job to be hot. Still, while most superheroines have an Impossible Hourglass Figure, MJ is almost always buxom and leggy, and she doesn't have the superpowers to justify it.
    • Most fans will attest that Mary Jane fit the Trope most during Todd McFarlaine's run on Amazing Spider-Man; he did several "cheesecake" shots of female characters, and as the most visible member of the supporting cast, she had most of them, the art during his run giving her a sudden preference for midriff revealing tops and dangerously daring necklines.
  • Gwen is a very beautiful blonde-haired woman who wears outfits (particularly skirts with thigh-high socks and boots as well as dresses) that highlight her very voluptuous body (that's nearly as sexy as MJ's body), buxom breasts, hourglass figure, and long, toned legs.
  • Black Cat had a suit designed for Navel-Deep Neckline, made out of black PVC, and had a build that would require lots of surgery to get in real life, even more so than a lot of other heroes. Her miniseries The Evil that Men Do opens with a Shower Scene focuses a great deal on her body, such as a close up of her washing her legs or showing her figure via Sexy Silhouette.
  • In a very weird way, Marvel has been trying to turn Carlie Cooper into this, most likely to increase her popularity. Low cut jeans, bared midriff, a tattoo that's near her lady bits but still visible in order to increase the midriff, and was probably the only girl in Spider-Island shown during the 'Naked New York' scene. However, because people just can't stand her, it's been rather ignored.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous:
  • In The Six Arms Saga, Spider-Man attempted to get rid of his superpowers... but the attempt failed rather spectacularly, giving him six arms.
  • The Spider Doppelganger has multiple clawed arms.
  • Doctor Octopus famously sports four additional mechanical limbs, as do derivatives from Doc Ock's mold like Lady Octopus and the Squid.
  • Spider-Man/Deadpool: Itsy Bitsy is a woman who received DNA from both Spider-Man and Deadpool, which caused her to turn into a psychotic spider-like creature. She has six arms armed with guns and sharp organic webbing.
• Mutual Envy: The Spider-Man/Human Torch Trade Paperback "I'm With Stupid" shows their relationship through the years, with the last story, "I'm With Stupid" pointing out the good things they have: Spidey gets to be near all the hot women and also be able to follow Reed without needing a translation into "normal," Johnny gets to have the trappings of fame and go to various universes Spidey would do anything to go to. Or the perks of power "with NONE of the responsibility."
• Narcissist: A trait that nearly all Spider-Man characters to some level have shown at different times:
  • Peter after being bitten by a spider, decides to court celebrity and fame as a performer rather than use his newfound superpowers and changes for scientific analysis and research. While Uncle Ben's death teaches him why this isn't good, he still retained a narcissistic streak well into his later years such as Roger Stern's "The Daydreamers" where he dreams about winning the Pulitzer, the Nobel, joining the Avengers and the Fantastic Four at the same time with both of them fighting each other over him, and of course Jameson kisses his boots and grovels at his feet. This changes after his marriage with Mary Jane when both of them realize their Hidden Depths and he becomes more genuinely selfless. Post-OMD, he retains some sense of it, such as insisting to Mary Jane that it's okay for him to lie to Carlie Cooper for his double life because he wants her to love him for "plain ol' Pete" only for her to dump him, as MJ more or less predicted she would when she finds out that he lied to her. And as Peter Lampshades in The Amazing Spider-Man (2018), he rather liked the fame and adulation that came with being a CEO of a company with unearned wealth and degree.
  • Even his work as Spider-Man has an element to it. Peter's main angst as Spider-Man is primarily how his guilt affects him and him personally, how it screws up his life, and how his attempts to help others cause problems for him because he's misunderstood or he's unlucky. His reaction to Goblin killing Gwen is how Norman killed "his woman". In Slott's "No One Dies", his excessive concern and grief over losing loved ones leads him to add a new Heroic Vow which Mary Jane points out is excessive and grandiose since he's a superhero and not god and that his great sensitivity tends to make him lose sight of what he is actually capable of and what his actual responsibilities are.
  • Narcissism is also a trait and flaw for many of Peter's supporting cast one which they overcome. Flash Thompson goes from a selfish jock to a dedicated serviceman inspired by Spider-Man to serve something bigger than himself. Gwen Stacy in Ditko's run started out as a self-absorbed Ice Queen before mellowing out to an overly sensitive girl in Lee-Romita's run. J. Jonah Jameson is of course almost supremely self-absorbed and self-centered even when he is doing good, acting noble, and serving something bigger than himself, with his narcissistic side co-existing with his heroic side.
  • Mary Jane is interesting for someone whom others see as this, and who also tells herself that she is one many times, but actually proves to be more consistently selfless than most. After walking out of her broken home and abandoning her sister to make something of her life, she became devoted to her Aunt Anna and even her neighbor May Parker, notably being friendly and visiting them even when Peter was too busy. Her decision to stick by Peter in The Night Gwen Stacy Died even after she lashes out at him. Her support and encouragement of Peter being Spider-Man during one of his "Spider-Man no more" phases when they were friends (thinking out how she, the most irresponsible person she knows, prefers Peter continuing to remain the most responsible man person she has ever met), and ultimately becoming a very devoted, faithful, and loving wife to Peter. Post-OMD, MJ lapses into her pre-character development narcissism but her selfless streak returns from time to time (such as encouraging Peter to find love and happiness even if she is still in love with him herself), helping her boss Tony Stark, and flirting with superheroics even when she doesn't want to.
• Noble Demon: Spidey's Rogues Gallery consists of a few.
  • A literal example is Demogoblin, who was created due to a curse placed on the second Hobgoblin, who had previously made a Deal with the Devil. Throughout most of his career, Demogoblin acted like a Sinister Minister, killing people who he believed were sinners, which usually included many Innocent Bystanders. However, in a battle with the actual Hobgoblin, he made a Heroic Sacrifice to save an innocent child who the Hobgoblin had deliberately put in harm's way, dying in the process. This made Spider-Man more disgusted with the Hobgoblin than he ever had been; in the end, the demon who his wickedness had spawned had been nobler than he had been.
  • Sandman is often portrayed as somewhat heroic, or at least he's only doing super crime for the money. But he has a moral code and is not above teaming up with Spider-Man if the situation requires it.
  • Venom may be a violent psychopath determined to destroy Spider-Man and anyone who gets in the way of that goal, but he always tries to avoid hurting innocents and tends to go out of his way to protect them. This is because, in Brock's delusional mind, he's the hero of the people and Spider-Man is the monster that New York needs to be saved from.
• No Ontological Inertia: "The Lizard" was created by a man, Dr. Curt Connors, trying to grow his right arm back. When he becomes the Lizard, his right arm does, indeed, grow back. When he's cured and reverts to normal, however, he loses his arm again. Connors's RIGHT ARM has No Ontological Inertia. Ditto for Kommodo, who uses an improved version of Dr. Connors's formula, that allows her to transform at will. In human form, she has no legs. Where on earth do they come from?
• Not Me This Time: This happens to Spider-Man a lot, apparently. In Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America, Peter visits Uncle Ben's grave and sees Rhino walking through the cemetery. He attacks, thinking he's up to something (despite Rhino pleading that he isn't here to fight), and their fight breaks a gravestone belonging to Rhino's mother... which was the only reason he was there in the first place. When he realizes this, Spider-Man attempts to apologize, but Rhino is, understandably, far too angry to listen.
  • Subverted in that even though Norman Osborn will often deny involvement in a scheme hurting Spider-Man, lazy writing will often retcon him as being the mastermind.
  • In the Spider-Man spin-off Jackpot, the heroine, later accompanied by Spidey himself, beats up a minor villainess who was smuggling but really hadn't anything to do with what Jackpot wanted to know about. The snippy answer of the villainess was something along the lines of: "What? Do you think every villain in New York gets a daily update about every crime?!"
• Not Quite Flight: Spider-Man sometimes uses his webbing to create glider-wings, parachutes, bungee cords, and other means to send himself through the air when there are no convenient tall buildings or trees to swing from.
• The Notable Numeral: The Sinister Six.
• Official Couple Ordeal Syndrome: Spidey and Mary Jane. Dating a superhero makes you a target of hundreds of supervillains. Marrying him means the writers want to break it up as much as possible. And yet, because this is the web-slinger we're talking about, things could be even worse.
• The One Who Made It Out: Some of the stories (at least before the Dan Slott era^note Where Peter is a CEO businessman) deal with Peter's Angst about the fact that being Spider-Man is delaying or hurting his ambitions and plans for his career or attempts to live up to his potential. This is also part of the arc of his supporting characters.
  • Norman Osborn in his revival often taunted Peter for being an underachiever who more or less still lives in the same way he did as a young man, was still poor, and came off as an underachiever. Doctor Octopus in the Superior Spider-Man initially expressed the same views.
• Outdated Outfit: The Amazing Spider-Man (Lee & Ditko) was especially bad for this. Seeing almost all the adult men wearing fedoras, teenage boys wearing bow ties, and girls wearing long skirts are especially jarring by today's standards.
  • Mary Jane Watson is a huge victim of this, being a fashion model during her appearances in the 1980s and 1990s. The funny thing was that the contemporary "big hair" look that Todd Mc Farlane gave her in the 1990s actually dated more quickly than her "so outdated it's cool again" 1960s hairstyle, which was then brought back.
  • Supporting character Captain Jean DeWolff dressed like someone out of a 1940s film noir and drove a matching vintage roadster, but that seems to have been a deliberately retro look.
• Outside-Genre Foe: While Peter does live in the Fantasy Kitchen Sink that is the Marvel Universe, he largely sticks to traditional supervillains. However, he has encountered a few villains who fall into either more grounded or fantastical genres:
  • Shathra and Morlun are more on the magical side of things, the former being the avatar of spider wasps while the latter is a type of vampire that feeds on the life essense of people from across the multiverse who are connected to the web of life and destiny.
  • While they haven't lasted long, he has encountered ordinary people who for whatever reason have come into conflict with him as Peter Parker with many of them belonging to more dramatic and realistic genres. A notable example is Jonathan Caesar, a stalker who kidnapped Mary Jane and threatened to kill her if they don't get married.
• Painted-On Pants: Mary Jane usually wears these. So does the Black Cat, both in and out of costume.
• Pair the Spares: It's fairly common for supporting cast members to get bounced around like this. Harry Osborne used to date Mary Jane, but ended up marrying Peter's high school love interest Liz Allen after she hooked up with Peter. Similarly, Flash Thompson has dated Mary Jane, Gwen Stacy, Black Cat, Liz Allen, and Betty Brant, though only Betty and the Black Cat were exes at the time.
• Phlegmings: Spider-man's collection of symbiote villains (Venom, Carnage, et al.) have this in spades.
• Pick on Someone Your Own Size: Most of the villains Spider-Man met when he was a teenager only developed a hatred for him after he kept getting in their way.
  • While the adult Green Goblin originally fixated on the then-teenaged Spider-Man because he intended to make an impression on the New York mobs by capturing Spider-Man, who he thought would be an easy target, the Goblin soon became obsessed with the idea of making the much younger Peter Parker the "heir" to his legacy as the Green Goblin, seeing in Peter Parker the traits he wanted his heir to carry on, but found lacking in his own son.
• Portable Hole: The Spot has power over interdimensional portals, which he can place and remove as if they were solid objects.
• Power Perversion Potential:
  • Webs. As a matter of fact, Todd McFarlane wrote an implicitly explicit (consensual) bondage foreplay scene◊ (between Peter and his wife Mary Jane Watson) into an issue during his short run on the explicitly-created-for-him Spider-Man (no adjective) series from the early 1990s.
  • The Chameleon, a shapeshifter and Master of Disguise, provides a very creepy example. On one occasion when he discovers Spidey's secret identity, he disguises himself as Peter with the intention of committing a Bed Trick on Mary Jane. It doesn't get further than kissing, however, as she is immediately able to tell that he's not Peter (it helps that she deliberately slips him some misinformation that the real Peter would have known to be wrong, just to make sure). When MJ calls him out on it, Chameleon then turns into a stereotypical muscular hunk, and then a sophisticated-looking older man, to show that he can take any physical visage she might fantasize about, before shifting back to his normal form with the intention of taking her by force anyway. Unfortunately for him, though, this is the moment when MJ beats the ever-loving crap out of him with a baseball bat.
• Progressively Prettier:
  • Peter Parker is a classic example. Drawn by Steve Ditko, Peter was a skinny, thin-faced geek and Spider-Man was thin and more spider-esque. When John Romita Sr - a former romance comic artist - took over the pencilling duties, Peter Parker became significantly more handsome and Spider-Man took on a more muscle-bound appearance. May be Handwaved in that when Ditko was drawing it, Spidey was a teenager, and as he got older and got real exercise to go with his superstrength, his frame may well have filled out naturally.
    • The artists' notes in the first volume of Ultimate Spider-Man bear this out: in that series he's a high-schooler again, and he's drawn explicitly scrawnier and ganglier than the main universe version, with a note that he is supposed to be very thin, not having built up muscle from years of webslinging.
    • Peter does look less spindly and more conventionally attractive even towards the end of Ditko's run. That change began with Amazing Spider-Man #8 when Flash Thompson broke his glasses, and Peter decides he doesn't need to do that much Clark Kenting, considering the spider bite corrected his vision.
    • This is acknowledged in "Along Came a Child" from Marvel Comics Presents #120, which features a teenager who turns out to be the boy who witnessed Peter climbing up a building in Amazing Fantasy #15. Having figured out that Spider-Man is the same odd boy he saw years ago, he strikes a deal with J. Jonah Jameson, and the Daily Bugle publishes a police-sketch that accurately depicts Peter as he appeared in AF #15. Of course, Peter no longer looks like that.
  • Also, surprisingly enough, Gwen Stacy. In her early appearances, as drawn by Steve Ditko, she had highly, angular eyebrows, pinned up hair, a constant haughty expression, and fairly modest clothing; her features were sharp and angular and although she could occasionally pull off a nice pout, the fact that lots of characters called her pretty was the only hint to the fact that she actually was so. But when John Romita took over the drawing, Gwen was softened, her features became more angelic, she let her hair down, gaining her iconic bangs and headband, and she dressed in much sexier clothes.
  • Averted with Mary-Jane Watson who was The Faceless and The Ghost for most of Ditko's run albeit it was implied that she was quite gorgeous (based on the reactions of Liz Allan and Betty Brant who saw her before Peter did), but it's a Riddle for the Ages how Ditko's version of Mary-Jane would have looked like.
  • When he was first introduced, Eddie Brock was a very poorly kempt middle-aged man, and although he was very muscular, he had an oversized, grotesque frame. All of this was meant to signify that he was in a poor place mentally and that he was clearly villainous. As he became more heroic, he got more of a standard Heroic Build and looked about a decade younger, to the point where nowadays he's a bona fide Chick Magnet.
  • It even happened to Aunt May for a few issues when Romita took over! Luckily, the fans complained she looked too young and she was soon back to her old appearance.
• Psycho Electro: Electro is normally a very downplayed version of this trope. However, he went crazy after the Superior Spider-Man (actually Doctor Octopus in Peter's body, at that time) experimented on him. He can no longer control his powers (to the point of accidentally frying his ally/lover) and has frequent nightmares of Spider-Man torturing him.
  • The Electro of Ultimate Spider-Man is very psychotic, unhinged, and paranoid, unlike his original Marvel counterpart, where he was (at the time, anyway) just your basic thug with electricity powers.
  • Max Dillon's successor as Electro, Francine Frye, is a much bigger case, a Monster Fangirl that soon after getting electric abilities gave a Kiss of Death to Max in order to absorb his power.
• Punch-Clock Villain:
  • The Shocker differs from his peers mainly because he considers supervillainy more of a job than a way of life. He is essentially a gifted inventor that considers robbing banks to be more entertaining than a typical desk job, and has taken pains to avoid causing casualties in the past. Later, he starts working for Hammer Industries, which hires him out as muscle, where he punches into work and has a supervisor, etc.
  • The Sandman is, while a supervillain, still a halfway decent person, who, among other things, changed his real name so that his mother wouldn't get caught up in his criminal career. He even tried a heroic career, and kept it for quite a while before the Chronic Villainy set in. He is still shown to be a relatively amiable person once you get past the life of crime, and is noticeably less violent and cruel than his peers in Spidey's Rogues Gallery. He occasionally gains traits of an Anti-Villain as well, especially in Spider-Man 3, where he was a full on Anti-Villain who only commits crimes to save his daughter. In the early Marvel days, Sandman and Ben Grimm ran into each other in a neighborhood bar. They put down some minor troublemakers who were disturbing the peace, then spent the rest of the afternoon sitting side-by-side at the bar, swapping stories over beers.
• Put on a Bus: This happened to several characters over the years, ranging from Liz Allan to Flash Thompson to Debra Whitman to Harry Osborn to even Mary Jane herself. It turned out to be a round trip, since subsequent writers would bring them all back at one point or another.
• Real-Place Background: The Marvel Universe was renowned for being set in New York as opposed to the fictional cities of DC heroes, but even then Spider-Man still stood out originally for being the most tied to the city since the Fantastic Four had global and cosmic adventures while Doctor Strange likewise was an esoteric figure:
  • A number of famous stories and plots use real-life places and monuments. Most notably, Gwen Stacy died at the George Washington Bridge (though confusingly Romita Sr. modeled it on the Brooklyn Bridge) and it's not uncommon for real-life tourists and visitors to treat the real bridge as a memorial to her fictional death. Likewise, Peter and MJ's famous Make-Out Point is at the top of the Empire State Building, celebrated as their spot since "The Wedding" annual, and revisited in Matt Fraction's "To Have and to Hold" as well as Spider-Island.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Curt Connors' experiment to help people with missing limbs, like himself, caused him to transform into The Lizard, a monstrous reptile who detests all "warm-blooded" life (though it probably goes without saying that he doesn't like spiders either). In the well-loved '90s cartoon, he looked a great deal like a giant, very anthropomorphic Anole. The latest revamp of Connors gives him the ability to activate the "lizard brain" of humans, encouraging them to act like reptiles. Apparently, lizards are really sexually aggressive and mindlessly violent towards their own kind. Who knew? Komodo, who might count as a Distaff Counterpart of The Lizard, manages to be an exception. She was Connors' lab assistant and stole some of the formula that turned Connors into the Lizard, perfected it (for herself, anyway), and used it to grow new legs. Even though the use of said legs requires her to stay in her reptile form, she's still able to change back and forth (though being human means her legs go away), and in reptile form, she suffers no desire to Kill All Humans.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
  • Spider-Man has one in The Death of Jean DeWolff. The Sin-Eater is murdering people left and right, and one of his victims is Captain Jean DeWolfe. As she was one of Spider-Man's friends and supporters, he takes her death very hard and this adventure very personally. Ultimately, Spider-Man finds the Sin-Eater (who has no superpowers, by the way) and brutally beats him to a pulp. If not for Daredevil, Spider-Man seemed quite likely to kill him.
  • In the Grim Hunt storyline, the Kravinov family had been messing with Spidey for weeks and eventually killed several of his superpowered friends. Spider-Man goes berserk, taking out the whole clan and even used his wall-crawling grip to tear off a chunk of Sasha Kravinov's face.
  • And of course, there was right after the events of Civil War when Aunt May is shot by an assassin sent by the Kingpin after Peter exposes his identity to the world. Donning his black costume to let everyone know that he means business, he tears across New York until finally locating and delivering a huge beatdown on the Kingpin, threatening to finish the job if he can't find a way to save Aunt May (we all know how that turned out). In an issue of What If?, the assassin shoots (and kills) Mary Jane instead, causing Peter to snap and actually kill the Kingpin.
• Rogues Gallery: His gallery includes the Green Goblin^note a Corrupt Corporate Executive with a Mad Bomber Split Personality after taking a Psycho Serum, Hobgoblin^note a sane, albeit sociopathic fashion designer who uses a modified Goblin arsenal, Doctor Octopus^note a Mad Doctor who has four mechanical arms fused to his back, Venom^note a mentally troubled reporter bonded to an alien symbiote, sharing a hatred for Spider-Man, Electro^note a man who controls all forms of electricity, Mysterio^note a failed special effects artist who uses his technology to become a villain, Sandman^note a crook whose molecules are fused with sand particles Kraven the Hunter^note a big game hunter with the abilities of a Super Serum, the Vulture^note an old businessman who utilizes a electromagnetic winged harness, Carnage^note a psychopathic Serial Killer bonded to another symbiote spawned from Venom's own, the Lizard^note a scientist with a Split Personality which transforms him into a humanoid reptilian, the Rhino^note a brute with his skin fused with a rhino-like hide costume, Black Cat^note a master cat burglar who goes by her father's words to "never settle for second best", the Scorpion^note an investigator turned insane Psycho for Hire trapped in a scorpion-esque armor, the Shocker^note a robber who created an insulated battle suit with vibro-shock gauntlets, etc. Together with Batman and Superman's, it's considered probably the most well-known Rogues Gallery in all of comicdom.
  • The villains are also good examples of villains crossing over to fight new heroes besides their traditional sparring partners. Electro, for example, has become an enemy to Daredevil as well as Spider-Man, while Spidey himself has thrown down with the enemies of everyone from Iron Man to the Hulk to Captain Marvel.
    • A glaring example is Wilson Fisk, The Kingpin. He's become so closely associated with Daredevil that both the 2003 movie and the Marvel Studios/Netflix series used him as the Big Bad.
    • Dark Reign upgraded Norman "The Green Goblin" Osborn to a universe-wide villain when he took over the Avengers.
• Rogues Gallery Showcase: The original "Sinister Six" story was this more than anything, as the story featured Spider-Man fighting each of his enemies one on one rather in a group.
• Rogues' Gallery Transplant: A regular import-export trade exists in the rogues gallery between Spider-Man and other Marvel heroes:
  • One example that is practically the Trope Codifier for this effect: Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin of Crime. He began as a Spider-Man villain, and a generic villain mob-boss at that. Frank Miller revived and reinterpreted him as a major threat (modeled on The Octopus from Will Eisner's The Spirit) during his run on Daredevil, making him Matt Murdoch's archenemy and playing a relatively smaller role in Spider-Man stories after that. Miller's Fisk became an iconic and influential supervillain of The '80s inspiring the Post-Crisis take on Lex Luthor which in a case of Lost in Imitation later inspired the Post-Clone Saga Norman Osborn.
  • It almost happened with The Sandman. After the first two battles he had with Spidey, he became an almost exclusive Fantastic Four villain for the next 10 years. And later on he had a Heel–Face Turn and temporarily joined The Avengers. A similar situation happened with the Rhino, who for a while clocked more time as a villain in The Incredible Hulk.
  • Mysterio did this once on purpose because the real Spidey wasn't available, and made enough of an impression (notably, he indirectly caused the death of Karen Page) that he arguably still has a place among Dardevil's foes. He is still mostly a Spidey villain but when he shows up, there is a higher-than-normal chance that Daredevil will too.
    • Likewise in Old Man Logan he became a villain for Wolverine.
    • He briefly becomes a nemesis of Nate Grey (who, partly thanks to being friends with Spidey, had a tendency to run into Spidey's enemies), and even successfully trapped him in a fantasy world. Unfortunately, Nate is arguably Marvel's most powerful psychic. Needless to say, Karma followed very quickly.
  • Boomerang, a standard Spidey foe, was initially a villain to the Hulk. He was moved to Spidey when it became clear that a monster like the Hulk was a little out of the weight class of a Badass Normal with trick boomerangs.
  • Spider-Man has also tussled with a few of Fantastic Four's villains (since historically he has had the closest bond with them). Most notably Doctor Doom has appeared in some major stories, being the first Marvel Wide villain Spider-Man fought in the Lee-Ditko era, when he accidentally kidnapped Flash thinking he was Spider-Man (of course, Doom has fought pretty much every hero in the Marvel Universe at one point or another). Their paths also crossed a number of times, most notably in recent times being in the 50th issue of JMS' run where Spider-Man saves his life from a terrorist attack when Peter, MJ, Captain America and Doom were all stranded at the Denver Airport on account of a storm.
  • One of Spider-Man's all-time greatest battles with any villain was with the Juggernaut, an X-Men villain, in The Amazing Spider-Man #229–230. This battle got a sequel during the Grim Hunt arc. Then later, Spider-Man fought Firelord, a former Herald of Galactus, who was a villain of The Avengers in ASM #269-270. Both villains were intended to establish Spider-Man as the ultimate underdog, battling enemies beyond his wheelhouse, and defeating them on his own when usually they gave both the X-Men and the Avengers problems and needed a super-team to take them down.
  • Shriek started off fighting Cloak and Dagger but more commonly fights Spidey since, due to their relative obscurity compared to Spidey. She's also well-known as Carnage's girlfriend.
  • As of Dark Reign, Norman Osborn has become an archenemy of the entire Earth-based Marvel universe, second only to Doctor Doom before being downgraded and returning to Spider-Man's titles in Dan Slott's run.
  • Beetle IV, or Lady Beetle, started out fighting Captain America before quickly being moved to Spidey's corner.
  • Shocker has been a consistent Spidey villain, outside of his stints with the Masters of Evil and the Thunderbolts. As of 2018, however, he's moved to New Jersey and started tangling with Kamala Khan.
  • Interestingly, Arcade debuted in Marvel Team-Up, a series about Spidey teaming up with different heroes, but quickly became an X-Men villain before antagonizing the Avengers Academy without ever crossing paths with Spider-Man. In The Amazing Spider-Man (2018), he's resurfaced as a Spidey foe once more.
• Rousseau Was Right: Depending on the Writer. A running theme in Spider-Man stories, at least after Ditko left (since his run of stories generally had one-dimensional villains and his later objectivist turn was explicitly anti-Rousseauian). Spider-Man often believes that even his enemies are capable of being good or reforming, since as an imperfect man with the blood of his Uncle on his hands, he is himself trying to be a better person.
  • The incident with letting the robber run straight past him taught Peter that doing the right thing matters more than anything else in the world, sometimes even including love, happiness, and getting revenge for a lost loved one. Peter believes in caring for others so hard, just one homeless girl who was a fan of his that he missed on the street and is on death’s door by the time he finds her — breaks his heart even though she died loving him.
  • One Marvel Christmas Special has J.Jonah at the children’s ward trying and failing to teach the kids that Spidey is a selfish freak and only met with a collective “No you’re wrong geezer” as all the children share stories about how Spider-Man has visited and comforted them in their illness, including the terminal cases.
  • Notably both Norman and Goblin, and Harry Osborn became sympathetic and still from time to time affect some sympathetic traits (albeit in the case of Norman since The '90s he's been shown as pure unadulterated scum). Recent examples include Eddie Brock and Doctor Octopus somewhat. Even The Sandman has done a turn or two as a hero.
  • This is also the case of Spider-Man's supporting cast. Most obviously Flash Thompson, Peter's high school bully who via Character Development becomes a better person, apologizes to Peter and later dies a hero. Then there's J. Jonah Jameson who Peter respects for his good qualities and Hidden Heart of Gold but begrudges for his dislike of Spider-Man and his smear tactics. Even JJJ has turned around now after Peter revealed his identity to him.
• Run the Gauntlet:
  • Spidey's first battle with the Sinister Six was one of these, where he was forced to battle the Vulture, Electro, Kraven, Sandman, Mysterio, and Doctor Octopus one after another to save Aunt May and Betty Brant. This has been explained as being so each villain would have a chance to get the "honor" of killing Spidey himself. Spidey has since called this a "bone-headed method of teaming up" and in all subsequent fights, the Six attack en masse.
  • Gently parodied in Spider-Girl's fight with the Savage Six — the entire issue was one big homage to the entire first Sinister Six issue, the leader of the Savage Six employed the same method of attack, and his brother, also a super-villain, called him an idiot. The final fight (between the exhausted hero and fresh villain) is thoroughly subverted when Spider-Girl calls in a few favors, and the last villain is confronted by just about every hero in the Marvel Comics 2 'verse. He wisely surrenders at that point.
  • Norman Osborn once claimed that only a gauntlet would work against Spider-Man since the webhead is "good with groups," using the opponents' powers against them and causing infighting.
  • After a period where the classic villains were put aside to focus on new faces, there was an arc titled "The Gauntlet," where the Kravenoff family set up Spidey's classic Rogues Gallery to fight him one after another and wear him down. The cover for the first collected volume encapsulates the trope almost perfectly - Spider-Man lies battered atop his fallen enemies.
  • In the novel Revenge of the Sinister Six, Spider-Man lampshades the fact that whenever the Six get together, he always takes them down faster than when they fight him one at a time, and it's because when they overwhelm him, he's no longer able to hold back so much. To punctuate the point, while he's doing this, he's also dodging Doctor Octopus' robotic arms...before crushing his real ones.
  • A Spider-Ham anniversary issue lampshaded the origin of the Sinister Six with Mysteriape of the Swinester Six suggesting the same and getting mocked for it.
• Sanctuary of Solitude: Venom's origin story: Eddie Brock, down-on-his-luck reporter, is contemplating suicide in a church◊ while Spider-Man is trying to escape from the Symbiote. After he successfully drives it off, it bonds with Eddie, and Venom is born.
• Save the Villain: Shortly before the Gathering of Five arc, Spidey actually had to rescue Norman Osborn, and this Trope can be combined with What You Are in the Dark for that occasion. The Kingpin sent Nitro the Living Bomb to assassinate Osborn, which resulted in him, Spidey (in his civilian identity as Peter Parker) and Norman's little grandson Normie trapped in an elevator that was about to collapse, both of them pinned. Norman, being the Magnificent Bastard he is, actually took this time to gloat a little, telling Peter that he had no idea whether or not the security cameras were still working, and telling him that any displays of Super-Strength by Peter could possibly give him away to anyone who was watching. Of course, Norman was just as strong, but claimed he was unwilling for that very reason. (Or maybe he was waiting until the last second, or was actually unable to free himself, just too proud to ask for help. We may never know.) Eventually, Peter had to take the chance to save Normie (and found out quickly that the security cameras had been quite broken by the explosion) and might have considered leaving his enemy to fall. But when Normie begged him to save his grandfather, he relented, and helped get Norman out. Even then, Norman couldn't help but goad him a little, telling him that if he had done nothing he would have been victorious in their feud. (And this would be a very large turning point in it; Norman would perform the Gathering of Five to gain more power to prevent things like this again, would be driven far more insane, his identity of the Goblin would be revealed, and his enmity with Spider-Man would become much deadlier than before.)
• Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up:
  • Averted with Flash Thompson, originally a rampaging Jerk Jock, who comes back from his overseas military service much wiser and more mature. He actually forms a friendship with one-time target Peter Parker, as both men have grown since their high school days. Flash was never all that bad compared to other bullies. He later becomes a superhero in his own right, as Agent Venom.
  • Played straight with the Garth Ennis story, "The Thousand", where the villain turns out to be a guy who bullied Peter when they were kids. He saw Peter get bitten by the spider and saw his first display of powers. He then promptly went back and ate the dead spider, hoping that'd give him Spider-Man powers. Instead, he turned into a thousand spiders that could take over a person by eating them from the inside.
  • Played very straight with Tombstone, who bullied Joe "Robbie" Robertson when they were at school together, and grew up to be a full-fledged supervillain.
• Screens Are Cameras: The earliest versions of the Spider-Slayer robots work this way. The robots would seem to have no technological need to project the face of whoever remotely controls them onto a TV screen mounted on the robot's "head", but that's exactly what they do.
• Second-Face Smoke: J. Jonah Jameson does this a lot; Spidey has found ways of reversing it on him once in a while.
• Seduction-Proof Marriage: In "To Have and To Hold", a SHIELD agent who was formerly MJ's bodyguard in Los Angeles where they were friendly in a period where she and Peter were briefly separated tries to signal an interest in her, which she rebukes:
  Mary Jane: "Is that what you think we were? You work my security detail for a few months and now — now you’re Mr. S.H.I.E.L.D. man here to rescue me from my big, bad life? He’s my husband. You’re just some dude."
• Seductive Spider:
  • The Queen is a villainess with mystical control over spiders and is an extremely sexy woman who uses both her beauty and mental powers to seduce and control others. She once chose Spider-Man as her "mate"; unfortunate for him, as he was both married at the time, and "mating" meant that he would be the one impregnated, not the other way around.
  • Silk and Spider-Man mutually-secreted hormones that made the two of them irresistibly attractive to one-another. Even though they eventually decided they were Better as Friends, whenever they had a conversation, it was always laced with heavy Sexual Euphemisms and unintentional (as well as intentional) flirting.
• Sexy Secretary: Betty Brant, J. Jonah Jameson's secretary was Peter Parker's first love, although she was not terribly sexpot. She briefly got replaced by Glory Grant, who was sex on two long legs.
• Sexy Stewardess: In The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski) #51, while doing a favor for an aging crime boss (don't ask), this was once attempted on Spider-Man. Since this happened during the period he and Mary-Jane were back together, the results were quite humorous.
  Spider-Man: *from inside a large amount of webbing he's put up to keep the scantily-dressed "attendant" at bay* Just slip the food through the webs and no one gets hurt.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: Mary Jane Watson and Black Cat have moments like this especially when they are alone with Spider-Man. Given that they are both Ms. Fanservice and their seductive personalities, it makes sense.
• Shout-Out: Probably the most of any Marvel character outside of Deadpool, as Spider-Man's quippy nature and slight geekiness makes these easy. It goes far enough that at one point when he shows up in Runaways, and the characters begin to say "Look! It's—" he interrupts with "That's right... I'm Batman."
• Sick Episode: Peter was always getting sick for an issue or two, but then his spider-strength would allow him to recover in record time. Unfortunately, he always happened to get this right when the Monster of the Week showed up.
  • The most famous is probably Spider-Man having a cold The Night Gwen Stacy Died.
  • A special mention goes out to the Grim Hunt storyline, in which the villains actually plan their attack to take place when he's sick using the precognitive abilities of Madame Web.
  • One comedic short in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual (2014) had Spider-Man terrifying a group of villains by not speaking, which is considered a massive Out-of-Character Moment for him, as it meant he was pissed. Actually, he had laryngitis this time.
• Sky Surfing: The Green Goblin and Hobgoblin can do this with their respective Goblin Gliders.
• Sleeps in the Nude:
  • Johnny Storm sleeps in the nude, he claims due to heightened body temperature thanks to his fire powers. Peter discovers this when he lets Johnny crash at the Baxter Building (currently the home of Parker Industries) and finds Johnny asleep in his bed. And the only thing Johnny has to cover himself with is Peter's pillow. Peter is definitely not amused.
  • In Amazing Spider-Man 2018 #9, Peter is sleeping naked on his bed when he's woken by Silk who begins Eating the Eye Candy, partially fueled by the pheromones that make them attracted to each other.
  • Rather infamously done in Spider-Man: Reign, where the initial printing of the first issue was recalled because it showed the schlong of the aged Peter Parker as he sat nude in bed.
• Spider Limbs: A lot of instances of this trope have cropped up over the comic's history.
  • Firstly, there's arch enemy Doctor Octopus and his four back-mounted mechanical tentacles.
  • Then there is the Iron Spider armor Tony Stark gives Spider-Man in the Civil War has three retractable arms.
  • There's also Midnight Sons rogue Spider-X, who has bony spider-limbs.
  • Pre-dating the Civil War Iron Spider armor, a possible future Spider-Man was shown to be a genius with Powered Armor using a similar system to Doc Ock's. Interestingly, the future Goblin serving as his nemesis had equivalent technology on her armor as well.
  • Spider-Man once had a teenage fanboy named Ollie Osnick who built himself a set of mechanical spider legs and tried to become Spidey's sidekick. Since he was a clumsy, out-of-shape teenager with no combat experience, it was a good thing that Spider-Man was able to talk him out of it before he hurt himself. A few years later, he reemerged as the Steel Spider, having gotten into shape and learned some hand-to-hand fighting ability in the interim. After beating up some guys who'd attacked his girlfriend, he decided to hang up the costume but then reemerged during the Civil War on the anti-registration side. His super-hero career apparently ended when he fought the Thunderbolts and Venom bit off and ate one of his arms and he was imprisoned in the Negative Zone.
  • The Superior Spider-Man adds similar waldoes to his second costume. Makes sense, since he's actually Doctor Octopus after stealing Spidey's body and life. They are destroyed during the "Goblin Nation" arc.
  • The third and fourth Spider-Woman both possessed these at different points. Originally they were a power of Charlotte Witter (Spider-Woman IV), as a result of genetic manipulation by Doc Ock. After a lot of back-and-forth power-stealing, the limbs — along with the other powers of all three other "Spider-Women" — ended up with Mattie Franklin (Spider-Woman III).
  • This has happened to Spidey before, but he managed to cure his condition thanks to the help of Dr. Curt Connors (a.k.a. the Lizard).
• Stacy's Mom:
  • For a time in The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski), where the Sins Past storyline was taken as a legitimate event in Spider-Man's history, Norman Osborn was this to Gwen Stacy. Fits with Love Father, Love Son, as she also dated Harry Osborn for a time. Sins Past was ultimately revealed to be an elaborate ruse by a Harry Osborn A.I. in The Amazing Spider-Man (2018), using hocus pocus from Mysterio and clones to deceive Spider-Man into thinking Norman and Gwen had a relationship.
  • Norman had an affair with his son's fiancee Lily Hollister as well (After she had turned into the Goblinesque Menace), and for a time was believed to be the father of her child (later plot twists established Harry as the real father, and later runs would reveal Post-OMD Harry himself was in reality a clone of the long deceased original). Norman is not a very nice person.
• Statuesque Stunner: Stunner, who's over seven feet tall and looks like a bodybuilder in a skintight leotard. True to her name, she is described as breathtakingly beautiful, and in her first appearances, brags about how beautiful she is to some patrons at a bar, who judging by the smiles on their faces, don't disagree. It's later revealed that the reason why she's so beautiful is because she's actually a virtual reality construct (tangible hologram) controlled by Angelina Brancale. Angelina is an obese woman who wants to be thin and beautiful, so Doctor Octopus, another Spider-Man villain and her lover at the time, gives her a machine that allows her to be a Stunner.
• Status Quo Is God:
  • Until approximately The Amazing Spider-Man #38, Spider-Man had organic real-time Character Development going from 15-year-old teenager to high school student, to freshman at college similar to other Marvel characters at the time which averted Comic-Book Time. When this Early-Installment Weirdness ended (mostly because it became clear that Stan Lee's trope-playing and trope-defying approach which he saw as best a temporary fad, had led to a lasting series of IP), Marvel adopted a new approach called "the illusion of change" as a result of which Peter Parker's aging and situation has frozen into more or less what it was since he was in college. He's at best in his mid-twenties and has been so since the late-60s.
  • The only major status-quo change since Peter graduated high school was when he married, an event that happened mostly by accident mostly because it was unexpectedly popular as an idea among the regular public. It lasted for 20 years in real-time where multiple generations of readers saw Spider-Man as the married superhero. Marvel editors and executives spent most of their time since then backpedaling and reversing Peter to single status. They succeeded after Civil War in the regular continuity at least.
  • Spider-Man is the street hero, and he's still struggling, a bit of a Butt-Monkey and a loner hero among the superhero continuity. The situation changed briefly in the run-up to the Civil War and stayed in place until Superior Spider-Man alienated him from the superhero community again.
  • Mary-Jane Watson remains Peter's on-off Love Interest and no matter how many girlfriends and dates Peter and she have, they almost always return and start dating again sooner or later.
• Story Arc: Whenever single writers work on an extended run, they tend to create a particular serialized plot and story either dealing with a particular story or villain, or on a character and thematic level, this allows them the satisfaction of providing their readers a conclusion of some sort even if the serialized nature continues. The Amazing Spider-Man (Lee & Ditko), The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski) and The Amazing Spider-Man (Dan Slott) have their own pages dealing with stories in their runs. For other writers:
  • Lee-Romita's arc was more episodic but the overall theme was to give Peter a social circle and a series of friends, and try and have Peter get some direction for the future. Peter also struggles in this arc with his duties as a superhero and as friend and boyfriend (to both Harry Osborn and Gwen Stacy), getting neurotic because he keeps lying to them. This story arc gets resolved three times. The first is when Captain George Stacy, his second father figure after Ben's death and Spider-Man's first friendly authority figure dies, which also throws a wrench in his relationship with Gwen. Harry Osborn's drug issues create problems in his friendship with him, and then after Stan Lee left, it ends conclusively in Conway's The Night Gwen Stacy Died.
  • Gerry Conway's story arc which began with the death of Gwen Stacy and concluded in Issue #149 was essentially ending Peter's college era, and moving on from Gwen and falling in love with Mary Jane. Their growing friendship, love, and relationship which includes their First Kiss and ends with Their First Time (and probably Peter's first) was intended by Conway to signal Peter finding and overcoming tragedy and suffering, and experiencing a more adult romance than before. It also marked the end of Peter's Coming of Age Story from teenager to man.
  • Roger Stern who came over more than fifty issues after Conway left during which Spider-Man was run by Len Wein and Marv Wolfman who tended to avoid big story arcs, dealt with Peter at the midpoint of his youth. Where after leaving college he goes to graduate school and is considering becoming a serious scientist. He also introduced the Felicia and Peter romance and towards the end the love triangle between them and MJ. Likewise, Stern introduced the Hobgoblin mystery and the overall thematic arc is what people think of and expect of Spider-Man such as Felicia imagining Spider-Man as being a more sophisticated man than her, and Spider-Man as an object of wish fulfillment and heroism. The theme of masks and social roles is also dealt with deeply.
• Stranger Behind the Mask:
  • There was an early storyline, where the masked Crime Master, built up as a major threat similar to his predecessor Big Man (who had been Daily Bugle reporter Frederick Foswell). However, unlike Big Man, when Crime Master is shot and killed by police during the story climax, it's revealed that the man is completely unknown to both Spider-Man and the reader, though the police identify him as a fugitive. Spidey lampshades it by thinking "Sometimes, the culprit isn't always the butler."
  • When Peter unmasks Electro, since he has no connection to Electro's civilian identity Max Dillon, he has no idea who it is.
  • Despite lots of foreshadowing that he may be Harry Osborn (among others) when the fifth Green Goblin was unmasked, he turned out to be... nobody. Literally, it was some kind of Artificial Human created by Norman Osborn.
  • It's easy to forget this, but Venom was originally done like this. During Venom's introductory story arc, Spidey was being stalked by this maniac in the black symbiote suit he'd discarded who seemed to know his identity and monologued angrily to himself about how Spider-Man had ruined his life. He was seen unmasked early in the story, but the readers were unable to identify him, leaving them puzzled about who this mystery man actually is. Then when he finally captures Spider-Man and unmasks himself before him... he's a completely original character, whose backstory was Retconned into an existing Spider-Man story (the infamous Sin-Eater arc). Even worse, Peter knows who Brock is (although not to the extent that they knew each other in Spider-Man 3), making this a Stranger Behind The Mask for the readers only, verging on Remember the New Guy?.
  • Happened again during The Clone Saga, thanks to an editorial screwup. In an attempt to clean up the out of control storyline, Marvel retconned everything into being the work of a mystery man named Gaunt. He was intended to be Norman Osborn, the only villain with the credibility to pull off such a wide-ranging plot, but one writer didn't get the memo and dropped hints that Gaunt was serving a more powerful villain. They did an Author's Saving Throw by making Osborn this more powerful villain, and Gaunt was eventually unmasked as... Mendel Stromm, Osborn's business partner in his pre-supervillain days and a D-list villain called "The Robot Master" who'd had all of two previous appearances: the first in 1966 and the second in 1986, a full ten years before The Clone Saga.
  • Subverted at the end of Superior Spider-Man. For over a dozen issues, the Goblin King has been dropping increasingly broad hints that he's Norman Osborn but always refuses to take the mask off. At the climax, Spider-Man rips off his mask, only to discover it's... some redheaded guy with a mustache he's never seen before. It turns out it really is Norman Osborn — he'd gotten plastic surgery since his original face had gotten too well-known.
  • Flipped on Spidey himself during the Mark Millar run in Marvel Knights: Spider-Man #4, in which an injured Spider-Man is abducted from his hospital bed by the Vulture, who angrily tears off the bandages covering his face and is completely deflated by the realization that he and his criminal buddies have been losing to a "nobody" for all this time.
• Teeth Flying:
  • Venom's teeth often go flying when Spider-Man gives him a beating. Not that it matters much, since they grow back in seconds.
  • During Spider-Man's first fight with Tombstone he knocks out several of his teeth.
  • In "The Mortal Past" from The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #28 after Carnage's friend Billy tricks him into taking off his costume so he can kill him as Cletus Kasady, Spider-Man takes advantage of the situation while he's more vulnerable in this state so he knocks him unconscious with a punch knocking out one of his teeth in the process.
  • In The Amazing Spider-Man #122, during Spider-Man's beatdown of The Green Goblin for killing his girlfriend Gwen Stacey, he knocks out some of his teeth.
• Then Let Me Be Evil:
  • While it never actually happens, Spider-Man comics have repeatedly teased the reader with the possibility of Spider-Man becoming a menace due to the All of the Other Reindeer mentality of the world around him. In the Ultimate Spiderman comics, Nick Fury was particularly worried that all of the tragedy and bad publicity in Peter's life would drive him to villainy — and given the combination of Peter's intelligence, determination, and superpowers, that would be a very bad thing.
  • The closest it came in the mainstream Marvel Universe was during the Acts of Vengeance, when he gained the godlike powers of Captain Universe, which he could not control, making the New Yorkers more scared of him than ever. The fact that super-villains were attacking him for no seemingly reason at all (something that was happening to the entire hero community during the crisis) only made him angrier. Finally, during his battle with the robot T.E.S.S. One, the insults from the people he was trying to help made him lose his temper, and he screamed, "You want a menace?? I've got your menace right here!!" And then he blew T.E.S.S. One to smithereens. (He may have eventually truly fallen into this trope had he not been able to win their respect by saving the city and winning their respect again — at least for a while.)
  • The Scorcher, a Spider-Man foe, reportedly started out like this. According to his origin story, research scientist Steven Jamal Hudak was framed for embezzlement by a co-worker and had to go into hiding to avoid his arrest. Being a wanted man with little chance of finding work at his chosen field, Hudak used his scientific knowledge to build a Powered Armor and started a career as a freelance mercenary.
• Thinks of Something Smart, Says Something Stupid: In the Omega Effect crossover, Spider-Man meets up with The Punisher. When he sees that Frank Castle has a female sidekick, Spidey thinks to himself◊ that cracking a joke about it will just piss Frank off—but he can't stop himself from saying it.
  Spider-Man's internal monologue: Of course... The Punisher... and he's brought a friend. Who's a girl. Don't say it resist the urge he'll kill you don't don't—
  Spider-Man: So I see you've started dating again.
  Spider-Man's internal monologue: Stupid mouth!
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Spider-Man's writing team is making all his classic villains either take a level in badass or be replaced by stronger and more dangerous counterparts (Vulture, Rhino). Doctor Octopus took control over all of New York's technology with his last appearance, Chameleon (written by, already mentioned above, Fred Van Lente) returned to his original ways, becoming a perfect — and dangerous — impersonator and assassin. Electro can now turn into lightning and destroyed the Daily Bugle building, Sandman can make multiple copies of himself (some of them are murderous), Mysterio took control over the Mafia Maggia with his tricks. Not so classic White Rabbit has been turned from a complete joke into a dangerous drug dealer and crazy killer and together with the Spot and a bunch of C-List Fodder villains — Scorcher, Speed Demon, Bloodshed, Squid, Lightmaster, and Answer — almost destroyed Mr. Negative's criminal empire and defeated his immortal servants and Hammerhead (they lost only because Negative brainwashed Spider-Man and sent him to fight them).
  • Spider-Man is all about taking a level in badass. That's essentially what happened to Peter Parker from the very start!
    • And in Spider-Island, after losing his spider-sense and having to learn how to fight without it (Spider-Fu), it has returned and now Spider-Man is even more dangerous! Baddies beware.
    • He's done this multiple times over the course of his career as he has grown from a raw teen hero into a mature adult one. He's added tools, refined his webshooters, even gotten training from Captain America (who had pointed out to him that relying on instinct in a fight isn't always a good idea).
  • Although never exactly weak, Norman Osborn went from being Spider-Man's enemy (who Spider-Man constantly defeated) the Green Goblin, to being the man who killed Gwen Stacy, to being the one behind The Clone Saga, to taking over the entire Marvel Universe in Dark Reign.
  • Mary Jane Watson started off as just a flirtatious, free-spirited love interest for Spider-Man. As time went on, she became his main love interest, and was strong enough that she once beat one of his enemies up with a baseball bat and hardly ever gets captured; she seems well able to defend herself from villains and even rescued Spider-Man when she needed to.
  • Also, Spidey's one-time girlfriend Betty Brant. After the murder of her husband Ned Leeds, she went from one nervous breakdown to another, was brainwashed by a cult for a while, and in general, was a Damsel in Distress. Eventually, after a long absence from the comic, she came back packing heat and knowing martial arts, intent on finding answers to the reasons behind Ned's death. Even Spidey was shocked at the change she had underwent. During Peter David's run on Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man (shortly before One More Day), the highlight has to be Betty saving Flash and Spidey from Arrow using a shotgun with silver bullets (she's a Daily Bugle reporter).
  • Joke character Hammerhead got this treatment, as part of becoming The Dragon for Big Bad Mr. Negative. He got a reinforced skeleton (made out of canonical Nightmare Fuel^note that is, it actually gives Spidey nightmares... despite the fact that he never actually saw it) and strength and durability upgrades including a Kevlar throat. The very first thing he does is utterly stomp Spidey. As Peter is lying on the floor with a dislocated jaw, he says "Why aren't you a joke anymore?"
  • Anthony Davis was a second-rate C-List Fodder supervillain known as the Ringer, who was humiliated by Spider-Man before being unceremoniously murdered along with 17 other supervillains by the villain-killing Scourge. A later retcon would reveal that Davis was Not Quite Dead when he was found by a group of agents from the technological terrorist group A.I.M., who were investigating the site of the massacre to steal the technology of the dead villains. He got better when A.I.M. turned him into a cyborg with advanced laser weapons and teleportation powers. Now calling himself Strikeback, Davis proved to be a much better fighter than he ever was as the Ringer, defeating the Vulture, Stegron, Boomerang, and Swarm one after another when he reappeared.
  • Spider-Man writer Fred Van Lente has been doing this in general with a few F-list villains, taking them and making them into genuinely capable threats. The best example is the Spot, who is developed by Van Lente into a mute killer who's been driven insane by his being trapped in an alternate dimension and who can now only communicate by writing in his own incomprehensible language of dots. We also see just how legitimately terrifying the powers of even the lowliest super-villains can be. More recently, Van Lente has been writing background stories featuring some of the classic Lee/Ditko/Romita villains in the new Web of Spider-Man series that began in late 2009.
    • The Spot always had what should have been extremely dangerous abilities. He was just too stupid to use them effectively.
    • In their first encounter, the Spot beats Spider-Man badly. In their next encounter, Spidey knows what to expect and has the endurance to take his "only" normal human level hits until the Spot has used his powers too much and has given an open spot for him to attack. Thus he is only defeated by his overconfidence.
    • This predated Fred Van Lente's work. The first definitive example of the modern age of Spider-Man comics was Scorpion, formerly an incredibly dim C-List villain at best, becoming the new Venom and thus gaining not only knowledge and experience of how best to fight Spider-Man, but also getting a considerable physical boost despite already being physically (if not mentally) capable of going toe-to-toe with Spidey.
    • After a pretty successful stint as Venom (see Thunderbolts and Dark Avengers), he is back as the Scorpion in an even MORE powerful scorpion suit. Spidey still bests him, but he certainly has the powers to be a threat these days.
• The Topic of Cancer:
  • Used as a Fate Worse than Death in one version of Venom's origin. It turns out that Eddie Brock has cancer which, through hormonal imbalance, causes fits of rage, ruining his life. The symptoms also attract the Venom symbiote to him. The symbiote wants to take over Peter but ends up attached to Brock and unable to switch hosts again. It has the power to stop the cancer from spreading but can't afford to cure it as it relies on it for food. This leaves Brock superpowered, angry, and in constant pain — for the rest of his life. It ended up being cured sometime later thanks to Mr. Negative soon after Eddie surrendered the symbiote to be bidden off. In Venom (Donny Cates), it is suggested that Eddie's cancer wasn't actually cancer, but the symbiote manipulating his mind and body to make him think he did, thus they could stay together.
  • A minor but very creepy villain named Styx is at one point called "living cancer". He's a victim of Playing with Syringes trying to find a cancer cure by way of Acquired Poison Immunity — by exposing him to mutagens. Instead, it gives him the power to make anything he touches wither and rot. The experience also twists his mind — if his ability wasn't limited to touch, he would be an Omnicidal Maniac.
  • In Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Vol 2 #1, it's revealed that Aunt May has cancer and she's terrified of letting Peter know. When she finally does, one of the things he does is head for Doctor Strange (he was taking a kid there after he had accidentally broken his arm and the kid had no insurance) and start to ask for help. Strange cuts him off and suggests that he just take the time to be with her... and also to not take up deals with interdimensional demons (which Peter agrees to).
• True Love Is Boring: Outright stated by Word of God as the reason behind the Retconning of Peter and Mary Jane's divorce. And even before One More Day, writers and editors tried to break up, kill off, or otherwise end Peter and MJ's relationship time and time again. Also one of the reasons Gwen Stacy was killed. Nobody at Marvel was ready for a married Spider-Man yet, though in the case of Gwen, her being boring was also a reason (since MJ isn't, it's a lot harder to keep her out of Spider-Man's life).
• Unbuilt Trope: While obviously later writers didn't get the memo, the original Clone Saga by Gerry Conway was a Deconstruction of characters coming Back from the Dead, being fixated on The Lost Lenore, and not dealing with grief in a mature way. In that story, Prof. Miles Warren who became the Jackal (and who was intended as a one-time villain who died at the end of the story) is a stand-in for fans of Gwen Stacy who hounded Conway and others for killing off the character, and who likewise blamed Peter Parker and not the Green Goblin for her death. While the Gwen who came back is revealed later to be a clone, initially Peter and everyone assumed she was real, and Peter's still conflicted about Gwen's return because he's not the same person who loved her anymore, he has moved on and his feelings for MJ are stronger than his grief for Gwen, because unlike Miles Warren, who had a lecherous and creepy obsessive fixation for Gwen (putting her on a pedestal and fixating on her looks), Peter's at heart a normal and optimistic guy and indeed he overcomes his Cloning Blues when he realizes that since he's now in love with Mary Jane, he's the real deal since the clones are all fixated on his past with Gwen. In other words, Conway's story is a proto-deconstruction to a number of comic tropes that came afterwards (i.e. Death Is Cheap, Status Quo Is God, Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest especially as it came to be seen in the wake of The Dark Phoenix Saga) and why even should Gwen return, his feelings he once had for her would not be enough to renew a relationship which contrasts heavily with Cyclops dumping Madelyne Pryor for the revived Jean Grey even when he had married and had a child with her. It also contrasts completely against the spirit and intent of the second and more notorious Clone Saga which was a stunt intended to return Peter "back to basics" and reverse his Character Development.
• Useless Spleen:
  • In the novel The Venom Factor, Venom states that when he finds whoever is responsible for the murders (that Venom is being wrongly accused of) he will eat his spleen. Spider-Man comments that this is an odd choice of organ to target and that Venom likely doesn't even know where someone's spleen is.
  • Comes back in the Sinister Six Trilogy where Spider-Man casually jokes about Venom wanting to eat his spleen. He speculates that it's not specifically the spleen he's after, they both just think it's a funny word.
• Very Special Episode: Spider-Man has been a very popular character for very special episodes. Select narm-filled issues show our hero:
  • Saving a young boy from being molested by his female babysitter by telling the tale about how he was molested as a kid by an adult friend named "Skip", who had an uncanny resemblance to Uncle Ben◊. Marvel has stated, however, that the story is not canon.
  • Foiling a plot to inflict the youth of America with teen pregnancy by giving advice about sexuality.
  • Saving a stoner from jumping off a building. This mess was actually paid for with tax dollars, mind you.
  • Teamed up with Storm and Luke Cage to combat Smokescreen. Guess what this one is about
  • Teaming up with the Rangers and a paraplegic superheroine to teach the Calgary Stampede a lesson about road safety.
  • Spider-Man is also known for one of the better Very Special Episodes. Stan Lee was asked to write a very special episode about drugs by the government, and, instead of creating a Long-Lost Uncle Aesop to focus the story on, he chose to use an existing character, with bonus points for being a rich white male with known emotional issues. The Comics Code then refused to approve the comic, which was the beginning of the end for the CCA.
  • All these various issues would later be collected in a TPB "Spider-Man Vs. Substance Abuse".
• Vile Vulture: Adrian "The Vulture" Toomes is a villain who stylizes himself as a vulture by using a winged suit to rob banks and try to kill Spider-Man. His vulture-like appearance is aided by the fact that he's bald and has a fairly prominent, pointy nose.
• Villain Over for Dinner: Aunt May and Mary Jane have a tendency to be visited by Spidey's foes in civilian garb.
  • Venom visited them both, although Mary Jane knew who and what he was and spent a long time terrified of him. He visited Aunt May as "a friend of Pete's". However, it has to be noted that due to Venom's twisted sense of fair play, neither Mary Jane nor May were ever in any danger. Venom never made any threatening moves toward either of them, and Eddie Brock even chatted with May in a very friendly manner and helped her with household chores. Brock even gave Peter his word that he would never harm Aunt May. Later MJ took out the Chameleon when she realized that he wasn't Peter.
  • Norman Osborn did this a lot, obviously since he was one of the first villains to learn of Peter's secret identity. Though, a few of these times, even he wasn't aware he was the Goblin. Norman's son Harry did the same. Once again, Mary Jane was aware of what Harry had become and almost had a Heroic BSoD because of it. Remember, Mary Jane was friends with Harry and even dated him at one point.
• Villain Takes an Interest: Some versions of Spider-Man give Spidey him this sort of connection to Norman Osborn, aka the Green Goblin. Especially when the Green Goblin's son is not living up to his father's expectations.
• Wake Up, Go to School, Save the World: The Amazing Spider-Man may well have invented'' this trope, and Peter's constant struggles to keep his life on track while fighting crime shows up in almost every other incarnation of the series. In fact, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created Spider-Man around this very premise. They wanted a young superhero who, unlike the then-popular "sidekick" depiction of such a character, had to simultaneously deal with the social and emotional pressures of becoming an adult... and the parade of crazy costumed baddies.
  • While Peter in later comics would become an adult in the main continuity, many adaptations would further lean into Peter struggling between being a high-schooler and a superhero. In comic books, the Ultimate Spider-Man would be best known for showing the concept in the light of the 21st century.
  • Peter Parker's successor as Spider-Man Miles Morales likely falls into this trope, both in the Ultimate Universe and the mainstream continuity.
  • Spider-Gwen follows a teenaged alternate version of Gwen Stacey who was bitten by a radioactive spider and similar to Peter has to find balance between her normal teenage problems and the life as superheroine Spider-Woman/Ghost Spider.
• Walking Wasteland: Carrion and Styx.
• Wife-Basher Basher: Cardiac usually doesn't concern himself with this kind of criminal (as a vigilante, his goal is to punish people who hurt others and do horrendous things but use legal loopholes and technicalities to escape justice). However, in one issue, while he is staking out a place, he sees a man assault his wife in a nearby apartment, and decides he can't "in clear conscience", let it happen. (Unfortunately, while he is teaching the wife-beater a lesson, it gave his true target more of a head start than he'd have liked.)
• Will-o'-the-Wisp: There's a villain named Will o'the Wisp, who most often fights Spider-Man. He can control his density and hypnotize targets.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity:
  • If you're a scientist introduced by name in the Spider-Man comics, you're usually one issue away from your experiments turning you into a deranged Supervillain. Especially if your name conveniently sounds a lot like the type of experiment you're conducting...
  • In almost every incarnation of Spider-Man, when he gains access to the power-enhancing abilities of the symbiote, he ends up becoming irrationally angry and cocky. Interestingly, this doesn't actually apply to the original comic book version of Spider-Man; he wore the symbiote suit for about a year without any ill effects, and it wasn't until the suit wanted their relationship to be a little more intimate than Spidey was ready for did he realize it wasn't such a great idea. The '90s cartoon was responsible for the "symbiote makes you a psychopath" aspect, which eventually came into play in the comic universe, however it was shown in a What If? issue in 1989 (5 years before the premiere of the animated series) that if Spider-Man kept the symbiote it would have possessed him mentally and physically, and eventually would have killed Peter.
  • Spidey's Arch-Enemy, the Green Goblin, in his original portrayal, was this. He was a distant father whose business practices were not always scrupulous, but he had redeeming traits, such as genuinely loving his son, and saving Gwen Stacy's father's life. Then the formula that gave him his powers drove him insane, though periodic bouts of amnesia restored him to his former self. After he killed Gwen Stacy, however, he was rewritten as always being sociopathic, with the kinder personality that he possessed during his periods of amnesia being a false personality. The Goblin formula probably enhanced his insanity, however.
• Wolverine Publicity:
  • As Marvel's Breakout Character, Spider-Man became the company mascot and in the early issues often appeared in multiple titles, predating Wolverine by more than a decade having passed even Wolverine and Deadpool in over-saturation as he is now either a member or guest-starring with the three big teams in the Marvel Universe—including the X-Men, the Avengers (both teams), and the new Fantastic Four (known as the FF); plus his own book is released twice a month.
  • Interestingly in Spider-Man's early issues, the Fantastic Four made appearances to boost the newcoming Spider-Man's popularity. The Human Torch made campus speeches in Peter's school, and Dr. Doom became the first Marvel-wide villain Spider-Man tussled with.
  • Recent comics have seen Spider-Man fall into Iron Man's orbit around the time he was getting his big push in the movies. He, Aunt May, and MJ moved into Stark Tower, Peter wore a suit designed by Tony Stark (Iron Spider), joined his side during the Civil War (before switching over to Team Cap midway), and in recent comics, Peter has even become Iron Man-lite in that he runs his own business and claims to be Spider-Man's employer and backer, while MJ actually transitioned from his supporting cast into Tony's for a while.
• Womanliness as Pathos: Gwen Stacy is a constant source of angst and turmoil for Peter, resulting in the circumstances her death being retreaded several times throughout publication, as well as many stories that resulted directly from her death or the events immediately leading up to them. For example, The Clone Saga started when Stalker with a Crush Miles Warren cloned both her and Peter Parker as revenge for Peter letting the object of his affection die. The story Sins Past revealed more details about her past, including that she cheated on him with his archenemy Norman Osborn and bore two children.
• Wring Every Last Drop Out Of Her: Aunt May has been on the verge of death for six decades.
• X Called; They Want Their Y Back: In one story, Peter is going undercover at a club for Vampire Vannabes. He dresses in what he thinks is appropriate goth gear, only for an Edward Cullen lookalike to taunt "The nineties called, they want their vampire back!"
• Yandere:
  • The Venom symbiote is a total Yandere for Spider-Man. Its thought process can be summed up as "That bastard! How dare he kick me out! Didn't he realize how awesome I was?! Well screw him! I hate him, I hate him, I want him to die! He deserves to suffer for hurting me! But then... I won't have him! I know, I'll kill off everything he loves and then force him to take me back! Then it will just be us together forever...". It's even been discussed once in Marvel Age Spider-Man and in The Spectacular Spider-Man, in which both times Peter pretends to apologize to the symbiote and asks if it wants him to be its host again, which it does, and both times Peter mentions that it's acting like a jealous ex-girlfriend. Also, take a look at the What If? take on The Other storyline, where Peter doesn't come back to life and the symbiote immediately abandons its current host to merge with Peter's body, becoming a new monstrosity called "Poison". It wants Peter so badly it doesn't even mind that he's dead.
    • On the flip side, Brock is this to the symbiote itself. Or rather, was. As Anti-Venom, he's now dedicated himself to destroying it. and even before that, he hated all other symbiotes (and with good reason, because Carnage was a killer who sickened him) and he devoted himself to killing them.
  • Carnage: Cletus Kasady and his symbiote have this relationship, with the latter willing to do whatever it takes to reunite with its beloved host when they're separated.
  • Spider-Man's former wife Mary Jane was actually plagued by two male versions of this trope, which were, oddly enough, connected. The first, and more obvious one, was her wealthy and Axe-Crazy landlord Jonathan Caesar. His first attempt to kidnap her failed, leading to his arrest and imprisonment, but even while behind bars, he was able to use his money and influence to make her life miserable, blacklisting her among the modeling profession until she managed to gain a role in the Secret Hospital soap opera.
    • The second one was much more subtle. After Caesar was paroled, a few folks who assaulted or abused Mary Jane (including a deluded fan of the soap opera and her angry director) were either murdered or assaulted. Mary Jane suspected it was Caesar's doing, especially when Peter himself was almost a victim, but Peter tended to doubt it, claiming that the attacks didn't fit his MO. Peter turned out to be right. The true culprit was the second Yandere (known only by his last name, Goldman) who had claimed to be a policeman, but was really only a clerk working for the NYPD. When Caesar made a second attempt to kidnap Mary Jane, Goldman murdered him in cold blood, and when Mary Jane rejected him, tried to shoot her too. But she tricked him into to getting close by offering to reveal the future plot of the soap (saying they'd have to change it if she were dead) and was able to knock him out with her purse. (Kind of makes you wonder what she kept in it... Bricks?)
  • One of the worst involved with Spider-Man's life is possibly Miles Warren, the orchestrator of everything that went down in The Clone Saga. He has always had one motivation for everything, and that is his unhealthy crush on Gwen Stacy. He seeks revenge on Peter not only for her death, but for having loved her when he couldn't. Ben seriously calls him out on this during the Final Battle, telling him, "Get this through your sick head, the Green Goblin killed her, Peter did not!" and Peter himself, during the Dead Man's Hand one shot, tells him, "Still hung up on Gwen, huh? Some things never change." The biggest irony is, Gwen's clone eventually fell in love with and married a far-more lucid clone of Warren (which the real one had abandoned as a failed experiment) so it's possible if Warren had not been such a lustful madman, the real Gwen might have been more accepting (or maybe turned him down in a way he could have accepted).
• Yin-Yang Bomb: Mister Negative. By day, Martin Li is the kindly, charitable owner of a soup kitchen whose visitors seem to be miraculously cured of their various ailments. By night the color-inverted Mister Negative is a ruthless gangster who warps Li's charitable works to his own criminal aim (unless it's Li who's covertly redirecting Mister Negative's efforts towards good).
• Zorro Mark: Kaine uses his wall-sticking powers on your face and pulls his hand away, resulting in the disfiguring "Mark of Kaine." Yeeowch. Fortunately (or unfortunately) the person he's doing this to is typically already dead.

• Absurdly High-Stakes Game: The Spectacular Spider-Man #21 had a somewhat lighter-hearted version of this. The New York superheroes have a yearly poker game with twenty-dollar stakes with the winner donating their winnings to charity. Then along comes the Kingpin with a ridiculous amount of money. There's nothing really at stake more than pride and a good cause, but that doesn't mean it's any less entertaining to watch Spider-Man and Kingpin play out the final round with ludicrous piles of chips each. (Spidey won- his Spider-Sense means that he always knows whether or not someone's bluffing.)
• Alas, Poor Villain: Harry Osborn, the second Green Goblin in the later-retconned but still well-remembered story "Best of Enemies" in The Spectacular Spider-Man #200.
• Art-Style Dissonance: Spectacular Spider-Man #86 was published during Assistant Editor's Month, so the gimmick of that issue was that Bob DeNatale threw out Al Milgrom's artwork in favor of that of Fred Hembeck, whose style is far from realistic. The issue's storyline was that the Fly realised he was losing his humanity and sought revenge upon J. Jonah Jameson and Spider-Man, and the humor is limited to Spidey's usual wisecracks (apart from the humor stemming from Hembeck's art, like the Fly having Xs for eyes when Spider-Man punches him). After the Fly is defeated, Danny Fingeroth (the actual editor of the comic) returns and puts an end to the cartoonish artwork. You can see images from this issue here.
• Aside Comment: The cover of The Spectacular Spider-Man #246 has 4 bizarre-looking villains called the Legion of Losers. It also has Spider-Man turning to look at the reader and saying "You've gotta be kidding!". See it here◊.
• Covers Always Lie: The cover of The Spectacular Spider-Man #256 shows the White Rabbit riding a mechanical rabbit that is firing Gatling guns. In the story, there is a mechanical rabbit with a different design that is only used for transportation.
• Dating Catwoman: Subverted with The Queen. Despite her beautiful appearance and her flirting, Spider-Man is not attracted to her at all and finds her disgusting, but that doesn't stop her from forcing herself on him. However, all of New York thought this trope was being played straight when the News captured the first kiss between them and assumed it was Spider-Man who initiated the kiss with his new adversary.
• A Day in the Limelight: Gerry Conway's late 1980s, early 1990s Spectacular Spider-Man run was built upon the concept of "A Day In the Limelight", as far as his run centering around Joe Robertson, a longtime supporting cast member of Spider-Man. Similarly, the only Spider-Man stories by loathed writer Howard Mackie that are liked by fans are the ones that had Howard focusing on the supporting cast members.
• A Foggy Day in London Town: Knight and Fogg were two British super-powered contract killers who appeared in The Spectacular Spider-Man #165-167 back in 1990. The latter saw himself as the personification of the London fog and could transform his body into a gaseous form that obscured his opponents' sight; his favorite method of attack was to strangle his targets from afar with his partially solidified hands.
• If I Had a Nickel...: Spidey responding to a threat made by the Green Goblin during the "Goblins at the Gate" arc.
  Spider-Man: Goblin, if I had a nickel for every time I heard a threat like that... well, I'd be one very rich friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
• It's Cuban: For fun, mob boss Kingpin invites himself to a superhero poker game bearing a Briefcase Full of Money to sweeten the pot. If the heroes win, they can donate it to a charity. If Kingpin wins, he'll buy a boat to rub their loss in their faces, as well as a Cuban cigar:
  Kingpin: Which I shall obtain illegally.
• Mistaken for Cheating: When Spider-Man first fought The Queen, she easily defeated him before forcibly kissing him while he was unconscious. This public makeout was captured on the News, but all of New York assumed that Spider-Man was the one who kissed Queen. Aunt May accidentally revealed the kiss to Mary Jane before she found out herself and Mary Jane gave Peter a hard time for awhile because of the kiss.
• Patience Plot: In Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #4, a character called the Hitman was given a contract to kill Spidey. The Vulture gets involved, and the Hitman tags both Spider-Man and the Vulture with a tracer so he can track them down. Later, looking at a tracking screen in his hideout:
  Hitman: Both Spidey and Vulture's blibs are stationary. Looks like they've both settled in for the night. Only thing to do now is wait. [sits at a table and starts cleaning his guns] Waiting. That's something I could never teach them back in the old days. Either they were naturals who knew it instinctively, or they never learned... and died because of it. So simple. You wait. And then, you strike.
• Seduction-Proof Marriage:
  • During the Changes arc in The Spectacular Spider-Man, Spider-Man is kidnapped and is being looked after by a sultry villainess called the Queen, who offers him "anything he wants". He requested a solid cage thingy so she'll leave him alone as he was Happily Married to MJ at the time.
  • In The Spectacular Spider-Man #166-172, when MJ was starring in the soap opera Secret Hospital, her male co-star attempted to seduce her. At one point, she gave the impression of being interested, but at the end of the story, she spelled out in no uncertain terms that she had no intention of leaving Peter.

• Alas, Poor Yorick: In Web of Spider-Man Annual #1, Spidey holds the head of a robot he just defeated, purportedly because he's impressed with the advanced technology and design.
• Blow Gun: In Web of Spider-Man, the Vulturions (four criminals who learned to copy Vulture's wings) use those. The curare is fatal for humans — Spider-Man is too tough to die, but gets stiffer with every dart and actually comes close to succumbing.
• Retool: Web of Spider-Man was originally just another Spider-Man book. Writer David Michelinie and artist Marc Silvestri eventually came onto the book and gave it a new premise starting with issue #16, in which Peter Parker travels around the world with Joy Mercado on assignment from NOW Magazine. This premise didn't last long, because a two-issue storyline involving the Provisional Irish Republican Army resulted in a bomb threat in the building Marvel's offices were located in at the time. The second part was hastily edited to replace the IRA with generic terrorists wearing black hoods, and the creative team subsequently disbanded by issue #22.
• Saved by the Church Bell: Famously, Spider-Man used church bells to remove the corrupting Venom symbiote from himself in Web of Spider-Man #1. The process nearly killed him and he could only go through with it by reminding himself of the people he needed to make up to, like Aunt May, Mary-Jane, and Harry Osborn.
• Save the Villain: In Web of Spider-Man, Spider-Man has to save the lives of the Vulturions when the real Vulture comes to town.

• How Much Did You Hear?: In Amazing Fantasy Vol. 2 #15, Spider-Man realizes that in the famous cover of Amazing Fantasy #15, he pretty much declared his real name in the presence of the guy in his armpit. Fortunately for him, the guy was screaming too loudly to hear it.
  Spider-Man: Um...you didn't hear that thing I just said, right? You know? About how the world may mock... yadda yadda yadda?
• Mad Artist: In Web of Spider-Man #73–76, Wilhelm van Vile used his paints to awaken the latent mutant powers of two unsuccessful performance artists, then enhance them, and form a team called the Avant Guard, with the goal of plunging New York into an ice age as their insane version of a "masterpiece". They were defeated by the combined efforts of Spidey and the Torch.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Retroactively done with the Amazing Fantasy Starring Spider-Man mini-series, which bridged the gap between Amazing Fantasy #15 and The Amazing Spider-Man #1. In the second issue of the series, Peter meets Joey Pulaski, a teenage superheroine who he became friends with. She ends up being sent to jail after Spider-Man turns her in for committing a number of crimes, and for the rest of the mini-series, Spider-Man is devastated by the memory of her. Of course, since she was created in the mid-nineties, and her story set between those published in the early 60s, her existence begs the question "why haven't we heard of her until now?". The only time she ever appears is in the one story, and her existence is never explored again.
  • This happens a lot with these retroactive issues. The other villains in the same mini-series (a man named Undertaker and a supervillain named Supercharger), despite being Spider-Man's first supervillains, never get any mention (indeed, the Chameleon is still toted as Spider-Man's first supervillain in the comics), and the original villains for Untold Tales of Spider-Man generally have never reappeared. The exception to this is The Scorcher, (Spider-Man's first black villain), who died within the series.

• "The Breakfast Club" Poster Homage: In Avenging Spider-Man #12, Peter and Deadpool explores Peter's dreams to find out who is trying to infiltrate his brain. At one point, Peter dreams characters into The Breakfast Club, which is introduced with a shout-out to the original poster. Peter is Brian, redheaded love interest Mary Jane is Claire, jock frenemy Flash is Andrew, Deadpool himself is Bender...and he doesn't know who Allison is, so the person impersonating her must be the villain. It turns out to be Hypno-Master.
  Deadpool: What a weirdo. You couldn't be dreaming of Mean Girls?
• Defeat by Modesty: In Avenging Spider-Man, Spider-Man defeats a subterranean warlord in combat for leadership of his people who was handily beating him after finishing off the Red Hulk by swinging a shard on a webline and cutting off his loincloth. Turns out shaming someone in battle also counts as besting them.

• Actually Pretty Funny: In Peter Parker: Spider-Man #47, when Green Goblin tells Spider-Man what he was briefly going to call himself, they both start laughing.
  Green Goblin: I wasn't always going to call myself "Green Goblin". At first, I was going to call myself "Mister Coffee". Can you imagine how weird the last few years would have been if I'd done that?
  [pause]
  [both crack up laughing]
  Spidey: Heh-ha-ha! Look out kids, it's Mister Coffee and his latte of doom!
  Goblin: Oh God, stop!
• Enlightened Antagonist: Enigma aka Tara Virango from Peter Parker: Spider-Man #48-#49, is a woman from Bangladesh who gained supernatural powers and a mystical connection to the Buddhist goddess Tara after being infected with a nano-virus (she is a survivor of an environmental disaster during which her native village was exposed to the viral outbreak). She starts out as a semi-antagonist to Spider-Man, having stolen the precious Star of Persia diamond and even physically attacking Peter on one occasion. However, he soon learns that her motives are noble: she seeks to prove that the outbreak was not an accident, but a deliberate release of a biological agent ordered by the Corrupt Corporate Executives of the company that developed the virus (and the reason why she stole the diamond was that she wanted to demand a large compensation to the survivors to be paid as ransom for it). Once Spider-Man realizes the truth, he joins Enigma's side and helps her defeat the corporate executives.
• Heroic Spirit: In Peter Parker: Spider-Man #30-#32, Spidey also fought off a broken neck. Of course, it wasn't really broken, but with the villain in question (Fusion) being a Master of Illusion, he didn't know that until he was clenching his fists and standing up for another go.
• Literal Split Personality: Sandman had this happen to him once, in Peter Parker: Spider-Man, by some plot. He got split into his core, his childhood self, his feminine side, and unfortunately, his evil side in order to handwave why he stayed a crook.

• Artistic License – Law: In Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Annual #1, Floyd Baker, the father of Spider-Man's foe Sandman, is framed for the murder of an alternate reality Ben Parker, and given a quick death sentence. When the governor (or maybe NYC's mayor) learns that Sandman's going to break out his father, he orders the immediate execution of the man, something that violates a wide range of laws and civil rights protections, and nobody involved in law enforcement bothers to say 'you can't do that; it's illegal'.
• Ironic Nickname: Tom Taylor's first issue in Volume 2 of Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Lampshades the fact that Spider-Man is a Spider-themed hero, when after Spidey saves a little girl and her father, the small child slaps his spider emblem on his chest out of her dislike for spiders:
  Spider-Man: It's all good to be fair, I don't exactly have the most kid-friendly costume. It literally has a spider on it.
• Wrestling Monster: In Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #6, this is played straight with Masked Luchador El Muerto. This is played with when wrestling god El Dorado shows up. He never appears in the ring of any promotions and fights with swords.

• Earn Your Happy Ending: In The Sensational Spider-Man vol. 2 29#, Eddie Brock is dying of cancer. Alone, and forgotten except as a remorseless monster to the public at large, and the remnants of his old "pal" are floating around in his head telling him that he still has one chance at revenge by killing a comatose May Parker or just disappearing off the world with nothing to show for it. Or he can just sit in his bed waiting to die with Venom tormenting him until the end of his wasted life. Instead,◊ he cuts himself trying to remove the remnants of Venom from his blood and it works. After Spider-Man saves him, he tells the remnants of the symbiote to shut up. After being exonerated for the crimes he committed as Venom, he met Matin Li/Mr. Negative, who offered him a job. Eddie accepted, and when Martin touched him, the remnants of The Symbiote were fused to his immune system, turning him into Anti-Venom.
• Gratuitous French: For whatever reason, Madame Web spoke with occasional French words during her brief appearances at the end of The Sensational Spider-Man vol 2, despite never doing so before, or after.
• Villain Over for Dinner: In The Sensational Spider-Man #31, Aunt May takes out the Chameleon disguised as Peter Parker with poisoned cookies because she knew he wasn't the real Peter.

• Aside Glance: In an issue of Marvel Knights: Spider-Man, Peter and Liz Allan get talking during a high-school reunion. Liz reflects on how weird their lives have been, from the Living Brain attacking the school to Harry Osborn (and his dad) both being the Green Goblin, and concludes that sometimes, it feels like Peter's the only normal person she knows. Peter's reaction is priceless.
• Big Damn Heroes: The Avengers are this when they show up right when the Sinister Twelve are about to kill Spider-Man.
• Buried Alive: In the first arc, Norman Osborn has Aunt May kidnapped and buried alive as part of a plan to put Spidey in such a blind panic that he wouldn't be paying attention to Osborn's efforts to assemble a new incarnation of the Sinister Six.
• Capitalism Is Bad: Norman Osborn mocks Peter with classist insults, for being a loser who works as a high-school teacher despite his great talent, which Spider-Man retorts by pointing out that Norman could well have cured cancer with all his wealth and connections if he actually cares about improving lives. Norman then replies that he only said it to hurt Peter by his values, because he on the other hand as he puts it, "I don't give a rat's ass".
• History Repeats: The Green Goblin invokes this by bringing Mary Jane to the same bridge where Gwen Stacy died.
• Meta Twist: Right after Spider-Man sends Green Goblin to prison, Aunt May is kidnapped. Osborn protests that he hasn't had time to formulate a revenge plan from prison yet, so it couldn't have been him. It turns out the mastermind was Mac Gargan AKA The Scorpion AKA the new Venom. But he didn't know who Spider-Man was and wasn't smart enough to orchestrate the scheme, so who gave him the instructions? Norman Osborn, of course.
• Not Me This Time: The series kicks off with a story in which Aunt May is kidnapped. Spider-Man immediately confronts Norman Osborn, who's in prison, demanding he return her. Osborn says he had nothing to do with it, because he's in prison. Of course, being imprisoned (or even dead) has not stopped Osborn on other occasions. And it turns out that he really was responsible.
• Powerful, but Incompetent: This is highlighted when Scorpion becomes the new Venom, as even with the symbiote at his command he's still less effective than Eddie.
• Power Perversion Potential: In one Marvel Knights storyline, Electro is seen frequenting a brothel with a mutant prostitute who can assume any form a customer desires. She seems to specialize in super-heroines, but mentioned that some customers with fetishes had requested rather unusual ones, even Fin Fang Foom. Her conversation with Electro is cut off by Spidey breaking into the place before he can tell her what he wants, so there's no way to tell.

• Genius Serum: In the story, "Flowers for Rhino", the dim-witted Rhino is tired of being treated like a joke and undergoes a dangerous surgical procedure to greatly increase his intelligence. He eventually becomes so smart that he thoroughly trounces Spidey in a fight and uses an algorithm to determine his Secret Identity. But he soon begins experiencing Intelligence Equals Isolation as he simply grows bored of everything and can only see the numbers and science behind the world around him instead of enjoying it for what it is. As a result, he ends up getting another surgery to revert his intelligence and make him dumber than he already was.
• Hate Sink: Spider-Man's Tangled Web introduces a one-shot villain known as The Thousand, who is just as loathsome as he is horrifying. Originally Carl King, a particularly nasty bully to Peter Parker, he transformed into a colony of a thousand spiders that could crawl into a human's body, devour them from the inside out and then wear their skin like a suit after eating the radioactive spider that gave Parker his powers. He goes through several bodies each year to grow stronger, with some of the victims being children, and hunts down Spidey for the sole purpose of stealing his body and taking over his life, under the belief that he should have been Spider-Man instead of Peter Parker. Even among Peter's worst foes like Norman Osborn and Carnage, the Thousand has none of their bravado or even slightly sympathetic qualities. He's a vicious, entitled bully who kills and torments for the pettiest of reasons, and a vile, predatory abomination both literally and figuratively. This just makes his ultimate demise of being electrocuted and having his last spider squished by a random passer-by all the more satisfying, and he has never reappeared since.
• Kayfabe: The comics treated the fight between Peter and the wrestler as real, though it was explained in issue #14 of Spider-Man's Tangled Web that Crusher Hogan was actually a "shoot" wrestler—in which the outcome of the match is not scripted.

• Power Perversion Potential: Todd McFarlane wrote an implicitly explicit (consensual) bondage foreplay scene◊ (between Peter and his wife Mary Jane Watson) into an issue during his short run on the explicitly-created-for-him Spider-Man (no adjective) series from the early 1990s.

• Faith in the Foe: In one issue of Spider-Man Team Up, Spidey has been framed for murder, again. And Abe Jenkins, formerly The Beetle, now MACH-1, is certain of his innocence because he knows who Spidey is as a hero.