“Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links.”
HIS LATEST OUTINGmight be called Brand New Day, but Spider-Man’s
latest MCU outing is, in fact, nothing new for our friendly neighborhood wall-crawler. With all memory of his existence erased from everyone, including his best friend Ned and his girlfriend MJ, Peter Parker lives a solitary existence, burning himself out as he battles a bevy of foes while dealing with a strange mutation. In short, another day in the life of Spider-Man, our most unlucky and long-suffering superhero.
The pleasures of Brand New Day come not in its novelty, but in the way that it mixes up familiar Spider-Man lore, and there it succeeds in spades. Tom Holland returns to play Peter Parker, finishing his last year of college at Empire State University.
He’s been coping (badly) with his separation from MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) by fighting crime full-time, a problem that becomes more difficult with the arrival of a mysterious stranger (Sadie Sink) who is wanted by the government and under the protection of Frank Castle aka the Punisher (Jon Bernthal). Oh yeah, Spidey will also have to deal with a legion of Hand Ninjas, bad guys like Tombstone (Marvin Jones III), and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).
In short, that’s a lot of madness going on in Brand New Day,
torn directly from some great Marvel comics.
The subtitle of Spider-Man’s new movie comes directly from one of the most surprisingly beloved storylines of the comics. We say “surprisingly” because it spins out of One More Day, perhaps the most hated storyline in modern comics. In One More Day, Peter Parker makes a deal with the literal devil of the Marvel Universe, Mephisto, giving up his marriage and erasing all knowledge of his secret identity from the public in order to save the life of his aged Aunt May. It was a clunky, nonsensical story that existed just because Marvel editorial didn’t like married Peter Parker.
Brand New Day didn’t completely smooth things over with fans, but it did show readers that good Spider-Man stories could still be told. The storyline brought Peter back to basics, featuring a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man fighting crime when he isn’t balancing his work responsibilities, his time with friends and Aunt May, or his empty bank account. Also, it helped that Brand New Day featured plenty of great stand-alone tales like “Three-Way Collision” by penciler Paulo Siqueira and writers Marc Guggenheim, Dan Slott, and Back to the Future co-creator Bob Gale.
As Tom Holland has made abundantly clear, Brand New Day puts Peter Parker through the wringer. We’ve already seen Holland’s Spider-Man have some hard times, most notably when his Aunt May died in No Way Home, a movie in which the Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire Spider-Men talked about their great losses. And yet, Peter will still do the right thing and make it through Brand New Day, just like he always has.
The trope of bad things happening to Peter Parker began with Spidey’s first appearance in 1962’s Amazing Fantasy #15. But it really solidified with his first great story, which culminated with Amazing Spider-Man #33, by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee. The previous issue saw Spidey’s quarry, a z-lister called the Master Planner, drop a gigantic pile of equipment onto Spider-Man. Issue #33 spends half of its pages with Spider-Man holding up the weight, wanting nothing more than to let go and let it crush him. However, as he thinks about the obligations he owes to others, Aunt May in particular, Spidey finds the strength to go on, setting a model that continues all the way through to Brand New Day.
Peter goes through something of a transformation in Brand New Day. While the transformation involves some key elements first introduced in the 2002 Spider-Man movie starring Tobey Maguire, the image of Peter emerging from a webbed cocoon brings to mind The Other, a mid-2000s storyline that tried to change Spider-Man’s status quo to better match the films.
The Other stretched across the three Spider-Man titles published at the time, and thus involved writers Peter David, Reginald Hudlin, and J. Michael Straczynski. It begins with Peter discovering that he’s terminally ill, and leads into some major transformations. These transformations do give the comic book Peter the same organic web shooters he has in the Maguire movies, but it also goes further, pushing Spider-Man into upsetting body horror territory.
One of the most exciting parts of Brand New Day is seeing live-action adaptations of the B- and C-list villains from Spidey’s rogues gallery. Toys, t-shirts, and trailers have given us glimpses of Spider-Man battling it out with Boomerang, Tarantula, Tombstone, and, most notably, Scorpion, finally making his return after being set up in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Of course, Spider-Man’s enemies have joined forces against him before, most obviously as the Sinister Six. But guys like Boomerang never had the power to stand alongside Kraven and Doctor Octopus.
Instead, Boomerang and other bottom-shelf baddies got their time to shine in the series The Superior Foes of Spider-Man, by Nick Spencer and Steve Lieber. Realizing that Spider-Man has suddenly become cruel and violent with his enemies (that’s because Doc Ock had taken over Peter’s body, but they don’t know that), Boomerang, Beetle, Speed Demon, and other minor villains band together to watch each other’s back, leading to one of the most delightful and hilarious comic runs of the 2010s.
In addition to slugging it out with some minor baddies in Brand New day, Spider-Man goes toe-to-toe with the strongest one there is, the Incredible Hulk. Although Hulk and Spidey have been around since almost the beginning of the Marvel Age, and even though Hulk fights with… everybody, he and Spider-Man have only thrown down a handful of times. Moreover, most of the battles are out of character, as when Spider-Man briefly has the power cosmic to punch ol’ Green Genes into space, or in the current, non-canonical series Spider-Man: Long Way Home.
Everyone in the early Ditko and Lee issue Amazing Spider-Man #14 acts as you would expect, but that makes for a rather non-climactic fight. Spidey spends most of the story fighting the Green Goblin, a skirmish that eventually ends up in a cave. And who do they find in that cave, but the Incredible Hulk, who doesn’t take kindly to the intrusion. Amazing Spider-Man #14 doesn’t offer the most epic reason for Hulk and Spidey to duke it out, but it’s hard to complain about whacky Silver Age plotting.
To the casual viewer, Hulk doesn’t feel too out of place in a Spider-Man story, nor do the red-clad Hand Ninjas. The same cannot be said of Frank Castle aka the Punisher, a traumatized, hard-edged antihero who slaughters criminals with no abandon. Yet, believe it or not, Punisher first debuted in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man, as the unwitting lackey of the goofy supervillain the Jackal, no less.
In fact, many of Punisher’s early appearances played like bright, silly superhero stories, even if the character’s co-creator Gerry Conway took inspiration from gritty ’70s movies like Death Wish. For example, see the two-part storyline published in Amazing Spider-Man #161 and #162, written by Len Wein and Ross Andru. Spidey teams with the fuzzy blue X-Man Nightcrawler for an adventure in an abandoned carnival, the same place where Punisher meets his eventual arch-enemy, Jigsaw. Those familiar with the decidedly R-rated Punisher show starring Jon Bernthal might be surprised to see Frank and Jigsaw wearing silly costumes in these issues, but the story certainly fits the tone of Brand New Day.
Speaking of the X-Men… We’ve known for a long time that Stranger Things breakout Sadie Sink would be joining the MCU in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, but Marvel kept her character’s name under-wraps. Now that the movie’s out, however, we know that Sink is playing [SPOILER] Jean Grey of the X-Men. Few would expect Marvel to introduce such a major X-Man character in a Spider-Man movie of all places, but there is some precedent. As seen above, Spidey regularly hangs out with mutants, and generally has the trust of the X-Men.
Nowhere is that trust more apparent than in the 2015 series Spider-Man and the X-Men, by Elliott Kalan and Marco Failla. Set during a period of division among Marvel’s Mutants, when Cyclops and other members left the team to form a radical offset, Spider-Man and the X-Men finds Spidey accepting an invite to teach at the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning, named for the late red-haired hero (yeah, she was dead at the time, but she got better). Even though Jean doesn’t appear in the series, Spider-Man and the X-Men shows how well Spidey gets along with young mutants, a major plot point in Brand New Day.
Brand New Day takes place four years after Spider-Man: No Way Home, and much has changed since Peter Parker magically made everyone forget him. For Peter, the most devastating part may be the fact that the love of his life MJ no longer knows that he exists. Worse, she has moved on to someone else, with whom she seems to have a loving relationship. Rough as that realization is for Peter, it might be even worse for readers of Spider-Man comics, because MJ’s new beau reminds them of Paul (a name that has also been confirmed for the film).
For the uninitiated, Paul is a guy with a knot-top who starts dating Mary Jane Watson in writer Zeb Wells and artist John Romita Jr.’s Amazing Spider-Man run. Paul immediately earned the ire of fans because… well, to be honest, because he isn’t Peter. As anyone who reads the Wells and Romita run finds, Paul’s kind of boring and imperfect, but he isn’t a bad guy. He just isn’t Peter Parker, and therefore readers hated seeing him with Mary Jane, in the same way viewers of Brand New Day hate seeing even a brief few moments of this new guy with MJ.
For all its superhero spectacle and amazing guest stars, Spider-Man: Brand NewDay is fundamentally a movie about growing up, about moving into adulthood and taking on different types of responsibility. The film begins with Peter Parker living on his own, his high school days far behind him, while old pals MJ and Ned graduate college.
In the pages of Marvel Comics, Peter has also aged, growing from the young teen we first met in 1962’s Amazing Fantasy #15 to the young adult we know today. But no comic has fully captured the maturation of Peter Parker like Spider-Man: Life Story by Chip Zdarsky and Mark Bagley. Set outside of continuity, Life Story tracks the story of Peter Parker in real time, starting with him as a 15-year-old in 1962 and continuing to age 72 in 2019, with each issue spanning a decade. Ambitious and audacious, Spider-Man: Life Story tells a moving tale about how Spider-Man may mature, but he’ll never forget the great responsibility his great power bestows upon him.
The 2025 issue of Amazing Spider-Man #1, by Joe Kelly and Pepe Larraz, is the seventh comic book with that title, the launch of a seventh volume of the long-running series. Although this latest relaunch doesn’t completely reboot Spider-Man’s story, as everything that happened in the previous comics still “counts,” it does bring Peter Parker back to first principles: he’s broke, he’s overworked, and he’s worried about Aunt May.
“Get Back Up” sounds like a story we’ve read a thousand times, right? And it sort of is, intentionally so. But not only do Kelly and Larraz execute the bread-and-butter Spider-Man story at the highest level, but they set up some twists that will change the way we think about Peter Parker and his family. What more could you ask of a Spider-Man story?
