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How Marvel keeps Spider-Man comics “10 years ahead” of the MCU while welcoming Brand New Day movie fans
Why Marvel wants Spider-Man comics to be both ahead of the MCU and easy to jump into.
FeaturesbyChris Arrant, Editor-in-Chief
Additional contributions byJoshua Lapin-Bertone
Published on Mon Jul 20 2026
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There’s a new Spider-Man movie in theaters this month. There’s also new Spider-Man comics on shelves this week, and almost always every week into the far future. The successful Spider-Man comics inspired the movies and set the stage with readers for the successful Spider-Man movies, and those movies in turn inspire the comics and set the stage with viewers to go back and try those comics. This virtuous cycle is the ideal way comic book adaptations should work if you ask any fan or anybody working in comics… as long as adaptations don’t end up forcing themselves back on the source material.
Ahead of Marvel Studios and Columbia Pictures’ Spider-Man: Brand New Day on July 31, the question of how its marketing and eventual release is informing plans Marvel Comics has for Spider-Man comics is something on many people’s minds – us included. But instead of just speculation, we straight-up asked… and got answers.
“We always try to have books for people who walk out of the movie theater and into a comic book store or bookstore wanting more of that,” Marvel Comics’ longtime Spider-Man editor Nick Lowe tells Popverse. In addition to the full-time job of being the Spider-boss as it were, he also serves as an executive editor for the company and is vice president of content and digital publishing.
Lowe and the Marvel team are using a mixture of classic comic collections best-suited for Spider-Man: Brand New Day viewers, along with new comics that might be able to hook people into that weekly new comics fix.
“The goal is to have stuff to make that transition easy so we have things like the terrific Brand New Day collection that’s something like a greatest hits of that era, along with a new Marcos Martín cover for it that rules,” says Lowe. “We also have the Dan Slott/Marcus To Spectacular Spider-Man: Brand New Day series with Punisher guesting in an incredible new way and the awesome Jonathan Hickman/Adam Kubert No Way Home series starring Spidey, Hulk and Punisher. And a few months later, a Spider-Man/Punisher mini.”
If you notice in there, Lowe didn’t mention the flagship of the Spider-Man comics line (and in many ways, Marvel itself), the long-running Amazing Spider-Man title. Over the decades and nigh-1000 issue run, it has been home to many of the stories that years (and sometimes, many years) later influence movies, including the ‘Brand New Day’ era that gave the movie Spider-Man: Brand New Day its subtitle. Lowe, who has been the lead Spider-Man editor since 2014, says he’s learned to keep that virtuous cycle away from that in order to avoid any audio feedback-style effect, and to keep creating new stories for the next Spider-Man movie, TV show, or anything else.
“We don’t try to echo too much in [Amazing Spider-Man] because we’re always trying to be ten years ahead of other media so they have awesome stuff to adapt,” says Lowe.
Future Kevin Feige thanks you, Nick.
That being said, it’s not like Marvel tells its creators to cover their ears when a new Spider-Man adaptation is in the pipeline. Joe Kelly is the current writer on the Amazing Spider-Man comic book series, and has written comics before in the midst of an adaptation release. In fact, several of his Marvel, DC, and creator-owned comics have been adapted into (or at least inspired) movies and TV shows over the years, and he’s also worked on some of those adaptations – including animated versions of Ultimate Spider-Man and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When asked about whether Spider-Man: Brand New Day is inspiring anything in his Amazing Spider-Man comics run, he says it should – but it shouldn’t be forced.
“…I think it’s sort of a missed opportunity if you ignore the films, or the TV shows completely, because they’re going to be seen by a lot of people,” Kelly tells Popverse. “But at the same time, it really can never be the tail wagging the dog. As big as those things are, as much money as they make, it all starts with the comics. It has to. I would say that there are some concepts that are in the MCU at large that I thought would be kind of fun to play with, and you’ll start to see them pop up on the road to [Amazing Spider-Man #1000].”
In the case of Amazing Spider-Man, it’s more of a ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ in terms of synergy and only he sees a way for it to better the comic story to be a better comic story
“But not leaning super hard into ‘They’re doing this in the movie, so let’s do it,'” Kelly adds. “If anything, I think what we’re doing is actually different than what you see in the movies, because we don’t get to know. I can’t be like, ‘I saw a trailer, now I’m going to put all this stuff in the book.’ It just has to be I’m going to tell the best Spider-Man story I can. And if there’s a little bit of synergy, cool, but it’s not a major priority.”
The Spider-Man: Brand New Day movie hits theaters beginning July 30, and there are new issues of Amazing Spider-Man waiting for you at your local comic store now. The ‘Death Spiral’ storyline just finished, so maybe that’ll inspire an adaptation in a few years.
Marvel’s most reliable superhero has proven he can do a whole lot more than just ‘whatever a spider can.’ Swing into Spidey’s history with Popverse’s…
Just watch out for that radioactive blood.
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Chris Arrant: Chris Arrant is the Popverse’s Editor-in-Chief. He has written about pop culture for USA Today, Life, Entertainment Weekly, Publisher’s Weekly, Marvel, Newsarama, CBR, and more. He has acted as a judge for the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, the Harvey Awards, and the Stan Lee Awards. (He/him)
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