Warning: contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Spider's Shadow #4!
As Spider-Man, Peter Parker has a well-known rule against killing his enemies - but in Spider-Man: Spider's Shadow #4, he reveals he's not as morally pure as he appears to be. Spider-Man's symbiotic alien suit is the focus of the alternate-timeline series, but while the "classic" Peter eventually abandoned the suit (which merged with Eddie Brock to become Venom), this What If? story asks what would have happened if he'd kept it.
Peter acquired his jet-black suit in the famous 1984 Marvel crossover event Secret Wars. On the patchwork planet known as Battleworld, Spider-Man found a complex machine that he believed to be a fabric replicator, releasing a sphere of black goo that enclosed him and formed a new suit that responded to his very thoughts. This was later explained to be a symbiote; an alien creature that bonds with its host and amplifies their feelings, specifically anger and aggression. Peter and the symbiote eventually separated and have been through a lot since, but Spider-Man: Spider's Shadow shows what would have happened if they'd stuck together, teaching Peter a terrible truth about himself.
In Spider-Man: Spider's Shadow, Peter has finally gotten free of the suit, facing up to the murders he committed while wearing it. Spider-Man has brutally murdered villains including the Hobgoblin, Scorpion, and Kingpin. Now, as the suit bonds to the Fantastic Four's Reed Richards and takes over the Baxter Building, Peter knows he's done wrong and the suit has amplified his feelings of aggression... but he also realizes the suit didn't create those feelings. He confesses his feelings to Mary Jane. "I wanted to kill my enemies. I was tired of the constant onslaught, of friends and family dying, because I...because I didn't do what I should."
Though Spider-Man: Spider's Shadow doesn't take place in current comics continuity, it is a What If? story, meaning this isn't an alternate universe where Peter Parker is a different person, but is how things would have played out in the regular Marvel Universe with one small change. As such, Peter's admission that he wanted to kill his enemies even before the suit is just as true of the Spider-Man fans know and love - the only difference is that here, he ended up acting on that impulse.
Peter's admission is a dark confession; that the so-called 'friendly neighborhood Spider-Man' hides a dangerous amount of anger behind his mask. Spider-Man is a character who always tries to do the right thing, but that doesn't mean he's an angel. Peter Parker understands that if he put his enemies down for good, they wouldn't be able to hurt other people ever again, and that temptation is clearly something he deals with as best he can. Thankfully, in the mainstream comics, Spider-Man rejected the Venom symbiote just in time, avoiding actually acting on his dark thoughts, but even in the version of events where he kept the blood off his hands, the hero still feels the urge to take a lethal approach to the evil he sees every day.
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July 29, 2021 at 12:21AM
