Spider-Man: Far From Home Might Have Hidden Ties to a Pair of Spidey Villains

A supporting player in Spider-Man: Far From Home could be a nod to two Marvel Comics supervillains. Spoilers follow.

Far From Home outs Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) as Quentin Beck, a scorned former Stark Industries employee who carries a seething grudge against the late Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr).

Along with his cohorts, also ex-Stark employees — including William (Peter Billingsley), Guterman (Nicholas Gleaves) and Victoria (Clare Dunne) — Beck and his crew use the repurposed Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing technology, or “B.A.R.F.,” to create “Avengers-level” threats as part of an elaborate hoax, posing Mysterio as the world’s greatest hero.

Beck’s “armored warrior” has his cape ironed by Janice (Claire Rushbrook), who may be a nod to Janice Lincoln, who was introduced to the comic books in a 2010 issue of Captain America before emerging as a recurring Spider-Man enemy, surfacing most recently in Marvel’s ongoing fifth volume of Amazing Spider-Man.

There Janice is armored criminal The Beetle — assuming an identity most famously filled by longtime Spider-Man foe Abner Jenkins, the first Beetle — and has since re-established the Sinister Syndicate, now a squad of female supervillains that includes Lady Octopus and the Francine Frye Electro.

Janice is also the daughter of super-strong crime lord Tombstone, once the boyhood friend of Peter Parker’s sometimes Daily Bugle employer Joe ‘Robbie’ Robertson. Exposure to an experimental chemical endowed Tombstone, real name Lonnie Lincoln, with superhuman strength and durability, powers he’d use to menace Spider-Man, Daredevil and the Heroes for Hire.

Ant-Man #1 saw Janice pose as a Stark Industries hopeful to get close to Stark, who she then attempted to assassinate. She was ultimately thwarted by the Scott Lang Ant-Man.

Far From Home‘s Victoria could be a nod to Victoria ‘Vicki’ Snow, who in the comic books was an Iron Man admirer and the once fiancée of Iron Man enemy Whiplash, who was then posing as Stark Industries employee “Mark Scott.”

“I don’t get why everyone keeps calling [Mysterio] a villain. He’s just a director! I don’t understand it. No, he’s essentially putting on a show,” director Jon Watts told /Film.

“He’s putting on a show for Peter (Tom Holland) to try to con him, and he’s putting on a show for the world. It’s a collaborative process, and you wouldn’t just do it all alone, you’d have to have a crew behind you. Mysterio very often had a crew in the comics, and I always liked that idea, and this is a way to take that as an inspiration and get a very different kind of group of henchman than you would normally see. You have Guterman as his writer, and you have Janice trying to get the wrinkles out of the cape. It’s not your typical group of goons.”