Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man: The Peter Parker Origin Story You Didn’t See

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man doesn’t spin the same old origin story. Marvel Studios’ first Spider-Man animated series was conceived as a prequel to the live-action films starring Tom Holland, set during Peter Parker’s freshman year of high school before the web-slinger is recruited to Team Iron Man in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. (The high school-set Spider-Man: Homecoming took place during Peter’s early days as a Tony Stark-sponsored superhero, but the 2017 movie skipped past the well-known origin story of a spider-bitten teen learning the tragic lesson that with great power must come great responsibility.)

But then Marvel Animation made it clear that Spider-Man: Freshman Year (later retitled to Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man) is set outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Sacred Timeline, spinning off into an alternate reality where a 15-year-old Peter Parker (voiced by Hudson Thames) is the pupil of Oscorp industrialist Norman Osborn (Colman Domingo) instead of Tony Stark.

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“Very early on — I would say within the first two months of coming up with the story — we [realized], ‘We’re very limited here,’” series creator Jeff Trammell explained to ComicBook. “Moving it out of the Sacred Timeline gives us a bit more freedom.”

That meant the freedom to incorporate characters like Nico Minoru (Grace Song) of the Runaways, sorcerer Doctor Strange (Robin Atkin Downes), and a Venom-like symbiotic alien (Kellen Goff) into Peter’s origins, which almost certainly doesn’t align with the still-untold origin of Spider-Man’s MCU counterpart.

“It really freed us up,” Trammell said, “but also allows us to pick and choose the moments of the MCU continuity that we do want to address, kind of built for our world.”

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man swings onto Disney+ Wednesday with its series premiere, titled “Amazing Fantasy,” which begins with a powerless Peter Parker attending orientation at Midtown High School of Science and Technology. Suddenly, Doctor Strange portals into the sky above the school mid-fight with a symbiote. “We’re not supposed to be here,” the Master of the Mystic arts says, restraining the alien after Peter distracts it long enough to save bystander Nico.

As Strange teleports the symbiotic alien away, the closing portal severs a descending spider’s strand of web. The spider of mysterious origin then drops onto an unsuspecting Peter Parker and sinks its teeth into the back of the teen’s neck. One time jump and an opening credits sequence later, months have passed since that fateful day, and Peter is thwipping across Queens in his homemade suit as a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

While that’s only one half of what happened that day — the other half will be addressed in a future episode — Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man skips past much of the origin laid out in Amazing Fantasy #15 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. To fill in the gaps, Marvel is publishing a five-issue prequel comic book series, also titled Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, by writer Christos Cage and artist Eric Gapstur.

Only two issues have released since December (with a third out Feb. 19), but they reveal what you didn’t see in the animated series: namely, what happens immediately after Peter passes out from the spider’s bite.

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Peter’s doting Aunt May wants him to get checked out at the E.R., but they can’t afford the fifty bucks co-pay. It’s then revealed that Peter’s Uncle Ben has already died from an as-yet-unknown cause, although it’s hinted that he spent time in a hospital before passing away. (In most Spider-Man origin stories, Uncle Ben is shot and killed by a burglar after his nephew fails to use his new spider-powers to stop the fleeing burglar during a robbery.)

Peter’s Spider-Sense and spider-like reflexes manifest for the first time when he leaps out of the way of a toppling tower of applesauce boxes at Delmar’s Deli-Grocery. That night, at the Parker apartment, Peter’s new friend Nico laments the “comparable institutions” they’ll be sent to instead of Midtown (which ends up being Rockford T. Bales High School) because she saw the S.T.E.M.-oriented school as her way to “start over” after leaving L.A. to live with a foster family in New York.

Nico informs Peter that a real estate conglomerate has been trying to buy the land where Midtown sits for years, meaning it’s unlikely the school will be rebuilt. The pair decide to investigate the damage, and once inside the school, they make another discovery: that an explosion happened after the attack by the symbiotic alien, and the cause is arson.

The real estate conglomerate that wants to buy the land is disguised by shell corporations owned by the brother-in-law of the mob boss Silvio Manfredi (a.k.a. the Spider-Man villain Silvermane). (The second episode of the two-episode premiere, “The Parker Luck,” reveals the arsonist to be Butane (Jake Green), who says a developer paid him big money to burn down a city block so it can be bought back on the cheap for the future site of a luxury high rise building.)

When Peter and Nico are discovered by Manfredi’s thugs, Peter breaks the chains of a locked door before fighting off two thugs with surprising strength and speed. He then is able to dodge gunfire, leap tall buildings in a single bound, traverse the rooftops like an Olympic athlete, and climb walls like a spider. Peter realizes he has abilities like his hero, Captain America… and proceeds to throw up in an alleyway trash can when he realizes he could have been killed. Inspired by a poster of Captain America on his wall, Peter suits up in a makeshift costume to protect his Aunt May from the mafia.

In issue #2, Peter tests his abilities in a rich kid’s backyard wrestling tournament. During a cage match with former heavyweight champion Crusher Hogan, a masked Peter adopts a name: “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” to make himself sound approachable and local (but the announcer shortens it to the shorter “Spider-Man”). Surprised by his own strength, Peter decides to apply his chemistry skills to develop self-dissolving webs so he can apprehend bad guys without hurting them. (After all, with great power comes great liability.)

At first, the web-swinging Spider-Man’s costume is a lens-less mask over plain street clothes, and he soon has a reputation as a “friendly neighborhood Spider-Man” looking out for the little guy. But the neighborhood belongs to the Manfredi crime family, so Silvio summons “Man Mountain” Marko and The Enforcers to crush the bug: a trio that includes the whip-wielding Montana, the martial artist Fancy Dan, and the big, brutish Ox.

The 10-episode first season pits the Oscorp-backed Spider-Man against street-level villains like Speed Demon (Roger Craig Smith), the Tarantula (Anairis Quinones), the Unicorn (Sarah Natochenny), and Mac Gargan/the Scorpion (Jonathan Medina), and features appearances by such classic Spider-villains as the Chameleon (Smith) and Dr. Otto Octavius (Hugh Dancy).

New episodes of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man premiere Wednesdays on Disney+ through Feb. 19, the same day issue #3 of the prequel comic hits stands. Issue #4 goes on sale March 26, followed by the fifth and final issue on April 23.