Warning: This article contains spoilers about Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man‘s season finale. Spider-Man’s W.E.B. is expanding. Marvel’s animated Disney+ series Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man started with whiz kid Peter Parker (voiced by Hudson Thames) accepting an internship at Oscorp, where he worked alongside fellow “friend-terns”: young geniuses Asha (Erica Luttrell), Jeanne Foucault (Anjali Kuanpaneni), and Amadeus Cho (Aleks Le). But at the end of the 10-episode first season, Peter learned benefactor Norman Osborn (Colman Domingo) used the interns’ work to construct Project Monolith: a gateway that opened a wormhole in spacetime, resulting in Peter being bitten by a genetically-altered spider.
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No longer trusting Oscorp or Osborn, Peter severed ties as an Oscorp-sponsored Spider-Man. Now bankrolled by his hands-off friend Harry Osborn (Zeno Robinson), Team Spidey thwipped up W.E.B.: the Worldwide Engineering Brigade.
RELATED: Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Makes a Strange Twist to Peter Parker’s Origin Story
W.E.B. is based on WEB SLINGERS: A Spider-Man Adventure ride at the MCU-inspired Avengers Campus at Disney California Adventure Park, which in turn inspired the five-issue comic run W.E.B. of Spider-Man. W.E.B. began as a Tony Stark-funded scientific research station, part of the Avengers Campus (Centralized Assembly Mobilized to Prepare, Unite, and Safeguard) initiative to train new recruits from around the globe.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man‘s season finale ends with Harry/The Dude at the Desk extending an invitation to more than a dozen prospective W.E.B. recruits, and in true Marvel fashion, the list is filled with Easter eggs and wider references to the MU. Some of the names are a tribute to real-life animators — W. Scott Forbes, Lee Ann Dufour, Emmy Choi , and Benjamin Anders — while others are characters from the comic books.
Amadeus Cho
In the comics, Amadeus Cho is a 16-year-old super-genius and the “seventh smartest person on the planet” who befriends the Hulk and the Greek demigod Hercules. As the Totally Awesome Hulk of Marvel’s All-New, All-Different era, Amadeus wielded both brains and brawn when he absorbed gamma radiation from Bruce Banner. He’s since taken the name Brawn and served as a member of several super-groups, including the Champions and Jimmy Woo’s Agents of Atlas — but last we saw him on Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, he declined the W.E.B. invite and chose to remain at Oscorp.
Asha
Like her comic counterpart, Asha hails from the most technologically advanced nation in the world: Wakanda. (She worked with Oscorp’s aerospace team to create the star map that Osborn ultimately used as part of Project Monolith.) Asha’s comic counterpart was a student of the Wakandan School for Alternative Studies and, wielding the power to reflect or absorb light to disappear at will, she’s fought alongside Storm and the Black Panther.
Jeanne Foucault
It’s revealed Daredevil (Charlie Cox) tasked his protégé Jeanne, a.k.a. Finesse, with spying on Osborn and then W.E.B. In the comics, she was a member of Avengers Academy: an initiative to recruit and train the new generation of super-powered people. A polymath, she can learn various abilities and skills at incredible speeds — including mastering languages and fighting skills.
Max Dillon
Maxwell “Max” Dillon is the alter-ego of the electric-powered supervillain Electro, one of Spider-Man’s most shocking rogues. Once a linesman who was struck by lightning while working on a power line, the fateful accident turned Dillon into the Master of Electricity — giving him the power to wield electrostatic energy and lightning bolts. (2003’s Spider-Man: The New Animated Series, which was inspired by the Tobey Maguire-led films, reimagined Max Dillon as Peter Parker’s classmate at Empire State University.)
Tai Miranda
In The Unstoppable Wasp, Hank Pym’s Red Room-raised scientist daughter, Nadia, founded G.I.R.L. (Genius In action Research Labs). Nadia recruited Taina Miranda, a world-class engineer, inventor and roboticist. As an agent of G.I.R.L., Taina was part of the Wasp’s collective of Pym Lab-based girl geniuses alongside their friends Ying, Priya Aggarwal, Priscilla Layshala “Shay” Smith, and Taina’s older sister, Alexis “Lexi” Miranda. Taina, who walks with braces, is also able to fly with a pair of voice-activated Wasp wings gifted to her by Nadia.
Priya Aggarwal
The fashionable daughter of Indian immigrants, Priya is a biologist, geneticist, and G.I.R.L. genius based in Queens. In Unstoppable Wasp vol. 2, Priya’s exposure to an experimental gas gave her the power of botanopathy: essentially, a “plant psychic” with the ability to control plants. Although she didn’t aspire to be a superhero, she eventually embraced her powers — and received combat training from Jeanne/Finesse, whose uncanny ability to replicate any experiment proved useful to G.I.R.L.
Toni Sandoval
“Toni Sandoval” appears to be a portmanteau referencing Toni Ho and co-creator Gerardo Sandoval. Once the Supreme Leader and head engineer of A.I.M. (American Intelligence Mechanics), Toni Ho is the daughter of Ho Yinsen: the advanced idea mechanic whose death inspired Tony Stark to become the armored avenger Iron Man. Toni has donned the Rescue armor originally built for Pepper Potts and later the Iron Patriot armor as part of A.I.M.’s U.S.Avengers.
Ned Leeds
In the MCU, Ned Leeds (played by Jacob Batalon) is Peter Parker’s best friend and “Guy in the Chair.” But in the comics, Ned was a Daily Bugle reporter who married Betty Brant, and battled Spider-Man as the Hobgoblin. Power hungry businessman Roderick Kingsley used the original Green Goblin’s cache of weapons to become the Hobgoblin, but he later used a brain-washing machine, the Winkler Device, to program Ned as Hobgoblin’s stand-in. Kingsley framed Ned and then had him killed by the assassin known as the Foreigner.
Tiberius Stone
On Earth-928’s timeline, Tiberius “Ty” Stone is the father of Alchemax CEO Tyler Stone, the biological father of Miguel O’Hara: Spider-Man 2099. In the present-day Earth-616, Ty Stone is a childhood friend-turned-rival of Tony Stark’s who had his parents killed so he could take over their company, Stone Inc. As head of Alchemax’s R&D Department, he designed next-gen Spider-Slayers that battled both Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2099 in the present day MU.
Kiden Nixon
A 16-year-old mutant, Kiden is a “timewalker” with the ability to accelerate time, or make time stand still, in a state called “No Time.” In the original 2003 NYX run, Kiden befriended X-23/Laura Kinney, the cloned daughter of Wolverine, becoming her first and oldest friend.
Diane Jenkins
Diane Jenkins appeared only once in the pages of 2019’s Marvel Comics Presents #8. A college student at ESU, Diane “unmasked” herself as Spider-Woman in a 15-second viral video. Jessica Drew, the real arachnid avenger, tracked down Diane and saved her from an assassination attempt by Hydra: the terrorist organization that once tricked the Spider-Woman into working as their assassin “Arachne.” When Charlotte Winter — an evil, multi-limbed Spider-Woman — attacked Diane, she fled into the street and was killed by a bus. In the end, Diane’s death was a cautionary tale about the dangers of social media.
Ripley Ryan
A newer addition to the Marvel mythos, Ripley Ryan was a magazine reporter before a Kree scientist endowed her with superpowers and she battled Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel. As Star, she became the living host of the Reality Stone, and Star was part of the Thunderbolts team assembled by Mayor Wilson Fisk — the Kingpin — when Knull, the King in Black, unleashed a horde of symbiotes on New York City.
