Spider-Man Noir

• 1. Introduction

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  Spider-Man Noir is a version of Peter Parker who has never seen a color. In the film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, his home universe is entirely black and white, so ordinary hues leave him baffled when he travels elsewhere. That monochrome home began in Marvel Comics, as a harsh New York of the 1930s. The Spider-Man who patrols it does not behave like the hero most readers know. Who created this darker Peter Parker, and what were they trying to say with him? What gave him his powers, and what does it expect of him? How does a vigilante live with the violence he commits? And what happens when a hero who began on the page is reshaped by a movie, and by a famous actor's voice?

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• 2. Marvel Noir Beginnings

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  In 2009, Marvel Comics launched a line of books called Marvel Noir. The line took familiar characters into an alternate universe, Earth-90214, and bent them toward hardboiled crime fiction. Writers David Hine and Fabrice Sapolsky created this version of Peter Parker. Carmine Di Giandomenico drew his first stories, and Marko Djurdjević designed his costume.

  The stories themselves never call him Spider-Man Noir. Marvel creators and fans adopted the nickname to tell him apart from the mainstream Spider-Man.

  Spider-Man: Noir #1 appeared in February 2009 as the first issue of a four-part miniseries. Readers responded well enough that a sequel miniseries, Eyes Without a Face, followed later the same year from the same writers.

  The character also echoes a pulp-magazine hero known as the Spider. Stan Lee has named that figure as an inspiration for the original Spider-Man. When the character reached live-action television, he took that very name and became the Spider.

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• 3. Winter of 1932

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  In the winter of 1932, Ben Urich, a Daily Bugle photojournalist, stands in Central Park listening to May Parker speak about the struggles of ordinary citizens. Some criminals know Urich as "the Spider." He befriends May's nephew Peter, a young man who cannot afford university. Peter explains that his Uncle Ben, a pilot in World War I, was recently murdered by criminals working for the industrialist Norman Osborn. Osborn is believed to be the crime lord called the Goblin. Peter recalls his uncle's view of that war: "If those in power can't be trusted, it's the responsibility of the people to remove them."

  In December 1932, Peter works for Urich and ventures into a warehouse full of stolen antiques. One artifact, a spider idol, breaks open and releases a swarm of spiders. One bites Peter, and he passes out. He dreams of a spider-god that promises him power. He wakes inside a black web cocoon and discovers he has spider-like abilities.

  Masked, Peter confronts Osborn and is stunned to find Urich already in the room. The photojournalist has been blackmailing the mob boss with what he knows. In exchange, the Goblin keeps feeding Urich's drug habit. Moved by Peter's determination, Urich resolves to expose Osborn's crimes and is murdered. Peter sews a costume from elements of his uncle's World War I airman uniform and becomes "the Spider-Man." Felicia Hardy, Urich's former lover and owner of the Black Cat club, helps his war on Osborn's syndicate.

  In January 1933, the Spider-Man kills the Vulture to save his Aunt May. She tells him he is just as bad as the criminals, because he shot an unarmed man he could have captured. When Osborn's gang is largely beaten, Peter has a chance to kill the Goblin and refuses. He argues that the man must stand trial and the truth must become public record. Kraven the Hunter, another of Osborn's cronies and a dying man, attacks the Goblin and kills him instead.

  By spring, Franklin D. Roosevelt is President, Hitler is gaining power in Europe, and May Parker still campaigns for the common people.

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• 4. Eyes Without a Face

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  The sequel miniseries tackles socialist agitation during the Depression, American fascism, and lynchings and racism in the New Deal period. It also borrows noir motifs such as the femme fatale. Its villains discuss the theories of Rudolf Kjellen, particularly biopolitics. The title alludes to Eyes Without a Face, a French horror film of 1960. The art style resembles Frank Miller's Elektra Lives Again.

  The story begins in September 1933, roughly eight months after the first miniseries. Peter works as a photojournalist and helps at May Parker's soup kitchen alongside his friend Mary Jane Watson. A masked figure called the Crime Master is rising as the city's new crime boss. Peter is also seeing Felicia Hardy, though she insists she is not his girlfriend.

  Peter and Joseph "Robbie" Robertson, a struggling reporter, investigate a laboratory on Ellis Island. There Otto Octavius and his assistant Curt Connors run mind-control experiments for the US government. That night, Flint "Sandman" Marko delivers several people to the lab. Octavius is secretly working with the Friends of New Germany. He wants to prove that people he calls "inferior" can be controlled through brain surgery.

  The Spider-Man tracks the Crime Master and is nearly beaten to death by Marko. Police shoot Marko dead, and the Crime Master escapes. Having learned that Felicia is connected to the Spider-Man, the Crime Master attacks her, disfigures her and nearly kills her. Peter then learns the Crime Master has been delivering people of color to Octavius. He goes to Ellis Island and finds Robbie, who has already had surgery on his frontal lobe. Robbie now has neither memory nor free will.

  Octavius and the Crime Master come to blows, and the Crime Master dies. FBI agent Jean de Wolfe arrives and arrests Octavius. A month later, the government chooses to deport him rather than risk state secrets surfacing at a public trial. In Germany, Octavius is humiliated. Heinrich Himmler and the Nazis consider his congenital disability proof that he is inferior and his work useless.

  Felicia slowly recovers from her injuries. She now wears a mask to cover her scars.

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• 5. Powers and Gear

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  Where the mainstream Peter Parker builds mechanical web-shooters, Spider-Man Noir fires organic webbing from his wrists. His strength, speed, reflexes, resiliency and agility match those of the classic hero, all scaled to a spider. In his first two miniseries he cannot make web-lines at all. His dark webbing sprays out or forms a net. After his resurrection, his control is fine enough to swing on web-lines and to throw web-based projectiles that stun opponents.

  His outfit is mostly ordinary clothing from the era, topped with a mask and reinforced with kevlar armor. The armor resists bullets and explosions. The mask is built from the headgear and aviator glasses his uncle wore in the Great War. The fedora first appeared in the second miniseries. After Spider-Geddon, he adopts a more traditional black-and-white Spider-Man mask, keeps the goggles, and wears the fedora over it. He also acquires a new gun belt decorated with a spider symbol.

  Spider-Man Noir regularly carries .45 caliber pistols. He is a skilled marksman who handles revolvers and the tommy gun. He will kill in certain cases but mostly prefers to wound criminals. His web of contacts runs through Felicia Hardy, the Daily Bugle, his later work as a private investigator, and informants inside the gangs.

  Despite his superhuman abilities, Peter Parker still needs his glasses.

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• 6. Across the Web

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  In 2014, the Spider-Verse event, written by Dan Slott, pulled Spider heroes from many alternate realities into a fight against the vampiric Inheritors. The tie-in Edge of Spider-Verse #1 returns to Earth-90214 in August 1939. Peter has been the Spider-Man for six years and has finally attended university classes. Mary Jane spent three years in Spain, fighting with the Abraham Lincoln International Brigade. Wilson Fisk is a rising power in crime and sends the illusionist Mysterio to kill the Spider-Man. Instead, Superior Spider-Man recruits Peter to join the Spiders fighting the Inheritors.

  After the Secret Wars crossover, Peter joins a team of six Spiders called the Web Warriors. They meet regularly to confront threats in other dimensions, especially those that no longer have a Spider hero of their own. The technology they use to travel between worlds destabilizes the Web of Life and Destiny. Some realities bleed into each other, and Peter's world suffers time anomalies. The team repairs the damage, and a new teammate named Octavia Otto helps devise a safer way to travel.

  One night in 1940, Peter investigates a weapons sale between Herman Schultz and the Nazis. Felicia Hardy fights beside him, now on speaking terms and working as the masked vigilante White Widow. Spider-UK arrives with an urgent request. The Web Warriors try to stop the Inheritors from using cloning technology to resurrect themselves, but they arrive too late. Peter tries to kill the Inheritor Morlun with a grenade, sacrificing himself. Morlun survives and drains Peter's remaining life-force, killing him.

  Spider-Gwen later visits the Marvel Noir Earth to tell May Parker, Mary Jane and Felicia how their Peter died heroically. May is furious to learn her nephew was a vigilante and calls him "a broken man." Mary Jane and Felicia thank Gwen for giving them closure. That closure would not last.

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• 7. Second Life

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  Spider-Verse volume 3 #5, published in 2020, reveals that Peter woke in a web cocoon on Earth-90214 after his death. He had seen the spider-god again, who told him his "service" was not finished. This Peter is slightly more introspective and glib. He works openly as a private investigator, with a new look and a more stereotypical 1930s way of speaking. Miles Morales appears and teams up with him to take the spider-god's idol back from the Nazis, so it can mend the Web of Life and Destiny. Miles warns that removing the idol may remove the spider-god's protection, making Peter's next death permanent. Peter accepts this. He says death should be permanent for everyone, and he neither wants nor deserves special treatment.

  An ongoing monthly series, Twilight in Babylon, began months later the same year. Margaret Stohl wrote it, with interior art by Juan Ferreyra. It opens in 1939, a month after the team-up with Miles. Aunt May and Mary Jane Watson are grateful that "a miracle" returned Peter to them. Both support his vigilante life, though May urges him to act more honorably than his instincts sometimes allow. J. Jonah Jameson gets Peter into police crime scenes in exchange for exclusive stories for the Daily Bugle.

  Peter investigates the death of Holly Babson, a waitress at the Black Cat club, who was clutching a cicada gemstone when she died. He flies to Europe with her sister, the museum curator Huma Bergmann. They are joined by the pilot Harry Charles, secretly a member of the Dora Milaje named Hu-Ri, and by Checkpoint Red, a guide in Istanbul sent by Tony Stark. The Nazis and their powerful new weapon, Electro, pursue them.

  At the temple where the gemstone originated, Huma betrays them. She is the goddess Inanna, and she has allied with the Nazis. She joins the cicada stone to the M'Kraan crystal and opens a portal to the Underworld, which returns some of Spider-Man's dead enemies. During the fight, Peter receives a vision from the spider-god Ereshkigal, Inanna's sister, who had taken Holly Babson's form. With her help, he destroys both the stone and the crystal and defeats Inanna and the undead. Back in New York, Jameson credits Huma with stopping the Nazis in Babylon.

  From 2025 to 2026, a second ongoing series, The Gwen Stacy Affair, was written by Erik Larsen with art by Andrea Broccardol. Gwen Stacy hires Peter to investigate the death of her father George Stacy, a mob enforcer whom Peter had recently killed while working as Spider-Man. Then Peter discovers that someone has stolen his powers and taken over as a second Spider-Man Noir.

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• 8. Screen Spider

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  In 2010, the video game Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions gave the character his first appearance outside comics. Christopher Daniel Barnes voiced him. Madame Web improves his web-shooting and sends him after fragments of the Tablet of Order and Chaos, held by his world's versions of Hammerhead, the Vulture and the Goblin. He then joins three other Spider-Men to fight Mysterio, who absorbs the restored Tablet and destroys reality.

  In the animated series Ultimate Spider-Man, Milo Ventimiglia voices a more serious, brooding Noir. He has cut ties with his versions of May Parker and Mary Jane Watson, until the mainstream Spider-Man shows him the value of having allies.

  In December 2018, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse gave the role to Nicolas Cage. His Noir speaks in a stereotypical "Transatlantic" 1930s dialect. Cage modeled it on Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. The Kingpin's machinations send Noir to Miles Morales' universe alongside Spider-Ham and Peni Parker. All three help foil the Kingpin's plans and return to their home dimensions. Noir makes a brief, non-speaking appearance at the end of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse in 2023. He will return in Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, with Cage reprising the role.

  The live-action series Spider-Noir, released in 2026, also stars Cage. His character is Ben Reilly, a private detective who gained powers when Man-Spider bit him while he was freeing soldiers from a German prisoner-of-war camp at the end of World War I. After returning to New York, he spent ten years as a superhero. He retired the persona when a criminal he had caught killed his fiancée, Ruby Williams. Five years later, a criminal conspiracy involving the crime boss Silvermane drags him back in, and he begins a romance with Cat Hardy.

  The suit has become a favorite in games. Yuri Lowenthal voices Noir in Marvel Super Hero Squad Online. He is an unlockable character in Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 and a skin in Spider-Man (2018), Spider-Man 2 and Fortnite in 2024. Even The Simpsons joined in: the episode "Treehouse of Horror XXXI" features a Noir-inspired Homer Simpson, voiced by Dan Castellaneta.

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