The Amazing Spider-Man #1000 by John Romita Jr. and Devmalya Pramanik

Spider-Man / Kraven by Corey Lewis

Spider-Man by Aaron Losty

Spider-Man by Giannis Milonogiannis

Spider-Man: No Way Home

Heavily indebted to Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman's excellent Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Jon Watt's multi-dimensional pile-up, Spider-Man: No Way Home, employs the same reality-bending as its animated predecessor - not to mention the current Marvel streaming shows - to give this increasingly disconnected sub-series (as well as long-time executive producer Avi Arad) a victory lap. In doing so, No Way Home batters Tom Holland's likeable take on Peter Parker out of his moneyed comfort zone to re-establish a balancing act minted in a previous Spidey phase. The film abandons the overloaded technological wish-fulfilment - that saw Spider-Man subordinated into the role of Iron Man's teenage ward - to push at the working class ache that underpinned Sam Raimi's take on the character. No Way Home drags in adversaries from these Raimi films, as well as the two Marc Webb instalments that followed, as a way to brute force Holland's Parker through this conceptual shake-up. 

No Way Home is a piecemeal experience. Strange highlights - imported from different films and deployed to wrinkle recognition - struggle to exert themselves on a whole that seems to be either thrashing around in the midst of an onscreen identity crisis or simply holding the Spider-Man character to ransom ahead of the next round of financier negotiations. Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin is an obvious but under-explored delight though. The character's trajectory built around the tensions of a personality split that, unfortunately, we barely see overlap. Still, even if No Way Home doesn't apportion enough screentime to Osborn to manufacture a believable (or even trackable) sense of mounting disquiet, the film does remember that the action in the first Spider-Man's was defined by a deeply personal strain of violence. While the weight that Watts and his screenwriters (Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers) heap on their hero never comes close to matching the face-swelling welts that Raimi dished out, Holland does get to play murderous rage: punch after punch, hammering down on the teeth of a clearly ecstatic Goblin. For a series of films in which (comfortably) billions of people have died, the motivational power of pure hatred is a note that has been largely absent. 

Spider-Man by John McCrea

Captain Universe Spider-Man X Venom by Chun Lo

PlayStation 5 - Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Despite the baffling title and a failure to tap into Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse's beautiful pop art sensibilities, it's nice to see a remaster that goes beyond simply upping a last-gen resolution. Spider-Man: Miles Morales plonks Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli's teen hero into Insomniac's Spider-Man, expanding and remixing the 2018 game to take advantage of (amongst other things) the PS5's zippy SSD load times.

Spider-Man: Far From Home

Twenty-odd films in, the Marvel Cinematic Universe largely functions as an on-going, episodic serial rather than a collection of distinct, individual pieces. Characters are seemingly allowed one film to set their stage before the demands of a wider playing field bleed into their space, polluting their identity. Case in point, Spider-Man: Far From Home, a film that uses a loose, poppy superhero-on-holiday structure to definitively paint over the incalculable trauma of Thanos' snap while simultaneously wallowing in the departure of Robert Downey Jr. Stark's shadow is such that the very idea of Peter Parker as a sweet, working-class prodigy is obliterated. This Parker is an heir, fumbling his way around with a fantastical pair of DITA sunglasses that constitute his terrible, unmanned combat vehicle inheritance.

Convoluted and episodic, Far From Home simulates that stale comics standby, the Summer Special. It's a bumper compendium of half-baked ideas and sketches not fit for general consumption; all the odds and ends lumped together in one volume with very little care for tonal or creative consistency. In terms of the intrusive Marvel bookkeeping and SHIELD autophagia, consider those encroachments trace crossover, the storytelling equivalent of some particularly nasty background radiation requiring extended stretches of corporately mandated attention. What makes Far From Home all the more frustrating is that there are blips of purchase here and there. Moments that threaten to arrest interest before they're lost in the churn of droned-out entitlement.

Aunt May hurling bananas at her nonplussed nephew, not to mention Peter's general anxiety about his so-called 'tingle', seems to suggest that Parker is losing touch with his innate spider-skills by focusing so heavily on Stark's endowment. As it is, the idea exists as a proposition and a tumbling, back-flipping conclusion embedded within the finale. The pain of this disconnection is never mapped out, we aren't given the opportunity to understand Peter's apparent disassociation. This tidiness extends out into the film, denying the human level conflicts the rough interactions they require: Peter's best friend Ned is enjoying a holiday romance, so he can't possibly feel ignored. Mary Jane definitively rejects a handsome rival suitor, meaning Peter doesn't have to spread himself thin to grasp at a private life.

Emotionally, at least in terms of interpersonal relationships, Jon Watts' film is chronically neat, leaving all sense of self-shredding conflict to the special effects realm. It is to Far From Home's credit that visual effects house Framestore, channelled through Jake Gyllenhaal's artistically precious performance as Mysterio, deliver an incredible illusory sequence that hammers Spider-Man with images and situations in which he is either specifically powerless or, if he manages to react quickly enough, simply hurling his body weight against unyielding phantasms. Regardless, Parker is being mocked, forced to respond to immediate, confusing visual and audio data. Framestore use shattering mirrors and the dense choke of poisonous green smoke to suggest the swirling anxieties that underline the best of Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko's work. These apparitions strip Peter of his Iron Lad exterior, forcing him to contend with his beginnings as a child in a personalised hoodie. Unfortunately this ordeal does not track into Parker re-examining his methodology, the teenager is quickly aboard a Stark branded VTOL jet using the billionaire's impossible-tech to manufacture a toyetic costume change.

Spider-Man

At the time of Spider-Man's cinema release there was a sense that this was a lesser Sam Raimi film, that the director of The Evil Dead was holding back on the camera tricks and stylistic flourishes he'd made his name with so as not to overload Sony's super-marketable super-story. While this franchise launcher may not be as bombastic as Raimi's earlier work, it's still breathlessly energetic and no less excited about pummelling its lead character. In Tobey Maguire, Raimi has found an actor capable of communicating an earnestness that, while it doesn't track into the all-conquering power fantasy at the centre of similar tales, is capable of providing their hero with a basic, indefatigable working class decency.

Financial stability is something that Maguire's Peter Parker has to constantly strain for - at the film's outset, Parker's elderly Aunt and Uncle are struggling to keep a roof over their family's head. Cliff Robertson's Uncle Ben is out of work and finding it hard to adjust, meaning Peter's difficulties are often expressed in economic terms. The Parkers are not dirt poor, but their future isn't certain. They have to be careful. This frugality has a knock-on effect for our teenage subject, meaning he stands out at school - chided and despised for not fitting in with the frosted tip bullies who stamp around in their cavernous polo shirts. Parker hasn't got a car to impress the girls with either. He's trapped in his bedroom, scheming ways to equalise his situation; dreaming of, essentially, growing up. Bitten by a genetically spliced spider on a school trip, Parker comes home and strips, revealing his pale, weedy body before blanking out.

Transformation in Raimi's Spider-Man is pointedly biological, for Peter it is a turbo-charged puberty. Overnight Parker's body becomes tanned and lean, his eyesight improves and he's more able to stand up straight. Parker is momentarily allowed to feel good about himself. This aspirational reconfiguration isn't perfect though and actually signals wild, bodily variation. At first this is just an enormous pustule on Peter's hand, where the spider clamped down on him, eventually though its spinnerets woven into his wrist; silvery marks that look like crisscrossing scar tissue. Later Spider-Man film adaptations honour Steve Ditko and Stan Lee's source material, making the character's web-slingers a mechanical device dreamt up by Parker between classes. Here they're mutant orifices that have grown out of his flesh, a note from an earlier, unrealised James Cameron project that not only explains away a teenager's ability to produce still-futuristic technology but also underlines the secret metamorphosis Parker is experiencing.

The brilliant thing about this Spider-Man then is that this isn't a story that tends towards bitterness or dreary introspection, rather it's about a young man puzzling out what kind of person he wants to be and how that desire, rather than the material wealth or influence he expects, is what ends up winning over the woman he loves. The superpowers do help but, really, the biggest boon they offer is a stable physical and psychological framework for Parker's identity to grow into. Uncle Ben's great power speech isn't experienced as an abstract over the decades of an average Joe life, it's a constant mantra steering Spider-Man's sense of civic duty. This is the long-term price Parker pays, he cannot turn away from the responsibility his altered state has enabled him to embrace. Raimi undercuts this notion of ceaseless altruism with an idea straight out of his Necronomicon work: the hero as an assiduous doll to be thrown at (or through) every available brick wall.

Parker's physical suffering is scaled up in accordance with his increased endurance. Grenades explode directly into his face; flying buzz saws score tracks up and down his arms. Raimi isn't interested in superpowers as a path to complete invulnerability though, the director much more excited about pushing the limits of bodily harm within a Summer movie setting. Confrontations with Willem Dafoe's cackling, never-not-entertaining Green Goblin absolutely crackle, particularly the final dust-up. Editors Bob Murawski and Arthur Coburn portray Goblin as a series of incoming knees, the impacts to Parker's face drawn out with slow-motion photography and slobbering expulsions. Peter's face bleeds and swells; his collapse onto jagged rubble provoking tiny, defeated yelps rather than the impatient grunts of a rabid action man. Raimi is relentless, never allowing the audience to think of Parker as safe, much less invincible. Again and again Parker is presented as a teenager, out of his depth, struggling to come to terms with his new form. Raimi using unrelenting punishment as a constant prompt for empathy.

Spider-Man: The Movie

Far from feature length, Koichi Takemoto's big screened Spider-Man: The Movie is essentially a 24 minute episode of Toei's webslinger TV series shot in (or masked for) widescreen. The short length means this Spider-Man's story beats are aggressive and elliptical; frame work is thrown up with blasting expediency, their images designed to linger like radiation. The fun here is in how Toei translate Marvel's superhero and his powers. Instead of bookish nerd Peter Parker we have Takuya Yamashiro (played by Shinji Todo), a motorcycle tough with a girlfriend and two siblings. Spider-Man's powers, gymnastics aside, are technological, including a wrist computer and an enormous space-craft capable of expelling dragsters or transforming into a sword-wielding super robot.

Although the film eventually reverts to type, throwing up titanic (but barely interactive) battles between spider-machinery and a torpedo-spewing monster-of-the-week, there's a lot of action in this Spider-Man that's refreshingly assailed. On his way to the film's comparatively rote finale, Todo's webhead clambers and scutters around like a genuine house pest, avoiding kicks and stabs from a swarm of grey generics. Spider-Man even gets to embrace the unconventional warfare tactics of Ninjutsu, substituting himself for gunfire-drawing duplicates or that Kawarimi classic, a block of wood. The fun peaks with a sequence straight out of Shaft's Big Score! - Spider-Man and his gassed Interpol buddy are pursued along a flat, featureless vacant lot, buzzed by a hovering helicopter. A hunched Todo darts about, attracting attention while a cross-eyed grunt hangs out of the chopper, blazing away with a flash-paper machine gun.

Spider-Man by Shinkiro

Spider-Man by Joshua Smith