If you’ve been following our comic reviews every week, you’ll know that I am more excited about the Spider-Verse event, than anything else happening in comics today. This event isn’t just happening in comics either! If you’re a fan of Disney XD’s Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon series, you’ll notice that episode 9 to 13 are Spider-Verse related! The Spider-Verse event is also spilling into video games with some iOS games as well. This is the first major comic event to cross media platforms like this!
For people who have been reading Spider-Man for as long as me or longer, this event is incredibly fun because it brings back versions of Spidey that some of us absolutely love. My favorite episodes of Spider-Man the Animated Series was the last few where Madame Web had to pull 6-7 different Spidey’s through time to stop Spider-Carnage, and this comic event is like that but on steroids. In this event, they’re pulling from almost every single version of Spider-Man that they’ve ever conceived. Even the most hardcore Spidey fan out there may not realize how many versions of Spider-Man there has been. Don’t read Spidey but love the movies/tv shows? Well no need to fret! Your friendly neighborhood Geeks With Wives is here to give you a short lesson in Spider-Man 101.
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We’re going to start with the Spider-Verse banner art and work our way from left to right giving you the names of each version alongside pictures. There are a total of 38 versions of Spidey in this Spider-Verse banner alone, and even more masks on the Spider-Verse cover art. If you want to know more about a specific version, by knowing the name and Earth number, you’ll have the groundwork to begin researching your favorites! (Use the Back, Forward and Pause buttons to navigate. The number in the photos corresponds to the ones on the banner. Unlike most other pages who did this, our list is 100% accurate!)
Now these are just the Spider-men shown in this promotional artwork for the Spider-verse. Not shown here are a few other Spider-men that we have already seen in the comics or the previews. Doc Ock, the Superior Spiderman, has been rounding up a team of Spider-men (and women) to face off against Morlun. These are some Spider-men that are missing from that banner:
Otto is forming this super group of Spider-heroes in the nick of time, because Morlun has already claimed some Spider-lives. This following slideshow shows a few of the Spider-men Otto didn’t get to fast enough. During Otto’s first few jumps into time, he found these Spider-men dead already:
So we have a total of 50 Spider-heroes so far in the Spider-Verse! You may think that’s a lot of Spider-men, but there are a few left I would love to see. In the Spider-Verse cover art shown here:
You can see even more masks than those shown up above. Some that even I don’t recognize. The writers are probably going to end up limiting the Spider-verse to around 50 or so, mainly because it would soon become hard to follow with more than that, and Marvel doesn’t want to risk confusing Spider-Man fans who may not know who all of these Spider-men are. But if I had my way, I’d want to see just a few more notable Spider-men:
If you look close enough at the cover art with all the masks, you can pick out Dusk, Ricochet, Hornet, Prodigy, Spider-Carnage and Spider-Man Unlimited’s masks, so there is hope for these! It’s a bit too hard to see the face mask for Spider-Boy, and I’m not even sure if Marvel owns the writes to any Amalgam characters or not, so he may be a stretch.
This is pretty much a list of every awesome incarnation of Spider-Man ever made, and luckily for us we’re getting to see all of these versions of our friendly neighborhood wall-crawler already in the Edge of Spider-Verse and Superior Spider-Man comics! It would have taken a TON of space to write about every version of Spidey, so instead I’m leaving it up to you guys whether or not you want to know more about a particular one. Just search the name or Spider-Man Earth-(number) and you’ll find everything the internet knows about that character! Hopefully I’ve opened your eyes to how many versions of one hugely popular character there can be, and make sure you don’t miss the Spider-Verse! It’s multiple universes in the making.