Comic Book Questions Answered – where I answer whatever questions you folks might have about comic books (feel free to e-mail questions to me at brianc@cbr.com).

Reader George W. wrote in to ask, "What happened to the spider after it bit Peter Parker?"

Well, in that very first story by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in Amazing Fantasy #15, they're pretty clear that the spider dies right after biting Peter (although, it also says that spiders are insects)...

However, years later we learned in Amazing Spider-Man (Volume 3) #4 that the spider then also managed to bite Cindy Moon before it died...

Amazingly enough, though, we DO know what happened to the spider as it was the main plot line behind the launch of Spider-Man's Tangled Web, which opened with a Garth Ennis/John McCrea/James Hodgkins storyline that introduced the villainous The Thousand, who turned out to be an old classmate of Peter Parker.

The young lad...well....dude ATE the freakin' dead spider!!

In the end, The Thousand is seemingly killed, but at the end of the issue, it turns out that he survived in the consciousness of a single spider, but, well, things did not go well for that spider...

It's an open debate if the Tangled Web comics are all in continuity (some of them seem explicitly NOT in continuity), but it seems in general that if there is nothing saying otherwise, they ARE in continuity, so I believe that this technically IS the "official" answer as to what happened to the spider after it bit Peter Parker (and Cindy Moon).

Thanks for the question, George!

If anyone ELSE has a question they'd like to see me address, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com