SPOILER WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Nick Spencer and Ryan Ottley’s Amazing Spider-Man series, Issue #4 of which is on sale right now.


Nick Spencer and Ryan Ottley’s Amazing Spider-Man series has largely been concerned with the classic Wall-Crawler debate between great power and great responsibility. So far, the series has tackled this conundrum by bodily splitting Peter Parker from Spider-Man. As nothing more than a man, Peter Parker is free to go about his civilian life while the masked vigilante Spider-Man cleans up New York City. Marvel canon is littered with stories about clone and alternate-reality Spider-Men, but the ongoing series is starting to feel like an inversion of Venom's origins.

As most Spider-Man fans will likely already know, Venom wasn’t always a separate entity from Spider-Man. The symbiote was first an alternate costume donned by Peter Parker in Secret Wars after his standard underoos were shredded by the Absorbing Man in a distant galaxy. When Peter returned to Earth, he came back with a fancy new black costume. For a while, Peter thought the costume was the bee’s knees. Who wouldn’t want a sentient alien superhero costume that obeyed your every mental command, after all? In time, though, the reality of the situation chilled Peter’s excitement.

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Recent events in Spencer and Ottley’s Amazing Spider-Man mirror Peter’s journey from “oh cool” to “oh no” first glimpsed in the Venom arc. As is often the case when weighing most binary arguments, the situations are aggressively opposed but the result is similar. For example, in the Venom arc, Peter Parker is fused with another entity (a totally separate personality, if we’re to glean anything from Eddie Brock’s experience with the symbiote). Amazing Spider-Man, on the other hand, is wholly concerned with the separation of entities -- Peter Parker from Spider-Man. In both cases, though, the result is a violation of Peter’s “with great power comes great responsibility” mantra.

The issue with Spencer and Ottley’s split Spider-Man is simply that he lacks the life experiences that led Peter Parker to become a great superhero. To briefly summarize the ongoing story, Amazing Spider-Man #4 revealed that split Spider-Man has forgotten Uncle Ben, who is canonically the deliverer of the great responsibility mantra. As a result, Peter Parker never matured past a petulant nerdling. Mentally, he’s still the same brat who was fawned over by his aunt and uncle, became vindictive when girls rejected him and just generally thought the world owed him something. As a result, he lacks the same moral compass Peter had when he was the one under the mask.

On the other hand, Spider-Man’s Venom costume fully debuted back in Amazing Spider-Man #252 and was the result of a cosmic adventure the Web-Slinger embarked on in Secret Wars. At first, Peter saw the costume as downright nifty, so much so that he didn’t even take up Reed Richards’ offer to examine the suit for quite a while. That’s decision that would come back to haunt Peter, because while the suit was instrumental in taking down baddies like Puma and the Rose, it harbored a darker side.

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At the time, though, readers didn’t know the suit was actually a living organism commonly referred to as a symbiote. The black costume was just seen as a replacement for Spider-Man’s typical fare, and the reaction was… vehement. Nonetheless, after suit made its first appearance, Marvel began to seed Amazing Spider-Man with hints that the Wall-Crawler’s new duds weren’t all the were cracked up to be. The first hint came when the costume ominously slithered out of its resting place in Peter’s bedroom and back onto him after he had discarded it for the night. Not exactly a typical superhero costume, that.

Later, the suit would start really acting out. Spider-Man was dating Felicia Hardy, Black Cat, at the time, and in one very dramatic scene Mary Jane Watson confronts Peter in his apartment after she narrowly evades an attack from Puma. Black Cat enters while Peter is in his civilian clothing, effectively confirming for Mary Jane that Peter is Spider-Man. Mary Jane storms off, and Black Cat is about to do the same, except Peter’s suit instinctively webs her to keep her from leaving (this also somehow resolves the conflict). The situation with the black costume only gets worse from there.

It’s later revealed that Peter has been having terrible dreams about his costumes fighting, and that the costume itself has been hijacking Peter’s body and fighting crime at night. When Peter finally visits Reed, he discovers the suit is, in fact, an alien symbiote that is looking to make the connection permanent. Peter removes the suit with a crushing sonic attack, which is quite tragic in retrospect, as the symbiote just wanted to help, just wanted to do some good. It’s main problem was that it was so absolutely alien.

Both the split Spider-Man story and the Venom arc are about control, which is a vital element of Spider-Man’s quest to balance power and responsibility. The Venom arc saw Peter Parker fused with an alien identity that enhanced his abilities but wrenched his control away from him in key moments: webbing Black Cat, tackling crime while he was asleep. The symbiote wanted to make the bond permanent, to wriggle even deeper inside its host and change Peter into a completely new lifeform, so to speak. The process was believed to be irreversible at the time, and it would have fundamentally changed Peter forever. He would not have been the same Spider-Man.

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In many ways, split Peter Parker is like the symbiote in the latest Amazing Spider-Man arc. He looks at the amoral split Spider-Man and wants to do good. He wants to help. As weird as it sounds, he literally wants to be inside split Spider-Man to help in the best way he knows how. For the Venom symbiote, that meant offering Peter all the benefits of a shapeshifting alien race that can also act as a living weapon. For Peter, it means offering guidance through the painful memories of an imperfect life that gifted him the often-burdensome ability to discern right from wrong; that ol’ stubborn Parker moral compass.

While one story is firmly about the separation of two identities and the havoc that wrecks on Spider-Man’s commitment to his power and responsibility mantra, the other is about their fusion. While we know how Spider-Man’s arc with Venom plays out, we’ll have to see how Spencer and Ottley resolve theirs to find out what it really has to say about Peter’s guiding ethos.