SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #302 by Chip Zdarsky, Joe Quinones, Joe Rivera, Jordan Gibson and Travis Lanham, on sale now.
Outside of his relationship to his Aunt May, Peter Parker’s larger family isn’t something that’s dealt with too much. His parents were spies for S.H.I.E.L.D. and died when he was a young boy, and outside of Uncle Ben and Aunt May, his extended family really hasn't been explored at all.
Except that is, for Teresa Durand, his maybe-sister. The recently-resurfaced Teresa has played a major part of the current run of Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, still reeling from revelations about her own past and searching for her place in the world. Now, the title's latest issue seems to settle the question of Teresa’s relationship to Peter for good, and it just may change the face of the Spider-Man books forever.
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Family Business
Teresa was first introduced in Marvel’s original graphic novel Amazing Spider-Man: Family Business by Mark Waid, James Robinson, Werther Dell'Edera, Gabrielle Dell’Otto and Joe Caramagna. The project was sold on the premise that Peter Parker discovered a secret sister he didn’t know about, but it turned out to be a bit more complicated than that. As it turned out, the Kingpin had the villainous mutant Mentallo meddle with Teresa’s mind to make her believe she was the daughter of Richard and Mary Parker, when in actuality she had nothing to do with them.
The graphic novel ended on the possibility that she may actually be Peter's sister, but that plot line remained unexplored for years. Then, Chip Zdarsky and Adam Kubert re-introduced her to the Marvel Universe in Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #1, and she's been a mainstay of the tile ever since.
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Teresa's return has her seeking Peter’s help when she learned of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s top secret Project: Twilight; a detailed plan on how to take down each and every supervillain and superhero in the Marvel Universe. While still on the run from S.H.I.E.L.D. and its Gray Blade division, The Tinkerer enacted his plan to bring the alien Vedomi to Earth, and Teresa accompanied Peter and J. Jonah Jameson into the past via one of Victor Von Doom’s time platforms, in search for a way to repel the Vedomi invasion. Of course, when time traveling, revelations are bound to be unearthed...
Sister Act
Once in the past, the three of them split up with Peter teaming up with his younger self, Jonah teaming up with his younger self and Teresa seeking out her mentor Nick Fury in hopes of learning more about her true origins. After gaining access to a secret safehouse belonging to Richard and Mary Parker, Teresa finds documents that seem to prove that she was in fact their daughter. However, this being superhero comics there’s always the chance that this could be a red herring. Just because the Parkers seemed to have had a daughter named Teresa, it doesn’t mean that the two are one and the same, after all. Or, there's the very real possibility that the documents were simply part of the Parker’s undercover mission.
What is most likely to happen is that the events happening away from Teresa such as the seeming death of the younger J. Jonah Jameson and Green Goblin’s early discovery of Spider-Man’s identity will lead to this timeline diverging from the primary Marvel Universe history to the point that it can’t be considered reliable. That doesn’t really matter, though, because one thing that this series has stressed since its inception is that whether they’re blood related or not, Peter loves and trusts Teresa like a sister, and as far as he’s concerned, she is a Parker. It’s understandable that she wants to learn the truth about where she came from, but that’s not going to change who she is today.
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