Spider-Man: Brand New Day might be named for the 2008 storyline immediately in the aftermath of the controversial “One More Day,” but this week’s first trailer for the movie revealed a lot more intriguing comic inspirations for the film than anyone ever could’ve expected.
While the film is still clearly keeping a lot of cards close to its chest, one central factor shown off in the trailer was the fact that Peter undergoes some stress-induced changes to his powers, seemingly getting himself a series of new abilities and upgrades in the process (including the return of organic webshooters, which have had a very weird history of going from an adaptive film choice in Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider-Man to an addition to the comics a few years later, to being retconned out of the comics in, ironically, the events of “Brand New Day,” and then now brought back to the big screen in Brand New Day!).
Those abilities, and the way Peter gets them hinted at in the trailers—emerging out of a cocoon as mysterious voiceovers discuss the life cycles of spiders and their rebirth—have comics fans intrigued. Although Peter has had a few storylines dealing with wild mutations of his powers and his physical form in the past (six-armed Spider-Man, anyone?), a lot of this has started sounding like one big, weird arc: “The Other.”
What Is “The Other” About?
“The Other” (or to give it its full title, “The Other: Evolve or Die”) is a 2006 crossover story arc between three then-ongoing Spider-Man comics: Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, by Peter David and Mike Wieringo; Marvel Knights Spider-Man, by Reginald Hudlin and Pat Lee; and Amazing Spider-Man, by J. Michael Straczynski and Mike Deodato Jr. Told in four parts, the story largely sees Spider-Man grapple with his mortality when encounters with villains new and old begin to reveal a shocking secret: Peter Parker is dying, and no one in the world can do anything to stop it.
The bulk of “The Other” is actually about this, as Peter, haunted by strange dreams and visions of the return of the sinister Morlun—a strange kind of almost energy vampire who travels the multiverse targeting the Spider-heroes of their realities to kill them and feast on their lifeforce—slowly discovers that he is very sick, and that no one, from ordinary doctors to the superhero world’s smartest minds to supernatural experts like Doctor Strange, can figure out what the cause of Peter’s increasing destabilization is.
Aside from an international quest to try and find a cause for his malady, most of this portion of “The Other” becomes about Peter accepting his impending death and using what time he has left to spend it with his wife, Mary Jane, and set up her and Aunt May for life after he’s gone. The trio sneaks into Latveria to use Doctor Doom’s time machine to revisit the day Peter’s parents left him with May and Ben; MJ and Peter use one of Tony Stark’s satellite pods to watch the sun rise over Earth.
Also, he gets cornrows in Wakanda while visiting T’Challa for medical tests. It’s very silly, and do not expect Brand New Day to touch that page even remotely.
What Parts of “The Other” Are Important to Spider-Man: Brand New Day?
It’s only really the last act of “The Other” that seems like it’s going to have any carryover in whatever spin on it Brand New Day has—the trailer at least implies that whatever strange feeling Peter has before he falls unconscious and starts experiencing changes is relatively short compared to the extended, impending nature of his sickness in “The Other.”
Having accepted his rapidly oncoming death, Peter fights the returned Morlun one last time in a do-or-die scrap. Except, this time it’s Peter on the end of the “die” part of that equation: despite seemingly trying to go all out against the villain, Morlun incapacitates Peter and beats him within an inch of his life, brutalizing his face beyond the point of recognition and even tearing out his left eye. He flees the scene when police arrive in the hopes he’ll be able to drain Peter’s life force in private when his broken and battered body is taken to a local hospital, where it’s made clear to the Avengers and Mary Jane that there is nothing they can do for Spider-Man but wait for him to die.
When Morlun arrives at the hospital and attacks MJ so he can feed, however, Peter suddenly awakens with a feral strength, his remaining eye glossing over and his teeth turning into fangs, as he hisses and savages Morlun, killing him almost immediately—before dying himself.
It’s here that things start getting weird: Tony Stark takes Peter’s body back to Avengers Tower so the world doesn’t learn that Spider-Man is dead, and as MJ, Aunt May, and his fellow Avengers begin to accept that Peter is really gone, they discover his corpse has been, for want of a better word, shed. As the Avengers try to search for whatever broke out of Peter’s body and fled the tower, the reader discovers a massive webbed cocoon has formed under the Brooklyn Bridge, inside which Peter is undergoing a physical and spiritual metamorphosis.
Encountering a giant spider deity who tells Peter that it represents the embodiment of the spider aspect of his self—and that he has spent too long embracing only the human side of his transformed dichotomy rather than the mystical elements of his spider-side, scared of what physical transformations could come of accepting it. After Peter agrees to accept this balance and the spider-within, he re-emerges from the cocoon completely revitalized. Follow-up tests by the Avengers discover that Peter’s body has been regenerated to perfect condition, with not just his eye restored but even his tonsils, which were removed as a child, with all signs of age or wear from his prior life totally erased. He also begins to show signs of increased agility, strength, and awareness beyond his usual power levels.
Accepting his new lease on life, Peter returns to Avengers Tower to find his old shed body has been colonized by a massive swarm of pirate spiders, becoming a sentient host. After chasing it across New York, the new being communicates with him, telling Peter that they are two parts of the same whole and that Peter was saved from death by a god called the Great Weaver, despite the protests of other deities, making him the target of cosmic forces well beyond him before disappearing (this figure eventually becomes known as Ero, a physical manifestation of the mysterious “Other” that Peter encountered while cocooned).
While on a patrol to clear his head and grapple with his encounter with the spider deity, Peter comes across a collapsed building and discovers even more new abilities: not only have the stingers that briefly emerged from his wrists when he killed Morlun returned, but he’s also gained night vision, the ability to sense vibrations throughout his webbing, and even adhesion on his back, allowing him to carry people on his back hands-free from embracing the Other.
What Could Adapting “The Other” Mean for the MCU?
We already know from Brand New Day‘s trailer that, if anything from “The Other,” we’re getting Peter undergoing a physical transformation that gives him some changes to his powers. We see his new organic webbing in action after he emerges from the cocoon, and in the trailer’s climax, we see his eyes turn pitch black, which could be a nod to the more animalistic form briefly seen in the comics.
Whether or not the MCU wants to dig into a more mystical and supernatural element of Spider-Man’s powers—tying him to cosmic deities and the idea of the “spider totem”—remains to be seen, especially when Brand New Day has been pitched as something of a reset for the character outside of his involvement with the Avengers and his past cinematic selves in No Way Home. But should the film bring in more elements from “The Other,” one idea feels particularly tempting: the introduction of Morlun.
Although No Way Home already covered the idea of there being multiple Spider-Heroes across the multiverse, positioning Morlun as a future foe for Peter sets the stage for a more specific exploration of that Spider-Verse concept (Morlun’s next major appearance in the comics after his seeming death in “The Other” is, in fact, in the Spider-Verse event in 2014, which has gone on to form the inspirational basis for Sony’s animated trilogy of Spider-Verse films). But with the fate of the multiverse imperiled by the events of Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, the latter of which Spider-Man is expected to appear in, is now really the time to start potentially laying the groundwork for a live-action Spider-Verse?
Maybe it’ll help set the stage for something a bit smaller—instead of simply establishing a basis for Spider-Heroes to have their own specific slice of multidimensional crossovers, perhaps Morlun could exist as a bridge to bring just a few of those other Spider-Heroes to the MCU, like Miles Morales (who of course stars in the animated Spider-Verse films) and other popular characters from those events, like Spider-Gwen.
We’ll see just how much of “The Other” ends up mattering to the MCU when Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings into theaters July 31.
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