‘Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’: Grounding Peter Parker in a ‘Street Level’ Alternate Timeline

Head writer Jeff Trammell and supervising director Mel Zwyer pay homage to the early comics with a "moving comic" style in CG while introducing a surprising supporting cast.

Marvel’s new Disney+ animated series, “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man,” finds Peter Parker (Hudson Thames, reprising his role from “What If…?”) in an alternate timeline during his freshman year in high school. This results in some surprising interactions: Pete befriends goth girl Nico Minoru (Grace Song) from The Runaways comics at Midtown School of Science and Technology and partners on a school project with football star Lonnie Lincoln (Eugene Byrd), who later becomes supervillain Tombstone. In addition, he’s bitten by a spider falling out of a portal during a fight between Doctor Strange (Robin Atkin Downes) and Venom, and he’s mentored by Norman Osborn (Colman Domingo) instead of Tony Stark.

These twists are part of a retcon subversion from head writer and executive producer Jeff Trammell (“Craig of the Creek”). “It was definitely our goal to create something that felt very new and very fresh,” he told IndieWire. “This isn’t a Spidey in space story. This isn’t hugely fantastical, for the most part. It’s very grounded dealing with street-level stuff, which, I feel, is a great place for the character.”

“Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” is both retro and contemporary, sporting its own “moving comic” hand-drawn style inspired by the early comics (with 3D shading from Polygon Pictures) and kicking off with the hip-hop theme song “Neighbor Like Me,” from The Math Club, which samples the original animated theme song.

“ There’s so many different Spider-Man,” added Trammell, “but finding one that feels unique if you were to pop ours next to 50 others was important. We were going back to the roots of [illustrators] Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and John Romita Jr., from the Silver Age comics [1956-1973], and just embracing the past for the look of the show, because we’ve never seen it done before.”

But they didn’t want it to be retro to the point of looking stiff or anachronistic. “We wanted to honor the older fans that grew up with the original comic books, and at the same time not ostracize the younger or new fans that have absolutely no connection with the old comic books,” supervising director Mel Zwyer told IndieWire.

This Peter is resourceful in creating his homemade suit. Along with the gym pants, sneakers, goggles, blue sweatshirt, red undershirt, knee pads, and awkward web-shooters, there’s an inspired touch: a pressurized canister on his backpack. “We were trying to find something original,” continued Zwyer. “I remember thinking  scuba divers have a little emergency spare, like an octopus, breather type, and I felt like that would’ve been a good, little thing.”

But Zwyer thought long and hard about how the web-shooter would work for a 14-year-old. “Being able to come up with this substance and make this tank, I was like, OK, I jammed a bunch of webs into this tank. It’s pressurized. I turn this, I do this. It feels oddly grounded for a superhero thing,” he said.

One of the more interesting aspects of “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” is its expanded view of the neighborhood, which is filled with petty criminals and warring street gangs. In fact, there’s a family drama subplot involving Lonnie becoming part of a gang to save his kid brother.

 ”I think a big thing for this show is so much of Peter’s supporting cast changes, and that opens up a lot of avenues for storytelling in the community,” Trammell said. “So being able to add a character like Nico Minoru, who he would never interact with in the comics, or Lonnie Lincoln this early on, makes them such a big part of his journey. I think it really colors who Peter is and the choices he makes in a fun way and who Spider-Man becomes.”

However, Peter’s mentorship with the compassionate Oswald has the most depth. The ambitious industrialist has great plans for crime fighting and sees Peter’s Spidey powers as vital to his strategy. But he has to learn to let Peter be Peter. This becomes most apparent during a series of failed Spider-Man suit experiments before they compromise on the white and blue Oscorp suit, loosely based on the Future Foundation suit from the comics.

“We had a way of making it our own,” said Trammell. “ Peter has an idea of what Spider-Man is, and other people have other ideas. So, I think this is the perfect juxtaposition of, if Peter had made this suit, maybe it would look different, but he didn’t. So that in itself is a great lesson of who Spider-Man is, and who he’s becoming as the show goes on.”

The first two episodes of “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” are now streaming on Disney+, with the remaining eight episodes premiering in groups of two or three every Wednesday through February 19.