Rob London
@roblondon
Marvel Research Team/Handbook guy. Senior Writer at . He/him/his.
This is all making me realize that I started reading Spider-Man comics in 1995, when Amazing Fantasy #15 was an impossibly distant 33 years ago…and that 1995 is now 31 years ago. Wallopin’ web-snappers, indeed.
He’s also become a hot Zoomer with a septum ring, setting him up as a love interest for Gwen! I feel old.
In Spider-Gwen: The Ghost Spider #5, by @stephsmash.bsky.social and Paolo Villanelli, we see that Fabian is all grown up, and following his dad into the family business!
Anyway. Cut to 2024. Earth-65’s Gwen Stacy, alias Ghost-Spider, has been newly spackled into Earth-616, and she is single and looking to mingle.
If you’ve gotten this far into my comic book blathering, you probably know the deal with the sliding timescale of comics: in a nutshell, while it has been almost 30 (!) years since 1998 in real time, in the world of the comics, only a couple years, at most, have elapsed.
DeFalco did return to the plotline in his alternate-future Spider-Girl book; he introduced Fabian as the new Black Tarantula, an enemy/ally/love interest for Mayday Parker. Note that he’s “barely twenty” here in the Spider-Girl future, making him maybe five years old in the Marvel Comics of 1998.
DeFalco never quite got to finish the Black Tarantula story satisfactorily, thanks to the disastrous Mackie/Byrne reboot of the Spider-books, but the Black Tarantula did bounce around Daredevil for a while in the 2000s, when DD was leading the Hand.
It turned out that the Black Tarantula had come to menace New York because his ex-lover had relocated there with their young (repeat: young) son, Fabian.
Back in the late 1990s, Tom DeFalco, Steve Skroce, and Joe Bennett introduced a new villain into the pages of Amazing Spider-Man: a super-powered South American crimelord called the Black Tarantula.
As John Byrne asserted in his Sensational She-Hulk series, comics characters only age when they’re off-panel. Long-time Spider-fans recently got a reminder of this…
He’d be even more insulted by this these days. (Unless he’s in one of his “evil” phases.)
If I had a nickel for every time a Supergirl movie had a promo deal with a fried chicken restaurant…
…but by the next issue, they were apparently informed that Rogue had that new Chris Bachalo costume. (Art by Mike Weiringo.)
They came very, VERY close in the closing pages of 2006’s Ms. Marvel #8, by Brian Reed and Roberto de la Torre…
RIP to Gerry Conway, who accomplished so many things in comics, but will always have a special place in my heart for penning the first two back issues I ever bought. The wacky villains and overlapping subplots of those issues inspired my lifelong obsession with comics history.
Thus, the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe was released the next year, and Spider-Man was officially deemed to be capable of lifting 10 tons. Thus, all arguments about Spider-Man’s strength ended forever, right? Okay, maybe not…
Clearly, there was a demand to actually quantify Spider-Man’s strength, and that’s exactly what happened in 1981’s ASM Annual #15, courtesy of Mark Gruenwald and Bob Hall. This feature attempted to divide Marvel’s heroes into strength tiers, and apparently people got REALLY MAD about it.
Stern’s successor, Tom DeFalco, had a similarly expansive view of Spider-Man’s abilities, leading to a two-parter where Spidey beats the brakes off onetime Galactus herald Firelord.