Surprising as that description sounds, it follows the original appeal of Marvel Comics, described by Stan Lee as taking place in “the world outside your window.” 1933 was a period of great social change, with the excesses of the Roaring ’20s still enjoyed by some while others were consumed by the ravages of the stock market crash. Hitler has just become the German Chancellor, but a mistrust of the institutions that had failed them and a general nativism and xenophobia kept most Americans from seeing yet another world war on the horizon. Instead most Americans turned their attention to more immediate enemies, which include the upper classes who wanted to cling to Gilded Age power (and the institutions who supported them), as well as immigrants who continue to make their way to the U.S.
All of those tensions inform Spider-Man: Noir, making for a more morally complex story than one would expect. The teenage Peter Parker is still the pure-hearted kid we know and love, but the general cynicism of the world gives him no clear moral standing as he fights Norman Osborn, aka the Goblin, and his thugs.
The Spider-Man Noir of Into the Spider-Verse played more like a parody of a film noir, which literally translates to “black film,” as coined by French critics analyzing moody American crime pictures of the 1940s and ’50s made in the wake of this era. In those films, the hero was a a hardboiled cynic, a la the detectives in The Big Heat or The Maltese Falcon. But in Spider-Verse, he’s a buffoon to be laughed at for his melodrama and inability to understand color.
It’s a good joke, but not the sort of thing that can sustain an entire television series. So it’s a good thing that Spider-Noir seems to be taking its cues from the comics instead of the movie. Granted, though, that some things need to be changed. Even if Spidey remains masked, Cage sounds every bit like the 61-year-old he is, and no amount of digital de-aging will make him into the young teen from the comics. Thus he can’t quite be the same innocent he was in the comics, nor can he have a firebrand Aunt May. She and Ben would be long gone by the time sexagenarian Spidey is working. However, she could still have been a leftist, perhaps a union organizer or suffragist.
More than a matter of political preference, though, the depiction of Spider-Noir’s Aunt May matters because the series cannot be a bunch of winking nods at movies and literature of the ’30s and ’40s. That worked for maybe 10 minutes of screen time in Spider-Verse, but it won’t hold a series—in part because modern audiences don’t know enough about film noir to get the reference. Instead it needs to be a story grounded in a type of reality, especially because it has a fantasy character at the center. Spider-Man: Noir and its sequel miniseries The Eye of the Beholder are a great model for the show and, if this first teaser is any indication, the model that Spider-Noir intends to follow.
Spider-Noir will stream on MGM+ in 2026.
The first teaser for Spider-Noir looks more like the comics than it does Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Read More