The Amazing Spider-Man is a famously cheerful, joke-cracking superhero, but the Web-Head has had his darker moments, with the darkest being in the 2007 Back in Black comics story. Coming on the heels of Marvel’s Civil War storyline, in which Peter Peter publicly reveals himself as Spider-Man to the world in order to comply with the Superhuman Registration Act, Peter’s world is thrown into upheaval with his identity publicly known. In a horrifying turn of events, Spidey’s old enemy Wilson Fisk a.k.a. the Kingpin orders the assassination of Peter’s beloved Aunt May from prison, which sends the Wall-Crawler down a dark path.
Amid Peter’s efforts to save the dying Aunt May, he confronts Fisk in his prison block, wearing a replica of his famed black suit. Peter then horribly beats and comes close to killing Fisk in full view of the other inmates. Ultimately, Peter’s identity and Aunt May’s health are restored in the retcon of the One More Day story, but Peter’s prison brawl with the Kingpin in Back in Black is by far the darkest single issue, and single moment, ever seen on the pages of a Spider-Man comic book.
Spider-Man’s Brawl With the Kingpin Is One of His Most Purely Human Comic Book Moments
After Aunt May is left in critical condition, Peter Parker’s protective instinct kicks into overdrive, leading him to confront Wilson Fisk in his cell block with dozens of onlooking inmates watching the showdown unfold. Fisk makes the mistake of thinking that sneering about Aunt May’s condition at Peter is a good idea. After Spider-Man removes the top half to proclaim “I’m not here to kill you”, the unmasked Peter proclaims “I am”, with the Web-Head ruthlessly beating Fisk to a pulp in full view of the prison population, and making his own sneering insult to Fisk about his lack of superpowers.
The fight culminates in Peter threatening to spray an entire throat-full of webbing down Fisk’s gullet, suffocating him. However, Peter ultimately relents, stating that he will only kill Fisk if and when Aunt Many dies of her wounds, Peter having clearly put the Kingpin through what is, for him, a far crueler punishment – being humiliatingly beaten by one of his sworn enemies in full view of every inmate in the prison. Peter also departs with a word of warning for every inmate watching the fight to stay away from Aunt May and M.J., warning that “You touch them, you die”.
The Black Suit Isn’t Just a Gimmick in Spider-Man’s Fight With the Kingpin
Back in Black and the subsequent One More Day Spider-Man comic book story unfolded in 2007, which put it in close proximity with the release of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3. With that movie adapting Peter’s encounter with the alien symbiote that becomes his black suit (and which eventually jumps over to Eddie Brock to become Venom), it would be easy to see Peter returning to his black suit in the comics as a way to ride the wave of Spider-Man 3 being the public zeitgeist. While it undoubtedly helped in terms of making Peter’s ongoing comic book story that much more of a mainstream event, Peter donning his black suit in his fight with the Kingpin serves the much more direct narrative function of externalizing his mindset going into the fight.
The Spider-Man readers see in his prison brawl with the Kingpin is a far cry from the quipping, happy-go-lucky Web-Head the world first fell in love with in Amazing Fantasy #15 back in 1962. This Peter Parker is a man one inch away from Frank Castle, a man who has lost almost everything since revealing his secret identity to comply with the Superhuman Registration Act, and has been left with nothing to lose. In ordering the hit on Aunt May, the Kingpin did what no other villain has done before or since and pushed the wrong button in Spider-Man. What the Kingpin believed would be a means of crushing Spidey and leaving him open to be defeated for good instead unleashed the darkest potential hidden within Peter with his potential not only kill but to do so every bit as ruthlessly as Fisk himself after an unforgiveable line had been crossed.
Even Spider-Man Can Be Pushed Too Far (As His Smackdown With the Kingpin Shows)
Spider-Man traditionally does not take lives, but as with every superhero, the idea of a no-kill policy is a principal that can, often is, and arguably should be put to the test. Peter’s prison smackdown with the Kingpin in retaliation for the attack on Aunt May is perhaps the truest testimony in all of his comic book history that Peter Parker, even with is arachnid powers, is still human. As a human, Peter feels all the same emotions we do, including joy, sorrow, fear, and rage. The latter is the emotion that Fisk foolishly chose to toy with in Peter, or perhaps the one that Fisk even assumed the Peter had in a low or suppressed state, and he paid the price for it.
Spider-Man endures as one of the greatest superheroes ever created because of how much his powers combined with his cheerful personality bring out the best of who he is inside – the geeky science nerd, the intrepid photojournalist, the acrobatic crime-fighter, and the Web-Slinger with great power who always uses it with great responsibility. In trying to kill Aunt May, Wilson Fisk learned first hand what it takes to bring out Spider-Man’s dark side, and he did so far more thoroughly than the original black suit ever did – all the more reason why Spider-Man donning a version of his black suit to savagely beat Fisk within an inch of his life exemplifies their fight as the darkest Spider-Man moment in his long comic book history.
The post I Think This Is Spider-Man’s Darkest Comics Moment (& It Involves The Black Suit) appeared first on ComicBook.com.
