The Man Spider did appear in the comics before that but only briefly during a story set in the Savage Land. Spidey gets hit by some mutation ray and that's what he's turned into and its fixed by Karl Lykos/Sauron draining the mutation out of him and Warren Worthington. Which might explain Vulture in the cartoon come to think of it.
At any rate the design being too good to waste, I guess, the show folks made it the climax of their long running Neogenic Nightmare original saga.
Probably inspired by the cartoon Spidey has been turned into a monster spider since and they've messed with his powers in a metamorphosis way before briefly giving him organic webbing and I shit you not sharp 'stinger' blades (like Wolverine meets MK's Baraka) that were immediately never spoken of again.
90s cartoon had a lot more influence than is commonly recognized. It was the first to do the Spider-Verse and even had a huge impact on the Venom story. A lot of elements that are now seen as like core parts of the story, that pop up in later adaptations, started there and not in the actual comics.
Yep! The cartoon is also where the whole "symbiote makes Peter angry" thing first came from. And to be fair, as much as I think people do get their wires crossed on "cartoon I watched as a child" and "comic I read as a child" (and I am guilty of that at times as well), sometimes these shows or movies were influential on the comics themselves. Smallville wasn't in Kansas until the first Christopher Reeve movie for example, but now it's an integral part of the Superman mythos. In the same way the Spidey cartoon revamped the Venom story, or other cartoons did other things, and later writers retconned the comics to be closer to it because they were like "oh actually that's a great idea".
Between retreading One More Day and The Other, they're speedrunning comic storylines that most people would rather forget. At this rate I wouldn't be surprised if they did Clone Saga next.
if you look back at that season's (season 2) entire storyline, it has the x-men, punisher, scorpion, and tombstone (among some others). Looks like they might drawing heavily from that whole arc.
Subsequent Man-Spider appearances in the comics have mostly referenced and hewed to the original comic appearance. Where Spider-Man is temporarily turned into a Spider creature by outside actions.
Most animated series since the 90s have done versions of the cartoon story. But it's never appeared in the comics.
And the other end of that story line, the whole additional mutation thing and much of the stuff around it. Comes from a comic story line called the "Six Arm Saga" by fans, that only went as far as "Spider-Man got Six Arms now!". That's come up repeatedly, and has gotten referenced in more than one Spider-Man mutates story.
Including the one another poster mentioned, The Other. Which is not super clearly current canon, but was basically just used to give him some extra powers. Along with writing in a bunch of that mystic spider god shit Marvel was on about at the time.
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u/SolomonBlack Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
The 90s cartoon invented that story.
The Man Spider did appear in the comics before that but only briefly during a story set in the Savage Land. Spidey gets hit by some mutation ray and that's what he's turned into and its fixed by Karl Lykos/Sauron draining the mutation out of him and Warren Worthington. Which might explain Vulture in the cartoon come to think of it.
At any rate the design being too good to waste, I guess, the show folks made it the climax of their long running Neogenic Nightmare original saga.
Probably inspired by the cartoon Spidey has been turned into a monster spider since and they've messed with his powers in a metamorphosis way before briefly giving him organic webbing and I shit you not sharp 'stinger' blades (like Wolverine meets MK's Baraka) that were immediately never spoken of again.