Sometimes a movie doesn’t need a bad guy; an acorn will do. Spider-Man: About the Spider-Verse has one of each.
For the former, there’s the Spot (Jason Schwartzman), one of the weirder villains in the Spider-Man canon, a man who can generate portals at will and cause all sorts of spatial chaos. As for the bastard, that’s Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), aka Spider-Man 2099, head of an elite Spider-Mans cross-reality task force with parallel worlds. Unlike the Spot, whose whole deal is thoroughly explained About the Spider-VerseMiguel is largely a mystery in this movie – we get it some backstory to him, but they’re mostly vague hints. Those hints suggest he’s different in some way, perhaps even disturbing. And probably because About the Spider-Verse is only the first of a two-part story, the film does not follow the clues it contains.
[Ed. note: Mild spoilers for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse follow.]
For a film so packed with expositions, About the Spider-VerseThe unreliable characterization of this particular alternate universe Spider-Man can be frustrating. Throughout the movie, we learn that he’s some kind of vampire (which is never explained), that he’s secretly on some kind of drug (also not elaborated on), and most importantly, he’s the only Spider-Man who is never funny. (Insulting to all other Spider people, actually.)
Like many things in it About the Spider-Verse, it’s easier to appreciate Miguel if you know his whole deal from the Marvel comics he first appeared in. There’s a caveat here, though: While the Spider-Verse movies draw lovingly from Spidey comics and their many adaptations, most of the movies’ characterizations are original to them. Basically the backstory Miguel do coming into this movie is new to this movie – the way he mirrors Kingpin In the Spider-Verseattempting to intrude into another reality where he could start a family is not from the comics.
Image: Sony Pictures
So before you dive into this, take this information with an appropriately sized grain of salt. Because Miguel is one of the weirder versions of Spider-Man that Marvel has published a lot of of comics left, he could be eventually a lot of alien in the Spider-Verse movies.
First of all: 2099 is a year
The name “Spider-Man 2099” is not, strictly speaking, Miguel O’Hara’s nom de guerre. He’s just the Spider-Man by the year 2099. Like many weird comic book ideas, this one originated in the ’90s.
In 1992, Marvel launched a series of comics set in the future of the Marvel Universe, in the year 2099. In the 2099 comics, everything in the main Marvel comic series was canonically referred to as a legendary “Heroic Age.” Many well-known superheroes, such as Spider-Man and the Punisher, were reimagined for the new age cyberpunk dystopia, as new characters took on classic alter egos. A few others, such as Doctor Doom and the Fantastic Four, visited that future from within the existing Marvel Universe.
Spider-Man 2099 was by far the most popular and enduring character in the 2099 series. While the series concluded in 1998, Miguel appeared intermittently in Marvel comics over the following years, until 2014 brought him into the mainstream Marvel Universe in a new Spider Man 2099 series.
Current comics took Miguel back to his own time, but he’s remained a fixture ever since.
Who is Miguel O’Hara?
Created by Peter David and Rick Leonardi, Spider-Man 2099 brought a cyberpunk flair to comics’ favorite webhead, reimagining him in a techno-thriller set in the futuristic “Nueva York.”
Image: Rick Leonardi/Marvel
In 44 songs, David, Leonardi and a group of other artists made up a new story about Miguel O’Hara, a half-Irish, half-Mexican-American geneticist who worked for the mega-company Alchemax. Miguel is working on a project that will give Alchemax genetically enhanced super soldiers, but after a crisis of conscience, he wants to quit. Too bad his superiors won’t let him.
In what remains to this day one of the wildest origin stories for a popular Marvel Comics character, Miguel’s boss gives him a highly addictive designer drug called Rapture, making him dependent on Rapture’s only legal distributor: Alchemax. Miguel becomes Spider-Man in a desperate attempt to get clean, using the machine he developed for his super soldier experiments to restore his genome to its pre-Rapture state. Unfortunately, a rival sabotages that process, causing the machine to rewrite his genetics so that he is 50% spin.
The big twist here is that Miguel’s transformation is more monstrous than Peter Parker’s, adding a bit of body horror to the character. Most of their powers are similar, but Miguel’s work in slightly more gruesome ways. He clings to walls, but with claws protruding from his hands and feet. Instead of a spider sense, he has enhanced vision and hearing that causes his pupils to dilate and daylight to become unbearable for him. Long before Sam Raimi gave Peter Parker organic web shooters, Miguel O’Hara found spinnerets in his forearms. And most notably are the fangs he develops that he is unable to retract, fangs that secrete a powerful venom and force Miguel to take on a muttering effect when he speaks, to avoid being noticed.
(One of the About the Spider-Verse‘s more alarming throwaway lines are when Gwen remarks that Miguel is a ‘ninja vampire’. In the comics, he’s not a blood drinker, or undead, or anything like that – vampirism isn’t much of an issue for him. Gwen’s line may be a lighthearted reference to his creepy fangs. Unless…)
Image: Rick Leonardi/Marvel
From there, Miguel adopts a costume he bought for a Day of the Dead festival in Mexico as his new uniform, and attempts to cure his condition as he seeks revenge against those who ruined his life. He gets some help from Lyla, the AI assistant voiced by Greta Lee in the movies. She’s not really part of his crime-fighting package; she’s essentially just a more sophisticated Siri who runs Miguel’s apartment in the comics. Eventually, Miguel learns to become a hero. It rules.
2099 is just a state of mind
Knowing all this, it is quite possible that the Miguel O’Hara of About the Spider-Verse is, in fact, completely faithful to the comic books, give or take a few details. He seems to depend much more on his own terribly high-tech suit, for example.
It’s also possible that the filmmakers want to pay homage to the comic book origins before doing something radically different with him – something they’ve already started with the character, given his movie status as a multiversal Spider-Cop.
Image: Sony Pictures
Usually, Miguel is useful as one of the more prominent Spider-People in Marvel history who are not variations of Peter Parker. Unlike Peter or Miles, Miguel becomes Spider-Man as an adult, specifically a Spider-Man who initially embraces and is complicit in a corporate surveillance state. Miguel has to factor in a world he helped create, and if you put his story against Miles or Peter’s mantra of power and responsibility, he makes more sense as someone who would have a more hard-line attitude about how to put it into action. to make.
Which means, yes – he’s a bit of a jerk. But will Beyond the Spider-Verse prove that he is ultimately a jerk for the public good? Or will he stay as he is About the Spider-Verse, a jerk blinded by his own rigid moral analysis? We’ll find out 2099 2024.