Real Name: Peter Ross
First Appearance: Spider-Boy #1 (1996)
Affiliations: Daily Bugle, Project Cadmus
Aliases: Arach-Kid, Mall-Crawler, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Boy
Creators: Karl Kesel, Mike Wieringo
Lame Abilities: Can manipulate gravity and stick to solid surfaces; enhance his strength, speed, and agility to superhuman levels; uses a special pistol that shoots synthetic spider webs.
Maybe they should have named him Spider-Lad. Spider-Boy has three strikes against him: 1) He’s a clone. 2) His name ends in “Boy.” 3) He shoots webs out of a special pistol.
Spider-Boy was a character in one of those alternate universes, where usually anything goes and bad ideas go to die. He was a clone of not only Spider-Man but of Superboy — not Superman, but Superboy — as well, only adding to the lameness. The mash-up was part of the Amalgam event in the middle ’90s, when Marvel and DC characters were combined into one. There was a Batman – Wolverine character named Dark Claw, a Man-Thing and Man-Bat character named Bat-Thing, and so on. Two series of 12 Amalgam books were released.
Super-Spider-Lad, the result of an experiment by Project Cadmus, doesn’t really have any spider-like abilities. He can manipulate gravity so that he can walk up walls, increase his strength, and jump really high. He also wears a leather jacket, which hasn’t been cool since the days of Fonzie. Thankfully, Spider-Boy has appeared in only two comics.
Spider-Man had gone 35 years without a “boy” or “lad” version. It should have stayed that way. There’s only one Spider-Man. Besides, wasn’t the original Spider-Man a boy himself?
I may not read too many comics, but seriously? Superboy and Spiderman? WTF were they thinking?
They were thinking…hey, uh, I don’t know what they were thinking–
They were thinking, “We are publishing one-shot comics based on the merger of DC and Marvel superheroes. Let’s be silly and have some fun.”
[They were thinking, “We are publishing one-shot comics based on the merger of DC and Marvel superheroes. Let’s be silly and have some fun.”]
They certainly achieved the silly part.
I can only say the only way that comic could have been worse if it were called SuperHulk. I know its redundant give me a break
I really dug the one-shot Amalgam Universe titles, presented as if they were real comics, with backstory, continuity, and good stories.
They were fun, which is more than I can say about, say, 52.
Guess I’m alone in that. But I still wish they’d grow a sense of humor at DC/Marcel and put out a new series of these little gems.
+++++
“Besides, wasn’t the original Spider-Man a boy himself?”
SO true!!!