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The best things in the Spider-Man comics have changed the way that superhero stories looked over the years. However, there have been over 60 years of Spider-Man comics and not all of them can be great. A lot of bad things have happened in the Spider-Man comics, and these ten did huge damage to Spider-Man as a character.
10) Spider-Man Leaving the Avengers
Spider-Man joining the Avengers was a huge change for the character. Spider-Man was a reserve Avenger starting in the ’80s, but he never joined the main team until 2005’s New Avengers. This version of the team saw Spider-Man and Wolverine joining the team, and started off Spider-Man’s tenure as an Avengers. Spider-Man stayed a member of the team until the Superior Spider-Man years, and played an important part in Avengers’ adventure. Spider-Man joining the Avengers showed how integral he was to the Marvel Universe, and since he’s left the team, he’s never seemed as important as he did in the ’00s and early ’10s.
9) Character Regression
One of the biggest problems with Spider-Man comics is the character regression that has been part and parcel of Spider-Man for almost 20 years now. There was a time, from his beginning to about 2007, where Spider-Man grew. He went from high school to college to adulthood and marriage. Readers may have been younger, but mature Spider-Man appealed to them. However, Marvel brass decided that Spider-Man worked better as a poor loser with no girlfriend, and that has been the default setting of the character. Spider-Man always goes back to being lonely and poor, and it’s a huge problem with continually reading Spider-Man comics.
8) Todd McFarlane and Erik Larsen Leaving the Spider-Man Comics
The ’80s contain some of the best Spider-Man stories of all time, and the later phases of the decades saw two of the most popular Spider-Man creators ever joining the book. Artists Todd McFarlane and Erik Larsen became the two main artists of The Amazing Spider-Man and Spider-Man, and they gave readers some of the greatest Spider-Man art of all time. Both of them were also pretty good writers, although Larsen is better, and Spider-Man books were at their height while they were working on them. However, McFarlane was one of the main agitators of the Image Comics Exodus, and both of them left Marvel in 1992. The Spider-Man books spent the rest of the decade falling from grace.
7) Spider-Man: Reign
Spider-Man: Reign is basically The Dark Knight Returns of the Spider-Man comics, but in the worst way. The book took place in an alternate future where Spider-Man had retired after the death of Mary Jane and New York City became a totalitarian state, having to put the costume back on to save the day. I always liked the book, but it’s impossible to deny how much it depended on its edginess, including introducing the idea that Spider-Man’s radioactive fluids killed Mary Jane. It’s gone down as one of the biggest missteps in Spider-Man history, but it still got a sequel, as much from its infamy as any love that readers had for it.
6) “Sins Past”
Writer J. Michael Straczynski’s run on The Amazing Spider-Man is a highlight of the 21st century Spider-Man comics, but it wasn’t perfect. The first indication of this was “Sins Past”, a story that established that at some point before they died, Norman Osborn and Gwen Stacy had sex, having two children who aged quicker because of the Goblin formula. This story was hated immediately thanks to its controversial retcon, and it’s looked at among the worst Spider-Man stories of all time. “Sins Past” would eventually get retconned out of existence, yet the stink of it will never go away.
