Marvel Shares First Look At Spider-Man’s Horrific Next Appearance, And It’s Grotesque In The Best Way

Peter Parker is about to learn about power and responsibility in the most harrowing ways imaginable when Midnight Spider-Man #1 launches this spooky season. Having a Marvel Comics universe devoted to horror is an absolute godsend for every character involved, as it’s sure to challenge and rock their mythologies and status quos, and this is especially advantageous for an iconic Marvel superhero like Spider-Man, who lends himself to the horror genre quite fluidly.

For instance, arachnophobia is one of the most common phobias, and many classic Spider-Man stories have delved into how frightening his relation to spiders can be, such as those featuring Man-Spider, Pestilence, and Spiders-Man. That said, Midnight Spider-Man basically strips itself of the tight leash that many other Spider-Man comics have had, and the select pages and panels that have been shared recently do a phenomenal job of emphasizing how gravely terrifying this series will be.

Marvel Shadow-Dropped An Early Look At Its Midnight Universe

Last week, Marvel Comics released an unlettered, black-and-white “ashcan” edition previewing a few pages each from its three upcoming Midnight universe books. For Midnight Spider-Man, in particular, this ashcan depicts how starkly young Peter looks, how manga-inspired ScieTronc’s interior artwork appears to be, and how unnerving and disgusting the series’ body horror is.

It’s admittedly a bit difficult to parse what is happening in the third page of this preview, what with it being unlettered and uncolored, but also because Peter looks like he’s ant-sized compared to the corpses that lie in front of him. This page also seemingly dedicates three panels to the same spider, and also features a spider on Peter as he sobs in fear (it’s unclear if this is the same spider, or one that is emerging from within Peter’s shirt).

Midnight Spider-Man Is Delectably Disgusting

The colored and lettered preview of the first ashcan page has since been unveiled, revealing that the adult couple he was living with is his parents, not Aunt May and Uncle Ben (not at first, anyway), and it may well be those same parents whom he finds as gigantic carcasses, with an equally enormous spider gradually emerging from one of their orbital cavities. This suggests that there’s a bit of a time jump between then and when he visits Oscorp, with Peter now living with his aunt and uncle following the deaths of his parents.

Maybe hearing or seeing that his parents died elicits the horrific imagery of his cat’s death? The possibilities are endless, as the ashcan pages are not consecutive and only offer glimpses at how the story will be presented in issue #1.

For all we know, this could be a nightmare sequence that Peter eventually wakes up from. However, we’ve seen that Peter finds his beloved pet Bamf in this decomposed, hollow state in his backyard, and with a spider crawling out of its eye socket, too, suggesting that everyone and everything Peter loves in this universe ends up dying in the same gruesome fashion.

From what we’ve seen so far, Phillip Kennedy Johnson and ScieTronc’s Midnight Spider-Man series has all the makings of a terrifying new origin story for the wall-crawler. We don’t yet know what powers this gross spider attached to Peter’s chest may imbue him with, but we can guarantee that arachnophobes who ironically find themselves to be fans of Spider-Man will have a tough time reading Midnight Spider-Man.

Midnight Spider-Man #1 is scheduled to be released on October 7, 2026.