It’s been four years and thousands of racist tweets since someone first jokingly suggested that Community’s Donald Glover should play Peter Parker in the rebooted The Amazing Spider-Man film series. Finally he’s getting his chance to sling webs as the Ultimates Universe’s Miles Morales in an upcoming story arc on Disney XD’s The Ultimate Spider-Man. Oh, man, bring on the feelings.
Morales will appear next year in a series of episodes that will bring different parallel universe Spider-Mans together, including Iron Spider, Spider 2099, and Spider-Girl (please be the Gwen Stacy version PLEASE BE THE GWEN STACY VERSION). Presumably this is meant to be a tie-in to the upcoming November 2014 comic title of the same name, though in the cartoon it’ll be Green Goblin behind the ‘verse-hopping.
Glover’s casting is particularly apt because it was the #Donald4SpiderMan Twitter campaign—and the resulting backlash against the very idea of a black Spider-Man—that inspired writer Brian Michael Bendis to create Miles Morales in the first place. He told Newsarama back in 2011:
Donald Glover stood up and said, “I want to be Spider-Man.” I was like, “I would like him to be Spider-Man. Very much.” I said so publicly at the time, and that came and went. We got closer and closer and closer to working on it, and then they did that hilarious bit on Community at the beginning of last season where he got out of bed and was wearing Spider-Man pajamas, and he looked fantastic! I had already written my first issue, and I was like, “Oh, I would so like to read that book!” then I was like, “I am writing that book. That’s awesome!”
In the Ultimates Universe, Peter Parker is killed in action and the Spider-mantle is taken up by 13 year old Miles; judging from the below clip (which reminds me a lot of the 2012 crossover event Spider-Men, where Marvel Spider-Man ended up in the Ultimate Universe) it seems as this version of the characters has a similar origin story.
While personally I always imagined Miles having a higher, unbroken voice, Glover’s pretty fantastic in this scene. “He meets someone who is his hero, and that comes across completely in Donald’s performance,” Stephen Wacker, Marvel Television’s vice president of current animation, told USA Today in an exclusive. “He’s got a real warmth that suits the character really, really well. If you’ve read Miles Morales comics, Donald’s voice nails what you’ve been reading.”
It’s not the Miles Morales-led feature film we all want to see one day, of course, but it’s certainly a start, and it will do a lot to bring the character into the minds of young kids who don’t know the comics as well. Hell, maybe there’ll even be a spin-off. I know I’d watch a whole cartoon just based on this Spider-Man, wouldn’t you?
(via Comic Book Resources)
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Published: Aug 26, 2014 11:12 am