Marvel Comics is no stranger to a bit of brand synergy and consolidation. The more characters break out into the mainstream beyond the readership of comics, the more their comics counterparts are sanded down and chopped and changed to eventually better accommodate the potential for audiences who are aware of them through adaptation to go to the comics and find familiar fare. This has been especially true as the shadow of the MCU grew ever larger, reshaping characters and realigning destinies the closer someone came to elevation into a movie or TV show. But now the company is bringing that realignment to bear on one of its most successful characters in recent memory… and making it a whole weird mess in the process.
The current volume of Stephanie Phillips, Von Randal, and Matt Milla’s Spider-Gwen: Ghost Spider wrapped up with its 15th issue this week, ahead of an “All-New” relaunch of the series next month. Over the course of the current volume, Gwen vacated her original home reality, Earth-65, after a variant of Loki, King Loki, came there in an attempt to steal a Cosmic Cube. Inadvertently fusing with the relic herself, Gwen has found herself now living in Marvel’s prime reality, attempting to safeguard the Cube’s existence while also reckoning with bonding with its cosmic, reality-warping power.
Having dealt with those struggles after a conversation with Phoenix, the final issue sees Gwen duke it out with King Loki once and for all. But at the moment of her seeming defeat, Gwen finds herself inside a mindscape communicating with the Cosmic Cube itself… in the form of herself, looking awfully like Gwen’s Earth-616 counterpart as she appeared in the iconic Amazing Spider-Man #121, the issue of her death at the hands of the Green Goblin. The Cube argues that Gwen should use its powers to rewrite her ending, and she does so, toppling Loki, leading to his arrest at the hands of the TVA, and even altering the fate of her rival-potential love interest Fabian LaMuerto, the latest Black Tarantula, saving him from certain death.
Except Gwen argues that this is not an end for herself, but a new beginning. In a flash of light, the issue climaxes with a brief epilogue from incoming All-New Spider-Gwen: Ghost Spider artist Paolo Villanelli. Seemingly having separated herself from the Cosmic Cube in the process, Gwen wakes up in her bedroom, still in Earth-616: now, as Marvel had previously teased would be the case, her new status quo. From what little we can tell, she’s been there for a while—and has seemingly had her original powers restored for good, having had symbiote-bonded powers for the best part of a decade after her original powers were stolen from her. But that’s not all: now her father, Captain George Stacy, is living safe and sound in Earth-616 as well.
Much like his 616 counterpart—who has been dead for over half a century, outside of a brief clone-induced resurrection during Clone Conspiracy—the Cube-reworked George is now once again a police officer, and whatever warping Gwen did has managed to handwave the fact that there did used to be a Gwen and George Stacy (however long ago they perished in Marvel’s sliding timescale) who existed in this reality and have been very dead for a very long time.
Well, mostly. Earlier this year Marvel announced that it would be resurrecting the original Gwen Stacy as the identity of a new, violent take on Gwenpool. Beginning back in May, the latest Gwenpool series revealed that Earth-616’s Gwen had been resurrected as X-31, the latest agent of the Weapon X program, and had even seemingly killed the original Gwenpool (that’s Gwendolyn Poole, before you get confused at the current Gwen-quotient). So with Spider-Gwen’s cosmic retconning, now both she and her prime-earth self are running around in Earth-616 at the same time, still as separate people.
It’s a spectacularly weird reset for the character, one that brings her back in line with a version of Spider-Gwen that most of the public would be aware of—i.e., the version we know through the Spider-Verse movies, itself based on Spider-Gwen’s earliest comic incarnations a decade ago—while also simultaneously effectively wiping part of that recognizable identity: that she is a character from across the multiverse and exists in a separate reality. Of course, this is far from the first time Marvel’s done this, especially with Spider-characters. Miles Morales successfully jumped over to existing in Earth-616 after the destruction of the Ultimate Universe during Secret Wars—and even got to raise the question of whatever happened to the Miles Morales of Earth-616 during the 2017 series Spider-Men II (the answer is, of course, weird).
Now largely removed from the multiversal concept, Spider-Gwen is just one Spider among the many wall-crawling their way through Earth-616. Just how Peter will react, or the currently alive-again original Gwen, remains to be seen. Status quos are ephemeral in comics; when death is a revolving door, it’s hard to ever really definitively say what will be a “new normal” for longer than a few years. There’s every chance that, at some point again, Gwen could go back to her home reality (maybe in time for, say, Beyond the Spider-Verse in 2027).
Time will tell just what the point of this status quo shift was really for. Marvel is heralding next month’s All-New relaunch as Spider-Gwen’s “Brand New Day.” Given the Peter Parker of the MCU is on the precipice of his own, perhaps it wouldn’t be too surprising if the MCU was preparing its own way to introduce another Spider-hero, and the comics were just laying the groundwork a little early.
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