untitled

192

Dru Je ries, “‘Anyone Can Wear the Mask’: The Marginalization of

MilesMorales in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” JCMS 62, no. 5 (2022–

2023):192–214.

Dru Je ries

“Anyone Can Wear the

Mask”: The Marginalization

of Miles Morales in

Spider-Man: Into the

Spider-Verse

ABSTRACT

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney

Rothman, 2018) marks the ﬁ lm debut of biracial Spider-Man Miles Morales,

with the original Spider-Man, Peter Parker, playing a supporting role. Despite

Miles’s centrality in the ﬁ lm, a conﬂ uence of narrative, industrial, and

stylistic factors work together to reinforce his secondary status compared to

Parker, who remains the franchise’s ideal of the real Spider-Man. In an echo

of the reactionary backlash to the #BlackLivesMatter movement embodied

in the hashtag #AllLivesMatter, the ﬁ lm’s explicit theme—that “anyone can

wear the mask”—functions less to legitimize Miles as Spider-Man than to

ensure his continued subordination in the broader franchise.

On the press tour for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (Marc Webb, 2014), longtime

producer of the Spider-Man ﬁ lm franchise Avi Arad asserted that Peter Parker

was the one and only Spider-Man that he would ever put onscreen. When

asked if he would consider adapting other comic book characters who have

donned the webbed mask over the years—including Ben Reilly (the Scarlet

Spider), Miguel O’Hara (Spider-Man 2099), and Miles Morales—he emphat-

193JEFFRIES • “ANYONE CAN WEAR THE MASK”

ically responded in the negative, claiming that previous attempts to include

“multiple” Spider-Men had almost ended the franchise altogether.

His words

would turn out to be ironically prophetic, as The Amazing Spider- Man 2’s lack-

luster reception and box o ce returns deﬁ nitively concluded that iteration

of the ﬁ lm franchise, prompting Sony to cancel their planned villain-centric

spin-o ﬁ lm The Sinister Six and ultimately to cut a deal with Marvel Studios

that would introduce Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

Under that arrangement, a new cinematic Spider-Man—the third live-action

take on Peter Parker within a single decade—debuted in Captain America:

Civil War (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, 2016), played by Tom Holland.

Contrary to Arad’s stated preference, this unprecedented “industrial col-

laboration between Marvel and Sony” also led to Miles Morales’s cinematic

debut, albeit indirectly.

With the live-action Peter Parker now ﬁ rmly associ-

ated with the MCU, appearing both in stand-alone franchise ﬁ lms such as

Spider-Man: Homecoming (Jon Watts, 2017) and crossover events such as Aveng-

ers: Endgame (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, 2019), Sony started to consider

alternative means of exploiting one of their most lucrative licensed proper-

ties. Rather than build toward a single cohesive serialized universe that would

be in direct competition with the MCU, their new strategy would divide the

Spider-Man intellectual property (IP) across multiple live-action and ani-

mated versions, with their version of Spider-Man relegated to the latter so as

not to compete—both at the box o ce and in the public imaginary—with

Holland’s live-action incarnation of the character. Their ﬁ rst release under

this new arrangement was Venom (Ruben Fleischer, 2018), a stand-alone

live-action vehicle for the popular 1990s villain/antihero ﬁ rst seen onscreen

in Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi, 2007), which revises the character’s origin story

and visual design to remove any explicit relation to his wall-crawling antago-

nist. Tom Hardy’s unhinged performance in the title role won the ﬁ lm some

ardent fans (many of whom even enjoyed the ﬁ lm unironically) and better-

than-projected box o ce numbers, prompting Sony to quickly announce

1 “The one thing you cannot do, when you have a phenomena that has stood the

test of time, you have to be true to the real character inside—who is Peter Parker?

What are the biggest e ects on his life? Then you can draw in time, and you can

consider today’s world in many ways. But to have multiple ones . . . I don’t know if

you remember, but Marvel tried it. And it was almost the end of Spider-Man.” It’s

unclear whether Arad is referring here to the widespread negative reaction among

comic book readers to “The Clone Saga,” a notoriously overlong 1990s comic book

storyline, or to the initial controversy surrounding Miles Morales’s comic book

debut. To say that either was “almost the end of Spider-Man,” however, is surely

overstating the case. See Drew Taylor, “Interview: ‘Amazing Spider-Man 2’ Produc-

ers Avi Arad & Matt Tolmach Talk Spin-O Plans, Crossovers & More,” The Playlist,

April 30, 2014, https:// theplaylist .net/ interview -amazing -spider -man -2 -producers

-avi -arad -matt -tolmach -talk -spin -o -plans -crossovers -more -20140430/.

2 Tom Holland ﬁ rst donned the mask nine years after Tobey Maguire’s trilogy-capper

Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi, 2007) and just two years after Andrew Garﬁ eld’s second

appearance in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. For an analysis of these performances,

see Aaron Taylor, “Playing Peter Parker: Spider-Man and Superhero Film Perfor-

mance,” in Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, ed. Matt

Yockey (Austin: Universit y of Texas Press, 2017), 268–296.

3 Tara Lomax, “Practicing Superhuman Law: Creative License, Industrial Identity, and

Spider-Man’s Homecoming,” in The Superhero Symbol: Media, Culture & Politics, ed.

Liam Burke, Ian Gordon, and Angela Ndalianis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univer-

sity Press, 2020), 119.

194 JCMS 62.5 • 2022–2023

a sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage (Andy Serkis, 2021).

The studio con-

tinued its villain-centric approach with Morbius (Daniel Espinosa, 2022).

Despite that ﬁ lm’s box o ce failure and subsequent notoriety as fodder for

ironic memes, Sony has several other live-action ﬁ lms centered on Spider-

Man’s supporting cast of characters slated for release, including Kraven the

Hunter (J. C. Chandor) and Madame Web (S. J. Clarkson).

A new non-MCU version of Spider-Man would appear just two months

after Venom in Sony’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter

Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, 2018; hereafter Into the Spider-Verse). Unlike

the six preceding Spider-Man ﬁ lms—and in direct opposition to Arad’s

pronouncement four years prior—the CG-animated Into the Spider-Verse

features Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) as its protagonist, with

Peter Parker (voiced by Jake Johnson) playing a supporting role alongside

various other spider-men (Spider-Man Noir, Spider-Man 2099 in a post-

credits cameo), spider-women (Spider-Gwen, Peni Parker), and even some

non-human spider-beings (Spider-Ham, SP//dr). The ﬁ lm assembles its cast

of characters via the kind of dimension-hopping shenanigans that have long

been associated with serialized superhero comics in general and “crossover

events” in particular.

In sharp contrast to the majority of live-action super-

hero adaptations, Into the Spider-Verse is not just a loose adaptation of narra-

tive content, concepts, and characters that ﬁ rst appeared in comic books; it is

also chockablock with stylistic ﬂ ourishes meant to evoke its source medium.

To a greater extent than perhaps any live-action ﬁ lm, Into the Spider-Verse

references, incorporates, and transforms various formal, aesthetic, and even

technical characteristics of comics, including captions, speech balloons, ono-

matopoeias, motion lines, Ben-Day dots, and the multi-panel grid, to name

just a few of the most obvious techniques employed throughout the ﬁ lm.

That said, audiences hardly need an academic article to point this out,

to say nothing of cinema and media scholars. The salient question, then, is

4 Brad Brevet, “‘Venom’ & ‘A Star Is Born’ Are Ready to Get October O to a Strong

Start,” Box O ce Mojo, October 4, 2018, https:// www .boxo cemojo .com/ news/ ?id

= 4443 & p = .htm; and Geo Boucher, “Sony’s ‘Venom’ Sequel Taking Shape: Woody

Harrelson’s Carnage on theWay?,” Deadline, January 7, 2019, https:// deadline

.com/2019/ 01/ venom -sequel -woody -harrelson -carnage -marvel -1202530997/.

5 Donovan Russo, “Sony Has Big Plans for Spider-Man Cinematic Universe, but

a Key Hero Is Unavailable: Spidey,” CNBC, March 24, 2019, https:// www .cnbc

.com/2019/03/ 24/ sonys -plan -for -spider -man -cinematic -universe -lacks -a -hero

-spidey .html. The ﬁ lm’s original release date was slated for 2020 but was delayed

multiple times due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A teaser trailer released online in

January 2020 featured an explicit visual reference to Spider-Man (one not present

in the released cut of the ﬁ lm) and a surprise appearance by Michael Keaton, seem-

ingly reprising his role from Spider-Man: Homecoming. Such allusions deliberately

blur the line between Sony’s live-action Marvel ﬁ lms and the MCU proper, suggest-

ing that Sony ’s relationship to Marvel is not stable but rather an ongoing public

negotiation. See Sony Pictures Entertainment, “MORBIUS—Teaser Trailer (HD),” You-

Tube video, January 13, 2020, https:// www .youtube .com/ watch ?v = jLMBLuGJTsA.

6 Aaron Couch, “Sony Sets ‘Karate Kid’ Movie for Summer 2024, Pushes Back ‘Kraven’

and ‘Madame Web,’” Hollywood Reporter, September 16, 2022, https:// www

.hollywoodreporter .com/ movies/ movie -news/ karate -kid -2024 -movie -sets -release

-date -1235222593/.

7 Crossover events are often extremely dense and complex a airs meant to either

increase sales across a publisher’s entire line and/or to reset their narrative conti-

nuity—itself a gesture intended to make their comics more inviting to new readers,

thereby increasing sales, at least temporarily.

195JEFFRIES • “ANYONE CAN WEAR THE MASK”

how should we understand this stylistic intervention? What purpose does it

serve, both in the ﬁ lm and in relation to the broader superhero ﬁ lm genre?

How does it shape our understanding of Miles Morales as a character? With

the biracial Miles functioning as the superhero genre’s “ambassador of the

diversity of 21st-century America,” it is important to consider that the repre-

sentational choices used to adapt the character to the screen shape how audi-

ences understand non-white superheroes in both overt and subtle ways.

andré m. carrington suggests in Speculative Blackness, “works of genre ﬁ ction

. . . are both deeply invested in market imperatives that buttress the existing

social order and, occasionally, more imaginative or diversionary than texts

that present realistic treatments of everyday life.”

As such, there may be no

better place than a Black-led, animated, and heavily stylized superhero ﬁ lm

to see this push-pull—between reinforcing the white status quo and cele-

brating the transgressive potential of the Black superhero—in action. Just as

white superheroes have traditionally “[reinforced] real racial hierarchies in

the world in which whites repetitively imagine victory over the forces of evil,

often represented by blacks and other racial minorities,” Black superheroes

function “not only as counter-hegemonic symbols of black racial pride and

racial progress but possibly even as Afrofuturistic metaphors for imagining

race and black racial identity in new and provocative ways.”

A ﬁ lm like Into

the Spider-Verse, released to a politically polarized America around the halfway

point of the Trump presidency, navigates a precarious middle path between

the two, attempting to satisfy each side without alienating the other.

Throughout this article, I treat the ﬁ lm’s style as one part of a broader

strategy evinced by the ﬁ lm across multiple discursive registers. Speciﬁ cally,

I argue that the comic book stylization of Into the Spider-Verse functions in

concert with other factors—including the way it depicts its protagonist’s

ethnicity relative to the comics and the politics of fandom, the ﬁ lm’s inter-

textual relationship to other texts in the Spider-Man transmedia franchise,

and the industrial status of animation compared to live-action—to police the

franchise such that Peter Parker’s primacy over Miles Morales is maintained

even as Miles is promoted as the central character of the ﬁ lm. In the context

of the broader franchise, Into the Spider-Verse marginalizes its biracial protago-

nist within a self-contained animated storyworld, separate from and unequal

to the MCU. While the ﬁ lm has been widely celebrated for its representa-

tional inclusivity, its ultimate theme—that “anyone can wear the mask”—

legitimizes Miles as Spider-Man while also ensuring his continued subordina-

tion in the context of the broader franchise.

Though my corpus here is limited to a single ﬁ lm, my argument necessi-

tates looking at it from several di erent angles. In the ﬁ rst section, I out-

line Miles’s origins as a comic book character and the polarized discourse

8 Ora C. McWilliams, “Who Is Afraid of a Black Spider(-Man)?,” Transformative

Worksand Cultures, no. 13 (2013),

https:// journal .transformativeworks .org/ index .php/twc/article/ view/ 455/ 355.

9 andré m. carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 14.

10 Adilifu Nama, “Brave Black Worlds: Black Superheroes as Science Fiction Ciphers,”

African Identities 7, no. 2 (May 2009): 134–135.

196 JCMS 62.5 • 2022–2023

surrounding his emergence, with particular attention to the discourse of

racial colorblindness. In the second section, I focus on how the character and

his world are strategically revised in the process of adaptation, arguing that

changes have been made for two main reasons: (1) to distinguish Miles from

the MCU iteration of Peter Parker, which draws obvious inspiration from

comics featuring Miles to such an extent that faithfully adapting the comic

book character would seem derivative of the MCU for general audiences, and

(2) to ease racialized anxiety around the character for mainstream (white)

viewers. Of course, Into the Spider-Verse is presented not just as a narrative

alternative to the hegemonic MCU but also as an aesthetic alternative;

accordingly, in the third section, I analyze the ﬁ lm’s visual design, paying spe-

ciﬁ c attention to its remediation of comics and the industrial status of anima-

tion. Ultimately, I argue that these narrative, industrial, and stylistic factors

work together in Into the Spider-Verse to functionally prevent Miles Morales

from supplanting Peter Parker’s status as the real Spider-Man in the broader

franchise. Finally, in the conclusion, I will grapple with the ﬁ lm’s success and

its embrace within the very communities that I argue it underserves.

THE COLORBLIND ORIGINS OF MILES MORALES

Miles Morales was literally conceived out of a conﬂ ict within superhero

fandom over the legitimacy of non-white characters in the genre. The pre-

history of the character can be traced back to a brief and fairly innocuous

blog post by Marc Bernardin on the science-ﬁ ction news website Gizmodo.

Titled “The Last Thing Spider-Man Should Be Is Another White Guy,” the

article bemoans the rumored casting for The Amazing Spider-Man (Marc

Webb, 2012) reboot, which indicated that Sony was not considering racebend-

ing the character of Peter Parker for the ﬁ lm.

Bernardin argues that Spi-

der-Man “is deﬁ ned by his choices, not by the color of his skin,” that “he’s a

wonderfully strong character, one full of complexity and depth, who happens

to be white.”

In other words, Peter Parker’s canonical whiteness should be

properly understood as ethnically and culturally neutral rather than a sig-

niﬁ cant and necessary part of who he is; as such, a Black actor could inhabit

the role without necessitating so much as another draft of the screenplay.

11 Racebending refers to the act of casting an actor of a race or ethnicity that

does not match the perceived race of the character as established in the source

material. Examples include the casting of Michael Clarke Duncan as the Kingpin in

Daredevil (Mark Steven Johnson, 2003) and Scarlett Johansson as Motoko Kusanagi

in Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017). Racebending is distinct from what

Kristin J. Warner describes as colorblind casting, because there is a canonical race

that is being changed in the process of adaptation, though both practices emerge

out of a colorblind approach to character. For more on the subject of racebending,

see Lori Kido Lopez, “Fan Activists and the Politics of Race in The Last Airbender,”

International Journal of Cultural Studies 15, no. 5 (2011): 431–445. For more on col-

orblind casting, see Kristin J. Warner, The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting

(London: Routledge, 2015).

12 Marc Bernardin, “The Last Thing Spider-Man Should Be Is Another White Guy,”

Gizmodo, May 28, 2010, https:// io9 .gizmodo .com/ the -last -thing -spider -man -should

-be -is -another -white -gu -5549613.

13 This approach is not ideal if authentic representations of diverse characters are

the desired goal, as “racially unmarked” tends to manifest in practice as “norma-

tively white.” Warner, Cultural Politics, 62. In the case of Spider-Man, a superhero

character introduced in the early 1960s whose initial novelty within the genre was

197JEFFRIES • “ANYONE CAN WEAR THE MASK”

Donald Glover—then known primarily for his role on the television sitcom

Community (NBC, 2009–2014; Yahoo! Screen, 2015)—caught wind of the arti-

cle and tweeted his desire to audition for the role. While many fans enthusi-

astically embraced the idea, another subset of fandom virulently opposed it,

ostensibly on the race-neutral grounds of maintaining ﬁ delity to Peter Parker

as he has been visualized since his debut in Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962).

Such fans claimed (and likely believed) that any opposition to diversi-

fying their beloved genre “is a matter of canon and continuity rather than

racism,” as though these were separable or distinct matters.

As Nicholaus

Pumphrey explains, “The preservation of continuity directly connects cur-

rent Marvel comics to a time in which black superheroes did not exist; as a

result, emphasis on continuity preserves the institutionalized racism of 1960s

America. Thus, arguments to retain the canon perpetuate racist ideology,

in both overt and subtle ways.”

In this case, adherence to canon (and

white hegemony) won the day: Andrew Garﬁ eld was cast, and Glover was

never granted an audition. In a metatextual moment referencing the online

campaign, however, Glover would appear wearing Spider-Man pajamas on an

episode of Community, which Ultimate Spider-Man (2000–2011) writer Brian

Michael Bendis would later cite as a direct inﬂ uence on the creation of Miles

Morales.

Ultimate Spider-Man was a ﬂ agship title of the Ultimate Marvel line, a

contemporary and simpliﬁ ed reboot of the Marvel universe meant “to attract

new generations of young readers to comics” by shedding the complex

mythology built up over four decades of serialized storytelling.

By reintro-

ducing classic characters in a contemporary context, the stories told under

the Ultimate Marvel banner were markedly more diverse than their 1960s

counterparts and even “opened up the possibility for . . . ethnically marked

avatars of A-list originals.”

Finally realizing that possibility some ten years

after the launch of the line, Miles Morales debuted in Ultimate Fallout #4

(2011) as a new Spider-Man to take over the mantle after Ultimate Peter

Parker’s death at the hands of the Green Goblin.

The issue was succeeded

the relative banality of his problems—paying the bills, caring for his ailing aunt,

balancing schoolwork and a social life with being a superhero—the fact that racial

discrimination is not among them marks him clearly as white.

14 McWilliams, “Black Spider(-Man)”; and Albert S. Fu, “Fear of a Black Spider-Man:

Racebending and the Colour-Line in Superhero (Re)casting,” Journal of Graphic

Novels and Comics 6, no. 3 (2015): 269–270.

15 Nicholaus Pumphrey, “Kamala Khan, Miles Morales, and Marvel NOW! Challenging

the Traditional White Male Fan,” in Ms. Marvel’s America: No Normal, ed. Jessica

Baldanzi and Hussein Rashid (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020), 215.

16 Pumphrey, 215.

17 The shot in question can be seen on Uncle Aaron’s television screen in one scene in

Into the Spider-Verse. In addition to appearing in Spider-Man: Homecoming as Aaron

Davis (Miles’s uncle, though Miles himself is never seen), Glover would also go on

to voice Miles Morales in the Ultimate Spider-Man (Disney XD, 2012–2017) animated

television series.

18 Frederick Luis Aldama, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics (Tucson: Univer-

sity of Arizona Press, 2017), 71.

19 Aldama, 73.

20 To be fair, Miles Morales was not the ﬁ rst explicitly racebent or racialized Ultimate

Marvel character. For instance, Orson Scott Card’s version of Tony Stark/Iron Man

became the explicitly Latino Antoñio Stark. See Aldama, 71–73.

198 JCMS 62.5 • 2022–2023

the next month by the debut of the Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man (2011–2013)

series, which told Miles’s superhero origin story leading up to Peter Parker’s

death, culminating with his assumption of the Spider-Man legacy several

issues later.

The letter column in the ﬁ rst issue of Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man, based

on responses to Miles’s brief debut in Ultimate Fallout #4, framed the legiti-

macy of diverse racial identities within the superhero genre as something that

was very much up for debate. As carrington explains, “Editors and publishers

exercise a great deal of inﬂ uence over the role fan correspondence plays in

comics, because they choose what appears and what to say about it.... [That]

inﬂ uence extends to the role comic book readers will play in negotiating with

questions of race through popular culture.”

In this case, Marvel ensured

that both sides of the issue were equally represented. A letter from a “young

Hispanic male” celebrating Miles’s introduction is immediately followed by a

riposte from a self-described “valued reader”; the latter is “disappointed and

o ended” that Marvel would replace Ultimate Peter Parker—the main con-

tinuity version of the character remained very much alive—with “an African

American/Hispanic person . . . for the sole reason of diversity.”

The kind of

white grievance that characterized so much of the reaction to Glover’s desire

to audition for The Amazing Spider-Man was thus ampliﬁ ed and validated as a

response to the diversiﬁ cation of superhero storyworlds.

Unsurprisingly, the creation of a non-white Spider-Man also led to much

consternation in the conservative media ecosystem.

After all, the superhero

genre has long functioned as a rarely challenged articulation of white excep-

tionalism, such that white superheroes are merely normative, whereas Black

superheroes seem to signify a challenge to the very “discourses of power on

which American society trades.”

As Sean Guynes and Martin Lund conclude

in their introduction to Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Com-

ics, “The superhero is a white—and overwhelmingly cisgender, male, straight,

and middle-class—ideological formation and has been so since its incep-

tion.”

Miles’s perceived status as an “ambassador of diversity” made him an

easy target for racist attacks, including fan discourse motivated by a suppos-

edly race-neutral devotion to canon. Such rationalizations are commonplace

in these discussions, as they allow individual fans to praise diversity in theory

while denouncing it in practice on the grounds that it is not being imple-

mented in the right way: the introduction of non-white characters, they say,

should be “organic rather than forced” and must not be seen as politically

motivated—an impossible bar for writers and artists to clear, given that the

presence of non-white (or feminist, or queer, or trans) characters will always

be understood as inherently political by these readers.

As McKenna James

21 carrington, Speculative Blackness, 129.

22 Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man #1 (emphasis added).

23 See Fu, “Fear of a Black Spider-Man,” 276.

24 Sean Guynes and Martin Lund, “Introduction: Not to Interpret, but to Abolish:

Whiteness Studies and American Superhero Comics,” in Unstable Masks: Whiteness

and American Superhero Comics, ed. Sean Guynes and Martin Lund (Columbus: The

Ohio State University Press, 2020), 3.

25 Guynes and Lund, 7.

26 McKenna James Boeckner, Monica Flegel, and Judith Leggatt, “‘Not My Captain

199JEFFRIES • “ANYONE CAN WEAR THE MASK”

Boeckner, Monica Flegel, and Judith Leggatt astutely write, “complaints

about forced diversity come from a position that always sees diversity as

forced, never as organic. Those who complain about the invasion of politics

into their comic books deny both the political nature of their own identities

and the political nature of comic book characters.”

In other words, super-

heroes that do not challenge white hegemony (and implicitly prop up a cul-

ture of white supremacy) have the privilege to be seen as apolitical, whereas

all other identities can be dismissed as “a kind of aesthetic a rmative action

that [hurts] the quality of the story lines and the characters.”

Mary J. Henderson identiﬁ es a distinctly post-racial approach in con-

temporary Marvel comics, where writers and artists “ignore or downplay the

social injustices that these diverse superheroes might face in their everyday

life,” thereby diversifying their comics on paper while also trying to avoid

“o ending their largest readership (white, cis males).”

While Bendis’s

writing on Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man has been criticized in precisely these

terms, it is undoubtedly a step forward compared to the Blaxploitation-

inﬂ uenced and stereotype-ridden characterizations of Black superheroes in

the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Luke Cage, Black Lightning).

As a ﬁ lm adaptation of these comics, Into the Spider-Verse is tasked with

walking this same tightrope, albeit on a much larger scale and with much

more at stake, given the costs of producing a monthly comic book compared

with a big-budget feature ﬁ lm. Sony’s primary interest in making Into the

Spider-Verse, as I have suggested already, was to maximize their exploitation of

the Spider-Man IP while its central character was otherwise occupied under

the creative auspices of the MCU. While the ﬁ lmmakers were also motivated

to present positive representations for young kids of color, the market-driven

imperatives of the industry dictate that they do so in moderation—that

is, without triggering the powerful feelings of racial resentment that have

attended Miles Morales since (and even prior to) his debut. By analyzing

the ﬁ lm from a variety of perspectives, we can determine what ideas about

race are palatable or even comforting to mass audiences, and by comparing

those representations to their source material, we can see what ideas about

race required revision or erasure to become suitable for white consump-

tion. Before we get there, however, it is necessary to ﬁ rst establish Into the

America’: Racebending, Reverse Discrimination, and White Panic in Marvel Comics

Fandom,” in Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices, ed. Rukmini Pande (Iowa

City: University of Iowa Press, 2020), 184.

27 Boeckner, Flegel, and Leggatt, 188.

28 Boeckner, Flegel, and Leggatt, 184.

29 Mary J. Henderson, “Representation Matters: Post-Racial Tensions in Moon Girl and

Devil Dinosaur,” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 10, no. 3 (2019),

https:// imagetextjournal .com/ representation -matters -post -racial -tensions -in

-moon -girl -and -devil -dinosaur/.

30 For detailed analyses of race as represented in this era of mainstream superhero

comics, see chapter 1 of Aldama, Latinx Superheroes, and chapters 1 and 2 of Adilifu

Nama, Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (Austin: University

of Texas Press, 2011). For an example of fan criticism of Bendis’s handling of non

-white characters, see “The Reality of Bendis Writing Blackness,” Stitch’s Media Mix,

July 6, 2016, https:// stitchmediamix .com/ 2016/ 07/ 06/ the -reality -of -bendis -writing

-blackness/.

200 JCMS 62.5 • 2022–2023

Spider-Verse’s context in relation to the comics, the broader Spider-Man ﬁ lm

franchise, and the MCU.

COLORBLINDING THE BIRACIAL SPIDER-MAN

Amid a ﬁ lmmaking landscape replete with remakes, reboots, sequels, pre-

quels, and other forms of narrative serialization and franchise extension, Into

the Spider-Verse is best classiﬁ ed as a reboot: it represents a new start for the

Spider-Man franchise, stylistically distinct and diegetically separate from the

preceding live-action ﬁ lms as well as other transmedia iterations of the fran-

chise (e.g., comic books, animated series, video games). As a reboot, however,

Into the Spider-Verse challenges the industrial and narrative logic of what Wil-

liam Proctor calls “the ‘reboot’ cycle” in contemporary franchise ﬁ lmmaking

inaugurated by the success of Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005).

Whereas reboots typically represent an attempt by corporations to resuscitate

a ﬁ nancially or creatively moribund IP, as was the case with Nolan’s reviviﬁ -

cation of the Batman franchise, Into the Spider-Verse reboots the Spider-Man

franchise in parallel to an ongoing and thriving live-action franchise. Despite

functioning as a reboot, it is less an attempt to supplant the MCU than to

maximize and diversify Sony’s exploitation of the franchise. The parallel rela-

tionship between the MCU and the narrative world inaugurated in Into the

Spider-Verse has a clear precedent in the relationship between Marvel Comics’

primary storyworld and the Ultimate Marvel line. The animated ﬁ lm should

therefore be understood in relation to the MCU, with its creative possibilities

restricted by and subordinate to that pop cultural behemoth.

For instance, some of the changes made to Miles’s world in the process

of adaptation—most notably, the near-erasure of his best friend Ganke Lee

from the narrative—were seemingly made because the MCU had already

appropriated them for its own take on Peter Parker. In Homecoming and its

sequels, Spider-Man: Far from Home (Jon Watts, 2019) and Spider-Man: No Way

Home (Jon Watts, 2021), Peter’s best friend Ned Leeds is based not on the

comic book version of Ned but rather on Ganke—in both physical appear-

ance (both are heavyset Asian Americans) and personality (both share a

marked a nity for Star Wars LEGO sets).

The existence of Homecoming

e ectively foreclosed on the option of including Ganke in a ﬁ lm about Miles

without seeming derivative of the MCU.

Additionally, Homecoming appropri-

ates the diversity of Miles’s storyworld more generally by racebending much

of its supporting cast, including Mary Jane, Liz Allen, and Flash Thompson,

as well as villains the Shocker and the Scorpion—all white in the comics

universe but played by people of color in the MCU.

According to director

31 William Proctor, “Regeneration & Rebirth: Anatomy of the Franchise Reboot,” Scope:

An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, no. 22 (February 2012),

https:// www .nottingham .ac .uk/ scope/ documents/ 2012/ february -2012/ proctor .pdf.

32 One thing removed from the characterization of Ned compared to Ganke is the

comics’ persistent suggestion that he may be in love with Miles. As Far from Home

makes explicit, Ned is conﬁ dently heterosexual, erasing the comic book character’s

ambiguous sexuality.

33 Ganke does appear in Into the Spider-Verse, albeit in a non-speaking role as Miles’s

assigned roommate.

34 Strangely, Frederick Luis Aldama’s description of the ﬁ lm overlooks practically all

of these characters of color: “Notably, in John [sic] Watts’s 2017 ﬁ lm re-creation,

201JEFFRIES • “ANYONE CAN WEAR THE MASK”

Jon Watts, the diverse cast—achieved via a colorblind casting process—

contributes to the ﬁ lm’s realism by reﬂ ecting the demography of contempo-

rary New York City: “Peter Parker goes to high school in Queens, and Queens

is one of—if not the—most diverse places in the world. So I just wanted it to

reﬂ ect what that actually looks like.”

In practice, though, it is the ﬁ lm’s cen-

tering of its white characters—Peter Parker, Tony Stark (Iron Man), and vil-

lain Adrian Toomes (the Vulture)—that gives the ﬁ lmmakers the freedom to

diversify around the margins without the risk of alienating white audiences.

We see the opposite phenomenon in Into the Spider-Verse, whose center-

ing of a Black/Puerto Rican superhero in Miles Morales is minimized by

inserting additional white characters into the story. In terms of adaptation,

Into the Spider-Verse’s narrative is directly inspired by particular, identiﬁ able

texts, with Dan Slott’s miniseries event Spider-Verse (Marvel, 2014–2015) as a

conceptual linchpin. As Proctor observes, “the Spider-Verse event-series [tags

Peter Parker] as the central Spider-Man of the Marvel multiverse. . . . From

this perspective, . . . Peter Parker is the ‘real’ Spider-Man, whereas his alter-

nate counterparts are ‘Spider-Totems,’ multiversal replicas, or analogues.”

While the Spider-Verse crossover event functions to conﬁ rm Peter Parker’s

privileged position in Marvel Comics’ narrative multiverse, the integration

of this conceit into the cinematic version of Miles’s origin has the opposite

e ect: that is, to de-center the protagonist from his own narrative, posi-

tioning him not as the Spider-Man but rather as a Spider-Man—merely one

among many. While Miles’s origin story in the comics is a personal and pri-

vate journey, in the ﬁ lm he is very quickly put under Peter Parker’s tutelage.

Since the Spider-Verse event and Miles’s origin story are completely separate

narratives in the source material, it is reasonable to conclude that their

combination in the ﬁ lm was a calculated attempt to increase the presence

of Peter Parker—the real Spider-Man in the eyes of producer Avi Arad and

mainstream audiences—in the cinematic adaptation of Miles’s story.

In addition to the Spider-Verse miniseries, Into the Spider-Verse draws upon

other comics as source material: namely, the early issues of Bendis’s Ultimate

Comics: Spider-Man, which outlined Miles’s superhero origin and key rela-

tionships leading up to his adoption of the Spider-Man persona in the ﬁ fth

issue, followed by an arc in which he comes to terms with his uncle’s crimi-

nality; Bendis’s limited series Spider-Men (2012), in which the Peter Parker of

the main Marvel storyworld is transported to the Ultimate Marvel universe,

where he meets Miles; and its sequel Spider-Men II (2017), in which they team

up again to ﬁ ght the Kingpin. While Into the Spider-Verse freely draws upon

Spider-Man: Home Coming [sic], the Asian sidekick is the only multicultural char-

acter; Blatino Spidey is passed over for Anglo actor Tom Holland.” Aldama, Latinx

Superheroes, 83.

35 Rob Keyes, “Spider-Man: Homecoming Director Talks Diversity & Marvel,” Screen

Rant, April 11, 2017, https:// screenrant .com/ spider -man -homecoming -jon -watts

-interview/; and Dirk Libbey, “Why Spider-Man: Homecoming Needs a Diverse Cast,

According to the Director,” Cinemablend, June 17, 2016, https:// www .cinemablend

.com/ news/ 1525079/ why -spider -man -homecoming -needs -a -diverse -cast

-according -to -the -director.

36 William Proctor, “Schrödinger’s Cape: The Quantum Seriality of the Marvel Multi-

verse,” in Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, ed. Matt

Yockey (Austin: Universit y of Texas Press, 2017), 332.

202 JCMS 62.5 • 2022–2023

characters, premises, dialogue, and even speciﬁ c visual compositions from

all four of these titles, my primary interest focus here will be Ultimate Comics:

Spider-Man, in which the character was initially established. In mounting

thisbrief comparative analysis, I want to stress that it is not my intention

to hold up one text as superior to another, or to criticize the ﬁ lm on the

grounds of inﬁ delity to its source material. Rather, I intend to reveal the

common thread uniting the most signiﬁ cant changes made in the process

ofadaptation.

One of the ﬁ rst images seen in the ﬁ lm is a ball bearing the number

forty-two being selected from a lottery machine. Stripped of its narrative

context and inserted into the ﬁ lm’s chaotic opening credits montage, the

image is somewhat ba ing and probably easily forgotten by most viewers.

Comics readers, however, would recognize the image from Miles’s introduc-

tory scene in Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man #1, in which he is the ﬁ nal selection

in an admittance lottery for a prestigious Brooklyn charter school. In con-

trast to Peter Parker, whose academic success is singularly attributable to his

scientiﬁ c genius, thirteen-year-old Miles faces an intergenerational legacy of

systemic oppression and underinvestment and therefore relies upon policies

of random chance to receive the same opportunities that his white counter-

part enjoys as his birthright. Peter may have di culties paying his bills, but

access to a quality education is never in doubt. The reliance upon a rma-

tive action for Miles’s academic success seems to be a deliberate attempt by

Bendis to call attention to the scarcity of these kinds of opportunities within

communities of color, which is why artist Sara Pichelli lingers on the details:

the disbelieving elation of Miles’s parents when his name is called (“Oh, my

God, you have a chance,” Rio Morales gasps); the tearful faces of the other

children of color not selected for admittance; and Miles’s obvious guilt at

being randomly selected over equally deserving students.

In Into the Spider-Verse, this aspect of Miles’s story—important enough

that it is how the character is introduced in the comic book—is downplayed

signiﬁ cantly. As Carol Anderson summarizes, “ a rmative action, which

[was] developed to ameliorate hundreds of years of violent and corrosive

repression, [was] easily characterized as reverse discrimination against

hardworking whites and a ‘government handout that lazy black people

“choose” to take rather than work.’”

Recall that the fan backlash against

Miles Morales’s introduction into the Ultimate Marvel comics was constituted

in part by calls of “reverse racism” of exactly this kind, with disgruntled fans

and conservative pundits alike branding Miles’s debut as “a media ploy, a

liberal attempt to market diversity and garner media attention” rather than

a good faith e ort to tell new stories that would be particularly meaningful

to underserved audiences.

Whereas the comic devotes space to address-

37 A fuller discussion of a rmative action and systemic discrimination in the educa-

tion system is beyond the scope of this article. For more information, see the dis-

cussion of Hunter College in chapter 2 of Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites:

America after Meritocracy (New York: Crown, 2012).

38 Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York:

Bloomsbury, 2016), 100.

39 Brian Montes, “The Paradox of Miles Morales: Social Gatekeeping and the Browning

of America’s Spider-Man,” in Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present,

203JEFFRIES • “ANYONE CAN WEAR THE MASK”

ing and disarming the white critique of a rmative action, as well as to the

positive impact such policies can have on victims of systemic discrimination,

this material does not make it into the adaptation, which instead obscures

the levers of oppression and reframes Miles’s school admittance in purely

meritocratic terms. On the drive to his ﬁ rst day of school, Miles’s father

Je erson Davis (voiced by Brian Tyree Henry) reminds him that he earned

his spot based not just on the admittance lottery (which is never depicted or

referenced beyond the decontextualized lottery ball in the opening credits),

but ﬁ rst and foremost on his test scores, sidestepping the familiar critique

of a rmative action policies as providing unfair advantages to undeserving

people of color at the expense of more deserving whites. Downplaying a r-

mative action makes strategic sense in the context of the adaptation, insofar

as white grievances around the policy remain widespread and potent to this

day and could easily mutate into negative feelings about Miles himself. Of

course, this elision also has the e ect of playing into post-racial discourse,

de-emphasizing the unique challenges faced by people of color in favor of a

more universal (i.e., colorblind and meritocratic) experience.

Miles’s father himself undergoes a signiﬁ cant transformation in the pro-

cess of adaptation. Whereas Je erson in the comics is slim and bespectacled,

in the ﬁ lm he cuts a more imposing, muscular ﬁ gure. Beyond this superﬁ -

cial change, however, in the comics Je erson is a reformed criminal, highly

suspicious of law enforcement agencies; in the ﬁ lm, by contrast, he becomes

a by-the-book police o cer who uses his squad car’s PA system to demand

that his son say “I love you” on the steps of his new school. It is di cult not

to read Je erson’s transformation from a cynical and politically aware Black

father into a cuddly police dad as a deliberate attempt to soften his charac-

terization for white audiences. With Pew Research indicating that an over-

whelming 84 percent of Black adults believe the police treat Black Americans

“less fairly” than their white counterparts, this change reinforces the dom-

inant pro-law enforcement ideology at the expense of the realities of Black

experience.

The move also ignores theracialized threat that American

and Future, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González (Austin: University

of Texas Press, 2016), 273.

40 The PlayStation 4 game Marvel’s Spider-Man (Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive,

2018), a signiﬁ cant contribution to the transmedia franchise whose PlayStation 5

sequel (Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive, 2020) put Miles center stage, retains

Into the Spider-Verse’s characterization of Je erson; given that game and ﬁ lm alike

were overseen by Sony and released within months of each other, the similarities

are likely deliberate. A common critique leveled against the PS4 game was that

its gameplay implicated Spider-Man (and therefore players) in police activities

(e.g., surveillance) without any awareness of how these practices were problem-

atic, especially for communities of color that are most often targeted by them.

As Samantha Puc writes, “At no point does anyone [in the game] question the

actions of the NYPD, nor Spider-Man’s close relationship with the cops. The game

all but refuses to acknowledge the real-world implications of its main narrative

and mechanics, which doesn’t sit well, especially asBlack Lives Matter protests

continue all over the world.” See Samantha Puc, “PS5: Spider-Man—Miles Morales

Needs to Address the First Game’s Cop Problem,” CBR .com, June 13, 2020, https://

www .cbr .com/ spider -man -miles -morales -ps5 -should -tackle -ﬁ rst -game -cop

-problem/. In addition to featuring references to #BlackLivesMatter and tributes to

the late Chadwick Boseman, the Miles-centric sequel “does away with the police

scanner and cop alerts that were a focus of the original Spider-Man. Instead, Ganke

builds an app [that] lets individual people report suspicious activity, allowing Miles

204 JCMS 62.5 • 2022–2023

police o cers often pose to Black kids in hoodies, like Miles; whereas the

MCU adaptation of Luke Cage (Netﬂ ix, 2016–2018) employs similar imagery

to comment explicitly on the epidemic of police violence against Black Amer-

icans, Into the Spider-Verse simply associates the police with respectability and

good family values.

Finally, Into the Spider-Verse o ers a very di erent moral compared to

other texts in the Spider-Man franchise. Whereas Peter Parker stories tend

to emphasize his Uncle Ben’s adage that “with great power comes great

responsibility,” Into the Spider-Verse o ers a new refrain, o ered initially by

Peter Parker and later repeated by Miles at the ﬁ lm’s conclusion: “anyone can

wear the mask.” While it may seem like an empowering message at ﬁ rst blush,

the phrase is worth unpacking a bit further. As Arad summarizes, “diversity

was . . . very important to us, because the big theme of Spider-Man is that

anybody can be under that mask. What the mask says is that when you put it

on, you have the heart and soul of a hero.”

This is plainly revisionist, as the

big theme of Spider-Man has always centered on personal responsibility, not

diversity and inclusion, to say nothing of the obvious conﬂ ict between this

sentiment and Arad’s refusal to even consider adapting Miles to the screen

just four years prior. In an interview featured among the ﬁ lm’s Blu-ray bonus

materials, Arad revealingly asserts that “[t]he young generation, they don’t

see that, they don’t see color, they don’t see ethnicity.”

We might interpret

the producer generously and believe that what he means is that the younger

generation does not discriminate on the basis of racial di erence, but what he

literally says is that kids today don’t see race, an explicit invocation of color-

blind racism that brings us back to Miles’s colorblind origins. According to

Ashley “Woody” Doane, colorblindness asserts that race “no longer ‘matters’

in American society” and therefore plays no systemic role in determining

outcomes for individuals. “If racial inequality persists,” Doane explains,

“then it is due to actions (or inactions) on the part of minority group mem-

bers.”

Far from o ering the equality of opportunity it promises, colorblind

to investigate without relying on the police. . . . Miles not relying on the cops

to improve his predominantly BIPOC community is a notable turnaround from

the white Peter Parker, who is aligned with the police in the original game.” See

Tauriq Moosa, “Spider-Man: Miles Morales Shows How Ordinary People Can

Overcome the Extraordinary,” Polygon, November 6, 2020, https:// www .polygon

.com/reviews/21551212/ spider -man -miles -morales -review -ps4 -ps5.

41 Drew Desilver, Michael Lipka, and Dalia Fahmy, “10 Things We Know about Race and

Policing in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, June 3, 2020, https:// www .pewresearch

.org/ fact -tank/ 2020/ 06/ 03/ 10 -things -we -know -about -race -and -policing -in -the

-u-s/. Also relevant here is Samira Nadkarni’s critique of Into the Spider-Verse for

its near-erasure of Rio Morales from the narrative in order to emphasize patri-

archalvalues. See “Searching for Black Mothers: Looking in the Margins of Black

Panther and Into the Spider-Verse,” Stitch’s Media Mix, March 29, 2019,

https:// stitchmediamix .com/ 2019/ 03/ 29/ guest -post -searching -for -black -mothers

-looking -in -the -margins -of -black -panther -and -into -the -spider -verse/.

42 Quoted in Ramin Zahed, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: The Art of the Movie

(London: Titan Books, 2018), 8–9.

43 “We Are Spider-Man,” Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, directed by Bob

Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures

Animation, 2018), Blu-ray.

44 Ashley “Woody” Doane, “Shades of Colorblindness: Rethinking Racial Ideology in

the United States,” in The Colorblind Screen: Television in Post-Racial America, ed.

Sarah Nilsen and Sarah E. Turner (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 15.

205JEFFRIES • “ANYONE CAN WEAR THE MASK”

ideology perpetuates the e ects of systemic racism by denying its existence

and obscuring its levers and then blames the victims of racism if they fail to

transcend their station.

“Anyone can wear the mask” is a product of this kind of colorblind

thinking in which race supposedly does not matter. At face value, it asserts

that superhero identities are not restricted to white characters but rather are

universally accessible—a sentiment that is obviously intended to be empow-

ering. But like colorblindness more generally, the proverb falsely presumes

equality of opportunity, begging the question, If anyone really can wear the

mask, then why are superheroes of color still so scarce? While the true answer

would likely point the ﬁ nger at risk-averse producers and other Hollywood

gatekeepers—those, like Arad, who have the power to decide which projects

get greenlit and which languish in cultural obscurity—Into the Spider-Verse

shifts the blame onto those so often left on the other side of the gate.

This revisionist moral also undermines the superlative nature of the

superhero archetype in the name of colorblind inclusivity. While superheroes

such as Batman have “long naturalized a persistent Western belief in white

exceptionalism,” as soon as the superhero is Black, the bar is lowered: sud-

denly anyone can be one!

The denial of the superhero’s inherent exception-

alism when applied to Miles echoes a similar rhetorical move to that seen in

the white backlash to #BlackLivesMatter, which John Tawa, Ruqian Ma, and

Shinji Katsumoto describe thus: “The phrase ‘all lives matter’ has recently

emerged in social media in an e ort to counter the ‘black lives matter’

movement and national demands for addressing disparities in police violence

against black men and women (Logan 2015). ‘All lives matter’ is an echo of

what racial and ethnic minority psychologists refer to as ‘colorblind racial

attitudes’ in which one minimizes the signiﬁ cance of race often by appealing

to an apparently humanistic ideal of concern for the entire ‘human race.’”

In keeping with #AllLivesMatter’s dismissal of lived Black realities in favor of

post-racial colorblindness, Into the Spider-Verse demonstrates, under the guise

of empowerment, that a Black kid is only permitted to become a superhero in

a narrative that explicitly emphasizes that anyone can—up to and including

a cannibalistic cartoon pig. Adilifu Nama’s description of the liberating poli-

tics of Black superheroes clearly illustrates what Miles’s colorblind treatment

denies him: “because superheroes are the embodiment of American morality

and the national ethos, black superheroes become that much more capti-

vating as symbolic ﬁ gures—they signify a type of racial utopia where whites

can accept blacks as superhuman, intellectually and physically superior, and

benevolent protectors of all humanity.”

It would seem that Sony, compelled

to diversify their approach to exploiting the Spider-Man IP after loaning

Peter Parker to Marvel Studios, could only approach Miles Morales from the

same colorblind perspective that they had previously refused to adopt when

45 Je rey A. Brown, “The Dark Knight: Whiteness, Appropriation, Colonization, and

Batman in the New 52 Era,” in Guynes and Lund, Unstable Masks, 242.

46 John Tawa, Ruqian Ma, and Shinji Katsumoto, “‘All Lives Matter’: The Cost of Col-

orblind Racial Attitudes in Diverse Social Networks,” Race and Social Problems 8,

no.2 (2016): 196.

47 Nama, Super Black, 153.

206 JCMS 62.5 • 2022–2023

Donald Glover sought an audition for The Amazing Spider-Man. As we’ll see in

the next section, the ﬁ lm’s reticence to fully embrace Miles’s exceptionality

extends beyond the ﬁ lm’s narrative to include its comic book stylization and

status as animation, both of which function to distinguish Into the Spider-Verse

from the MCU and minimize Miles’s signiﬁ cance within the franchise.

STYLIZING THE SPIDER-VERSE

Despite the fact that “comics are in right now,” the majority of ﬁ lms that

the average moviegoer would identify as “comic book ﬁ lms” downplay their

aesthetic relationship to the comic book medium in favor of photographic

verisimilitude.

As Drew Morton notes, the consistently poor box o ce

performance of ﬁ lms that engage in the stylistic remediation of comics,

combined with the record-breaking successes of superhero adaptations that

aesthetically e ace their comic book origins (e.g., The Dark Knight, Christo-

pher Nolan, 2008), “provides a strong incentive against the practice.”

The

MCU clearly took this lesson, and from the outset has developed a “clear

house style” that owes more to David Bordwell’s concept of intensiﬁ ed conti-

nuity than the distinctive pop art aesthetic associated with comic books.

sharp contrast to the MCU, the comic book–inﬂ uenced aesthetic design of

Into the Spider-Verse is obvious, immediate, and pervasive. Beginning with its

opening invocation of the Comics Code Authority (CCA) Seal of Approval,

the ﬁ lm establishes itself as a comic book ﬁ lm in the most literal sense: more

than a cinematic adaptation of a comic book storyworld, the ﬁ lm seems to

self-identify as a comic book. Even compared to “motion comics”—those

literal-minded adaptations that “[appropriate and remediate] an existing

comic book narrative and artwork into a screen-based animated narrative,”

most often adding only limited animation and an audiobook-style voice-over

to the raw materials of the comic—Into the Spider-Verse directly evokes sequen-

tial art in all its multimodal dynamism.

As such, the ﬁ lm clearly sets itself

up in contradistinction to the photorealistic computer-generated imagery

and non-descript blockbuster aesthetic that deﬁ nes the MCU’s house style,

instead adopting a more playful and intermedial approach to the design and

representation of its narrative world.

Ironically, though, Into the Spider-Verse is actually the ﬁ rst text featuring

Miles Morales to bear the CCA seal, as Marvel Comics abandoned the Com-

ics Code in 2001, a full decade before Miles debuted in Ultimate Fallout #4.

This is the ﬁ rst of many gestures signaling that the ﬁ lmmakers are primarily

interested in a comic book aesthetic associated with a much earlier period

48 Drew Morton, Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books during the

Blockbuster Era (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 3.

49 Morton, 38.

50 Martin Flanagan, Mike McKenny, and Andy Livingstone, The Marvel Studios Phenom-

enon: Inside a Transmedia Universe (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 197. For a discus-

sion of intensiﬁ ed continuity style, see David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It:

Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

51 Craig Smith, “Motion Comics: Modes of Adaptation and the Issue of Authenticity,”

Animation Practice, Process & Production 1, no. 2 (2012): 357, https:// doi .org/ 10

.1386/ap3 .1 .2 .357 _1. See also Drew Morton, “The Unfortunates: Towards a History

and Deﬁ nition of the Motion Comic,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 6, no.4

(2015): 347–366, https:// doi .org/ 10 .1080/ 21504857 .2015 .1039142.

207JEFFRIES • “ANYONE CAN WEAR THE MASK”

of the medium’s history, one chronologically closer to the debut of Peter

Parker in Amazing Fantasy #15 than Miles’s ﬁ rst appearance in 2011. As Sam

Summers notes, the CCA seal’s “prominent placement at the start of the ﬁ lm

[is] an obvious anachronism to any up-to-date comics fan. The ‘comic book’

aesthetic employed by Into the Spider-Verse, then, is one drawn from the pop-

ular imagining of the medium’s unique visual qualities, rooted in nostalgic

cultural memories rather than in the contemporary works from which the

ﬁ lm takes its story and characters.”

The ﬁ lm’s speciﬁ c use of comic book

ﬁ lm style can thus be considered as part of the same project discussed in the

preceding section—that is, one geared toward accommodating comic book

fans that have a nostalgic attachment to the comics they grew up with and

may be skeptical of Miles Morales and the diversity that he represents. As

Jason Rothery and Benjamin Woo describe, “Filmmakers and studio execu-

tives appear acutely aware of the ongoing need to court fans, and . . . these

discourses [can be read] as attempts to defuse the potential negative reac-

tions to new interpretations.”

In addition to aesthetically di erentiating the

ﬁ lm from the MCU, then, the ﬁ lm’s comic book stylization can also be read

as an attempt to manufacture a sense of comic book authenticity—one based

not on ﬁ delity to the comics from which it adapts its narrative, but rather one

speciﬁ cally rooted in (white) fans’ nostalgia for 1960s superhero comics.

Into the Spider-Verse also integrates actual comic books into its storytelling

and diegetic world, a strategy I have deﬁ ned elsewhere as explicit intermedi-

ality.

In so doing, the viewer is not just reminded of the ﬁ lm’s intertextual

status as a comic book adaptation but also clued into the role of comics both

within the diegetic storyworld and in its onscreen representation. As the

ﬁ lm’s production designer Justin K. Thompson states, “the goal was to make

you feel like you’re living inside a comic book.”

To be more precise, the

ﬁ lm creates a comic book storyworld that is represented through animation;

it is not the viewer (the “you” in Thompson’s statement) who is “living inside

a comic book,” but rather the characters in the ﬁ lm that exist in this multi-

modal, two-dimensional world. For instance, the introduction of each new

spider-character in the narrative triggers an expository montage that begins

with the image of a comic book cover, explicitly contextualizing them as

comic book characters within a comic book world.

Similarly, when Miles’s powers ﬁ rst manifest at school, he retreats to his

dorm room to read a comic book titled True Life Tales of Spider-Man, whose

cover is explicitly modeled after Peter Parker’s actual ﬁ rst appearance in

Amazing Fantasy #15. Let’s compare this with an equivalent moment in the

52 Sam Summers, “Adapting a Retro Comic Aesthetic with Spider-Man: Into

the Spider-Verse,” Adaptation 12, no. 2 (2019): 192, https:// doi .org/ 10

.1093/adaptation/apz014.

53 Jason Rothery and Benjamin Woo, “Mutatis Mutandis: Constructing Fidelity in the

Comic Book Film Adaptation,” in Comics and Pop Culture: Adaptation from Panel

to Frame, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Scott Henderson (Austin: University of Texas

Press, 2019), 134.

54 Dru Je ries, Comic Book Film Style: Cinema at 24 Panels per Second (Austin: Uni-

versity of Texas Press, 2017), 23.

55 Quoted in Zahed, Spider-Man, 13.

56 These covers look quite similar without being identical to actual comic book covers

featuring these characters.

208 JCMS 62.5 • 2022–2023

comics: in Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man #21 (Marvel, 2013), Miles watches a

YouTube video of Peter Parker’s battle with Venom to prepare for his own

encounter with the supervillain. The comic book version of Miles seems to

live in a world that reﬂ ects our own, in which video and photography serve as

the best tools for documenting and learning about real-world events. Miles’s

world in Into the Spider-Verse, by contrast, seems to be documented in comics:

sequential art, rather than video, is established here as the medium best

equipped to capture the true life tales of this world. Again, this is because

the world itself is akin to a comic book: recalling ﬁ lms such as Creepshow

(George A. Romero, 1982), Into the Spider-Verse’s (virtual) camera will on

occasion track backward out of the diegesis itself, revealing the storyworld

to consist of nothing more than panels on a comic book page.

Whereas

Creepshow uses dissolves to transition viewers between the photographic world

and the illustrated images on the comic book page, Into the Spider-Verse’s non-

photographic basis presents both versions as ontologically equivalent, iden-

tical save for the addition of speech balloons, captions, and the multi-panel

grid in the comic book version.

Into the Spider-Verse is also unreserved in its use of comics’ expressive

conventions (e.g., text captions, speech and thought balloons, onomato-

poeias, motion lines), reminding viewers of the medium’s signature commu-

nicative tools with each evocation.

For example, shortly after Miles is bit

by the genetically altered spider, his internal monologue becomes inﬂ ected

with comic book stylization: the next day at school, he starts to hear his

thoughts more loudly, which manifests visually as a series of yellow caption

boxes repeating what we hear in Miles’s voice-over: “Why is the voice in my

head so loud?” A few minutes later, a blue caption box (reading “Later that

night...”) serves an omniscient narrational function, separate from Miles’s

internal voice. Speech balloons also appear at various points in the ﬁ lm,

ﬁ rst as Miles stands precariously on the vertical wall of his school (“Keep

sticking!”) and then later to provide an English translation to Scorpion’s

Spanish-language dialogue.

As in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright,

2010), onomatopoeias often appear onscreen as visualized graphic text (e.g.,

a visible “clackity clackity clackity” as we see and hear Spider-Man type on a

computer keyboard) while motion lines and impact stars accentuate charac-

ters’ rapid movements and collisions in battle, respectively.

Formal intermediality refers to “the use of comics’ formal system—

sequential images, arranged spatially and available for simultaneous view—in

a ﬁ lm, often through split-screen.”

Again, this is a technique that appears

throughout Into the Spider-Verse and especially after Miles receives his fateful

spider bite. Indeed, after the bite we are immediately transported inside

Miles’s body, which is represented through an array of panels, each providing

a separate view of his internal anatomy: heart pumping, veins pulsing, blood

vessels ﬂ owing. Notably, the style of the images also changes to a less detailed,

57 See Je ries, Comic Book Film Style, 1–2, 94–98.

58 Je ries, 23.

59 The latter echoes the use of speech balloons as a creative form of subtitling in

Kick-Ass 2 (Je Wadlow, 2013). See Je ries, 77–78.

60 Je ries, 23.

209JEFFRIES • “ANYONE CAN WEAR THE MASK”

more hand-drawn aesthetic that contrasts with the ﬁ lm’s computer-generated

representation of external reality. It would seem that the spider has injected

Miles not just with the proportionate strength of a spider but also with com-

ics’ formal properties: under a microscope, blood vessels and Ben-Day dots

alike course through his veins.

The use of this technique climaxes during Miles’s ﬁ rst night out swinging

through Manhattan as Spider-Man in the ﬁ nal act of the ﬁ lm. In combina-

tion with speed-ramping that evokes “comics’ elastic temporality and staccato

rhythm,” Miles’s e ervescent debut as Spider-Man uses sequential panels to

great e ect.

The sequence begins with Miles clinging to the glass wall of a

skyscraper. As he ﬂ ings himself into the air, the animation ramps into slow

motion, suspending him in midair as he leans back, reverse-somersaulting

into a vertical dive. Cutting to an extreme long shot of an inverted Manhattan

skyline, we see Miles—dead center in the frame—slowly drifting, practically

ﬂ oating, toward the skyscrapers above. Movement is all but arrested in this

shot, recalling Scott Bukatman’s evocative description of Spider-Man co-

creator’s Steve Ditko’s artwork: “One small Ditko panel gives us a rear view

of Spiderman [sic] in the air over the city. His artiﬁ cial web snakes slackly

through his hands: this is movement in progress, not an arrested bat pose.

Two buildings ﬂ ank his body in the lowest part of the frame, no more than

jutting corners against the open space.”

The use of slow motion approxi-

mates the paradoxically dynamic stasis of the comic book panel, arresting a

moment of diegetic time for extended viewing and heightening the sense of

“vertiginous kinesis” that Bukatman associates with the superhero genre in

both comics and cinema.

Following this moment of temporal transcendence,

the sheer velocity of Miles’s descent is emphasized through a series of six pan-

els, which appear in a left-to-right sequence onscreen. Each panel’s compo-

sition centers on Miles in free fall, beginning with an extreme long shot and

progressing ultimately to an extreme close-up on his mask’s left eye: the kind

of panel layout that is often described as the comic book equivalent of a zoom

shot, but one that clearly o ers distinct visual pleasures of its own. This is also

distinct from typical cinematic uses of split screen, which tend to obey a logic

of simultaneity, o ering viewers visual access to two separate spaces within a

single composition. This (multi-)shot instead follows the sequential logic of

panels arrayed on a comic book page, presenting sequential moments in time

communicated through their relative arrangement in space.

While the story

being told across these panels is not complex, the movement across the screen

clearly communicates the increasing intensity of Miles’s fall.

Throughout the ﬁ lm, the ﬁ lmmakers also deploy aesthetic e ects that

bear a speciﬁ cally nostalgic association with outdated comic book printing

61 Je ries, 23.

62 Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity: Special E ects and Supermen in the 20th Cen-

tury (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 207.

63 Scott Bukatman, The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating

Spirit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), loc. 4270, of Kindle.

64 Into the Spider-Verse uses conventional split screen as well—for instance, in a

scene near the end of the ﬁ lm when Miles is speaking with his father on the phone.

In such moments, I would argue that the ﬁ lm is not remediating comics but rather

merely using cinematic split screen in the conventional way.

210 JCMS 62.5 • 2022–2023

technologies: namely, Ben-Day dots (for color and shading) and the deliber-

ate misalignment of line and color ﬁ lls. These choices—like the CCA logo

that introduces the ﬁ lm—eschew the aesthetics of contemporary comics

(such as those featuring Miles Morales) to instead hark back to a bygone era

of the medium that was aesthetically deﬁ ned by microscopic dots on cheap,

faded newsprint. In comics, Ben-Day dots “allowed printers to mix colors

through the careful application of varying amounts of primary colors applied

as a ﬁ eld of small dots. On close examination, the colors remain distinct, but

at a casual distance, the reader’s eyes mix the colors.”

Thanks to the four-

color (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, or CMYK) printing process used for

newspapers and comic books throughout much of the medium’s pre-digital

history, the association between sequential art and bright, primary color

palettes is strong.

Even today, when advancements in printing technology

and the transition to digital coloring have given colorists the ability to draw

upon the full visual spectrum, comics remain connected with garish colors

and Lichtenstein-esque Ben-Day dots in the minds of ﬁ lmmakers, viewers,

and even many scholars.

Like contemporary digitally colored comics, Into

the Spider-Verse enjoys a rich and varied palette, perhaps closer to a live-action

ﬁ lm than a 1960s comic book, but its lighting and shading e ects are literally

textured with nostalgia for vintage comics.

The ﬁ lm also draws upon the ﬂ aws inherent in antiquated four-pass

printing processes. As art director Patrick O’Keefe describes:

In a comic book, there’s no lens. So there’s no lens blur. To stay true

to the medium, we decided to go with a CMYK o setting as our blur.

The ﬁ lm actually has no motion blur in it, but, instead, borrows

from certain anime techniques to replicate the feeling of motion

with a frame. At ﬁ rst it was a real problem because you’d get a lot of

[visual] chatter. Despite our best intentions, you still need a “lens”

that can focus. So we decided, all the [sense of] focus is done with a

CMYK o setting like you’d get o a four-pass printing press. Then

we were bringing in the halftones, because that’s old school comic

book DNA, as well.

65 Robert S. Petersen, Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Narra-

tives (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), 96.

66 See Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper-

Perennial, 1994), 188.

67 As recently as 2007, adaptation specialist Thomas Leitch claimed that “comics

and movies deploy color very di erently, since comics are normally limited to

six colors (eight, counting black and white), whereas the most rigidly controlled

movies usually exploit the resources of a much wider color palette.” Liam Burke

provides an apt rejoinder to this antiquated observation, writing that “the restricted

palette Leitch describes was rendered obsolete [in comics] by digital colouring.”

See Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: FromGone with the

WindtoThe Passion of the Christ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

2007), 194; and Liam Burke, The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern

Hollywood’s Leading Genre (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 210.

68 Zev Chevat, “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’s Unique Art Style Meant

‘Making Five Movies,’” Polygon, December 11, 2018, https:// www .polygon

.com/2018/12/11/18136056/ spider -man -into -the -spider -verse -movie -art

-animation -style -visual -e ects.

211JEFFRIES • “ANYONE CAN WEAR THE MASK”

In both of these instances, the ﬁ lmmakers have their comic book cake and

eat it, too, remediating the aesthetic e ects associated with obsolete printing

processes but with a degree of control inaccessible to comic book printers

and without any aesthetic restrictions (e.g., of color choice). As a result, they

can deploy these techniques in deliberate and systematic ways, producing

novel focus and depth-of-ﬁ eld e ects in a speciﬁ cally non-photographic way

(i.e., without motion blur). As Ramin Zahed summarizes in the ﬁ lm’s Art of

the Movie co ee-table book, these “visual cues . . . pay homage to the gritty

origins of Spider-Man and the Golden Age of comic books.”

In this quo-

tation, however, “Spider-Man” does not refer to Miles, but to Peter Parker,

whose comic book appearances throughout the ﬁ rst few decades of his

adventures, at least, would be conveyed via these now-obsolete printing pro-

cesses. Like the Spider-Verse conceit itself, then, the comic book– inﬂ uenced

aesthetic of the ﬁ lm is executed in a way that rea rms Peter Parker’s impor-

tance to the cinematic experience, even as Miles assumes the central role in

the narrative.

Animation also clearly plays a subordinate role to the live-action super-

hero ﬁ lm, again positioning Into the Spider-Verse as secondary to the live-action

MCU. Historically, animated superhero ﬁ lms are almost always straight-to-

video a airs aimed at children (e.g., Superman: Brainiac Attacks, Curt Geda,

2006) or diehard comic book readers (e.g., Teen Titans: The Judas Contract,

Sam Liu, 2017); the few that are released theatrically tend to be o shoots

of television series (e.g., Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Bruce Timm and

Eric Radomski, 1993; Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, Aaron Horvath and Peter

Rida Michail, 2018) or original properties unrelated to existing comic book

canon (e.g., The Incredibles, Brad Bird, 2004; Megamind, Tom McGrath, 2010).

Though the ﬁ lm bucked the trend and was given a wide theatrical release,

Sony clearly did not treat Into the Spider-Verse as an equivalent to their live-

action Spider-Man ﬁ lms; it was produced on the lowest budget of any ﬁ lm in

the franchise, played on the fewest screens of any ﬁ lm in the franchise, and

was released theatrically in December, well outside of the May–July block-

buster season in which every other Spider-Man ﬁ lm to date had debuted.

In the ﬁ nal tally, it also grossed less at the domestic box o ce than any

other Spider-Man ﬁ lm—$12 million less, even, than the reboot-necessitating

The Amazing Spider-Man 2, despite far better reviews and word-of-mouth.

This last point may be surprising, since the ﬁ lm has been widely celebrated

by critics and audiences alike and is often hailed as the high point of the

franchise. Arguably, this success—culminating in the 2018 Academy Award

for Best Animated Feature and the announcement of two sequels, currently

scheduled for release in June 2023 and March 2024—speaks to the e cacy of

Sony’s strategy of tempering the ﬁ lm’s diversiﬁ cation of the superhero genre

69 Zahed, Spider-Man, 191.

70 Spider-Man: No Way Home, which was released three years after Into the

Spider-Verse, also had a December release date. Box o ce data for the entire

Spider-Man franchise can be found at https:// www .boxo cemojo .com.

71 Of course, its production budget was less than half that of Amazing Spider-Man 2,

making it more proﬁ table overall. According to IMDb .com, budgets in the live-action

franchise range from Spider-Man’s (Sam Raimi, 2002) $139 million to Spider-Man 3’s

$258 million. Into the Spider-Verse was budgeted at $90 million.

212 JCMS 62.5 • 2022–2023

with overt appeals to colorblindness and an aesthetic design that gives the

ﬁ lm the veneer of 1960s comic books.

MOVING BEYOND THE BINARIES

Miles Morales’s relegation to a secondary, highly stylized animated story-

world speaks to Hollywood’s continued di culty imagining characters of

color headlining four-quadrant blockbuster ﬁ lms, especially in the superhero

genre. As I have argued, the particular narrative choices made in the process

of adaptation are revealing. For instance, whereas the comic narrativizes the

positive impacts of a rmative action policies while also recognizing their

insu ciency to redress systemic racial biases, Into the Spider-Verse empha-

sizes Miles’s deservingness under a well-functioning meritocracy. Similarly,

Miles’s father is transformed from a reformed criminal to an o cer of the

law, emphasizing family values and respectability over the realities of racial

discrimination and unequal policing practices. Additionally, the ﬁ lm’s

central theme promotes colorblind racial ideology, which attaches a clear

asterisk to any claim that the ﬁ lm empowers underrepresented viewers in a

straightforward way. Finally, while the ﬁ lm’s comic book aesthetic is visually

exciting and innovative in many ways, it also functions to subordinate Miles

to Peter Parker and the more racially heterogeneous era of superhero comics

he represents. Taking all these factors into account, Into the Spider-Verse dem-

onstrates how stylistic, industrial, and narrative factors can work together to

maintain white hegemony even while ostensibly diversifying a franchise.

In an article published in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates attributed his

love for superhero comics speciﬁ cally to their “transgressive diversity,” or

at least the possibility thereof, especially in contrast to their comparatively

conservative ﬁ lm adaptations. Responding to the casting of light-skinned

actress Alexandria Shipp as Storm in X-Men: Apocalypse (Bryan Singer, 2016),

Coates ﬂ ips the association between a fannish devotion to canon and white

supremacy, writing:

Hollywood can’t bring itself around to cast someone who looks like

the Kenyan woman Storm actually is. This isn’t a matter of fanboy

accuracy, but white supremacy. In another world, where Lupita

Nyong’o’s dark is unexceptional, . . . this discussion wouldn’t be

necessary. In this world, the one where we can accept Nina Simone’s

music but not her face, it matters. . . . [O]ne reason I’m always cau-

tious about the assumption that everything is improved by turning

it into a movie is that the range of possibility necessarily shrinks.

I’d frankly be shocked if we ever see a Storm, in all her fullness and

glory, in a ﬁ lm.

The possibility of Miles Morales as depicted in the comic books and the

seeming impossibility of adapting the character within a live-action block-

72 Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Broad, Inclusive Canvas of Comics,” The Atlantic, February3,

2015, https:// www .theatlantic .com/ entertainment/ archive/ 2015/ 02/ the -broad

-inclusive -canvas -of -comics/ 385080/. Storm had previously been played on ﬁ lm

byHalle Berry, another light-skinned actress.

213JEFFRIES • “ANYONE CAN WEAR THE MASK”

buster, as well as the changes made to the character for the animated adapta-

tion described throughout this article, seem to prove Coates’s point. Perhaps

we should not be surprised that Miles would undergo signiﬁ cant changes in

the process of adaptation, given Arad’s on-the-record dismissal of Miles as

a viable live-action character in 2014, not to mention the superhero genre’s

long-standing bias toward whiteness.

Similarly to Coates’s understanding

of Shipp’s casting in X-Men: Apocalypse, such changes function largely to

reduce the sense of racialized threat and implicit (and sometimes explicit)

anti-Black bias that has surrounded the character since his earliest comic

book appearances—in other words, to make the character more palatable to

whiteaudiences.

And yet, like the MCU’s Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018), Into the

Spider-Verse succeeded in capturing Black audiences’ hearts as well as broader

mainstream box o ce success: the presence of Black protagonists and—in

the case of Black Panther, at least—largely non-white supporting casts seems

not to have presented a signiﬁ cant barrier to white audiences, subverting

Hollywood’s long-held hypothesis “that nonwhite characters challenged

identiﬁ cation and marketability.”

At the same time, the ﬁ lm’s injection of

colorblind racial ideology does not seem to have prevented viewers of color

from embracing it. As this article has done for Into the Spider-Verse, the cele-

bratory discourse surrounding Black Panther has been tempered by various

critiques; as Rebecca Wanzo describes, the ﬁ lm’s progressive Afrofuturistic

vision is marred by the presence of regressive, neocolonialist stereotypes of

African government and culture, a naively heroic representation of the Cen-

tral Intelligence Agency, and its (at least partial) demonization of Killmon-

ger’s revolutionary politics.

In the context of such complex Hollywood texts,

suspended as they are between reinforcing the white status quo and o ering

an olive branch to Black ﬁ lmmakers and audiences to craft and support

works that represent and empower them, Wanzo productively suggests that

we “move beyond positive and negative binaries and recognize that the comic

and ﬁ lm hold progressivism and conservatism simultaneously, representing

ongoing conﬂ icts over black liberatory practices.”

We can both celebrate the

experience of the child who walks out of Into the Spider-Verse ﬁ nally feeling

seen by a superhero ﬁ lm, and perhaps even tweet about it under the hashtag

#RepresentationMatters, while also maintaining Kristen J. Warner’s position

that such a framework may limit the sphere of representation to only those

images that function as clear “[signiﬁ ers] of progress” while also making it

more di cult to disavow colorblind (“dipped in chocolate”) representations

“because alternatives are few.”

Between the writing and publication of this article, Marvel Studios

announced, produced, and released a series of MCU projects, some of which

73 See Guynes and Lund, “Introduction.”

74 Rebecca Wanzo, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and

Political Belonging (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 15.

75 Wanzo, 207–218.

76 Wanzo, 208.

77 Kristen J. Warner, “In the Time of Plastic Representation,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 2

(2017): 34, 32.

214 JCMS 62.5 • 2022–2023

leveraged their Disney+ streaming platform as a supplement (if not alterna-

tive or eventual replacement) to theatrical feature ﬁ lm distribution. Among

them were adaptations of Marvel Comics characters introduced in the wake

of Miles Morales, including Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) (played by Iman

Vellani in Ms. Marvel, Disney+, 2022) and Riri Williams (Ironheart), a female

heir apparent to the Iron Man mantle (played by Dominique Thorne in Black

Panther: Wakanda Forever, Ryan Coogler, 2022). Both characters follow the

Miles template, taking an established superhero identity and passing it down

to a young person of color (Kamala is Pakistani American, Riri is African

American, and both are teenage girls).

Combined with Marvel’s other Phase

Four releases— including The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (Disney+, 2021),

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2021), and

Eternals (Chloé Zhao, 2021)—the MCU is showing an increased commit-

ment to racial diversity both in front of and behind the camera. At the same

time, the third installment in the MCU’s Spider-Man series, Spider-Man:

No Way Home, integrated characters from Sony’s preceding versions of the

franchise, including Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus from Spider-Man 2

(Sam Raimi, 2004) and Jamie Foxx’s Electro from The Amazing Spider-Man 2,

setting a precedent for the MCU to integrate material from licensed Marvel

ﬁ lms made by other studios on an ad hoc basis. Should Marvel elect to also

emigrate Into the Spider-Verse’s Miles Morales from Sony’s animated world to

the live-action MCU—as Marvel Comics did when it integrated the charac-

ter from the Ultimate Marvel line into their main storyworld—it could be

another step toward bridging the gap between the “transgressive diversity” of

superhero comics and the narrower (for now) range of possibilities of Holly-

wood cinema.

Dru Je ries (he/him) is the author of Comic Book Film Style: Cinema at 24 Pan-

els per Second (University of Texas Press, 2017) and the editor of #WWE: Profes-

sional Wrestling in the Digital Age (Indiana University Press, 2019). He teaches at

Wilfrid Laurier University.

78 Ironheart shares a creator with Miles Morales in Brian Michael Bendis.