Thursday, January 22, 2015

Spider-Verse: Spidey Super Stories

Spider-Verse is a currently running event in the Spider-Man comics that will involve every* Spider-Man we've ever met, including several Spider-Women and Spider-Girls (not to mention Scarlet Spiders and Spider-Hams and whatnot), and several brand-new versions. The premise is simple: there's a group of people trying to wipe out every Spider character across the multiverse, so all the Spider characters will team up to stop them. This is, of course, a massive event - multimedia even, since it will also feature in the Spider-Man Unlimited video game and the animated series Ultimate Spider-Man - and given the premise, it's only natural that it will add a few entries to this catalog.

*I say "every" because Marvel says "every", but there are a few that won't be showing up, such as Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. (Although see here for more information on that.)

Today's entry is Spidey Super Stories.

The Electric Company was an educational sketch comedy show that ran on PBS from 1971 to 1977 and was meant for children who had graduated from Sesame Street. The original cast featured such talent as Morgan Freeman, Bill Cosby, and Rita Moreno, and it was very successful. One of the recurring segments, beginning in 1974, was "Spidey Super Stories", which featured Spidey taking on different bad guys, none of whom were from the comics. One interesting feature of the shorts was that, despite being live action, Spider-Man spoke in word balloons to help children learn how to read.


This Spidey was mentioned in Spider-Verse #2 (January 2015), along with another Spider-Man. But whereas (speculation time) that Spider-Man may only be mentioned because they don't have the rights to use him, I think this one may only be mentioned because it'd be hard to convey that his word balloons are actual word balloons, whereas everyone else's word balloons are just speech.


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