Comic Book / Spider-Man: Reign 2

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Spider-Man: Reign 2 is a Marvel comic book mini-series written and illustrated by Kaare Andrews. This book serves as the official sequel of the original 2006 mini-series made by the same creator.

Once upon a time, Peter Benjamin Parker was Spider-Man, a costumed vigilante who defended New York City until the tragic passing of his wife Mary Jane Watson convinced him to hang up his mask. But as years passed, New York gradually devolved into a fascist police state that isolated itself from the rest of the world. The culmination of this was the WEBB System, an electric force field preventing anyone from getting in or out of the city. In order to combat this authoritarian regime, Spider-Man came out of retirement and discovered that his old adversary Venom was secretly using the WEBB System to cage the people of NYC in order to feed them all to an army of symbiotes.

During their climatic showdown, Peter was forced to blow up the entire Empire State Building in order to save the city from the symbiote horde. But while Venom and its minions were successfully slain, this inadvertently granted Wilson Fisk the opportunity to take advantage of the power vacuum and assert his control over New York.

Fortunately for Peter, he's presented one final opportunity to make things right and potentially prevent this dystopian future from ever happening in the process. But his determination to Set Right What Once Went Wrong results in him coming to odds with some old friends...

Spider-Man: Reign 2 provides examples of:

• Adaptational Heroism: The Green Goblin did not murder Gwen Stacy, laments the apparent deaths of Harry and his family, and opposes Mayor Fisk's regime, having Kitty-Kat break Spider-Man out of custody so he can help him topple Fisk.
• After the End: Reign 2 reveals that the world suffered a Class 2 Apocalypse where New York became the Last Bastion of human civilization thanks to the WEBB System keeping whatever ended the world at bay. But due to a combination of overpopulation, scarce resources, and the power grid being on the verge of failing at any moment, mankind's fate is doomed to extinction with the only alternative being Wilson Fisk's plan to digitize the minds of everyone in the city and have them live on in a virtual reality of his own design. Thankfully, the final issue reveals that the world outside of the WEBB never ended, and that the aforementioned apocalypse was merely a ruse created by Wilson Fisk so he can rule over Manhattan as an unrivaled despot, with The Upload simply being another way to keep everyone under his thumb.
• Ambiguously Related: Its heavily implied that Kitty-Kat might be the daughter of Felicia Hardy. She has Felicia's white hair and green eyes, wears an eerily similar form-fitting cat suit, possess the same talents as a Classy Cat-Burglar, and sarcastically claims that her mother would be jealous if she ever finds out that she kissed Parker during their escape from Fisk's goons. Issue #4 reveals that she's Katherine Morales, the daughter of Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy who the former believed died alongside her mother when they were caught outside of the WEBB when The End of the World as We Know It kicked off. Felicia Hardy simply stepped in to become Katherine's guardian after finding her alone in the middle of a panicked crowd then trained her to survive their new dystopian environment.
• Badass Longcoat: Peter picks up a discarded trench coat in order to cover himself up after Kat helps him escape Fisk's enforcers. Even after putting on another costume he stashed away in an apartment, he still wears the coat over it.
• Beard of Sorrow: Peter has a long, white one to shown that he’s become an old man who has lived a very rough life.
• Bittersweet Ending: Through the combined efforts of Peter, Miles, Kat, the Green Goblin, and the Venom Symbiote, Wilson Fisk is finally defeated and his plot to gaslight the entire population of Manhattan to effectively agree to a Suicide Pact is foiled. Peter also sacrifices himself to destroy the WEBB System's power source, revealing that The Outside World is perfectly fine and the Avengers immediately swoop in to help the traumatized civilians now that the barrier is down. Gwen Stacy is also still alive and well, reuniting with Miles and their daughter at last. But the decade they've spent trapped in the WEBB under the belief that she was dead led Miles to start a new family with an unnamed woman, which creates a noticeable rift between the two spiders once they finally see each other. Peter is also revealed to have survived the detonation of the WEBB's system's power core, with the comic ending with him triumphantly punching his way out of a web cocoon...
• The Dragon: For reasons that have yet to be explained, Miles Morales became Wilson Fisk's most trusted operative when the apocalypse hit. When word gets out that Peter traveled back to the past, Fisk sends Miles to hunt down and apprehend his old mentor.
• Enemy Mine: While Peter Parker and Norman Osborn were each other's arch-nemesis in the past, the threat of humanity's extinction forces the two to come together in order to save the world.
• Expy: Continuing its thematic similarities with Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Kitty-Kat is an expy of Carrie Kelley, another young Legacy Character with a Cat Girl motif who plays sidekick to a grizzled Old Superhero.
• Eyepatch After Time Skip: The aged Green Goblin apparently lost an eye at some point, as one of the eyeholes in his mask is stitched shut.
• Luke, You Are My Father: Kitty-Kat is the daughter of Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy, who accuses the former of intentionally leaving both her and her mother for dead when "The Event" popped off. In reality, Gwen didn't trust the WEBB System to keep them all safe after the Venom fiasco in the previous series and refused to take Katherine into the city where she could be put at risk. Miles compromised by choosing to scout ahead and come back for them after making sure things were safe, totally unaware that the world would end literal seconds later. The only reason Katherine is still alive is because she wrestled out of her mother's arms and ran after her father before the WEBB's defense grid went up.
• Major Injury Underreaction: The Green Goblin's reaction to his neck being broken is to start Laughing Mad.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!:
  • In Issue #2, Peter violently breaks into The Daily Bugle to interrogate J. Jonah Jameson for any information on MJ's whereabouts. Peter's belligerent behavior spooks Jameson so thoroughly that he grabs a shotgun from his office to defend himself, only to end up shooting Robbie Robinson (who was fully willing to help out the wallcrawler) when Peter dodges out of the way.
  • Issue #3 reveals that Peter's constant attempts to alter history in order to save MJ resulted in the Time Crash that destroyed the world. While Manhattan was able to be saved thanks to the WEBB System, Miles personally apprehended Peter and placed him in The Upload to prevent him from continuing his self-destructive loop while being able to live out the rest of his days in relative happiness. So when it turns out that Peter unplugged himself from the sim and has traveled back in time once more, Miles gears up to stop him by any means necessary.
  • To make matters worse, one of Peter's temporal duplicates murdered his past-self and made it look like a suicide in order to spare MJ the fate of dying to his radioactivity. All this succeeded in doing was cause a butterfly effect where MJ became the host of the Venom Symbiote while in grief and assembled all of his former villains to help her take control of New York, effectively repeating the status quo of the first Reign series.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: After the building he was being held captive in was destroyed, the emaciated Kingpin replenished his strength by consuming the crippled Mayor Waters.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: It at first looks like Mayor Fisk has altruistic motives, wanting to save everyone in Manhattan from whatever is outside the WEBB, which is failing, via Brain Uploading, but it turns out there was no apocalypse, it was just an illusion orchestrated by Fisk, with people who seemingly died in the nonexistent cataclysm like Gwen Stacy being alive and well; the upload also does not actually transfer a person's mind into a digital paradise, it just creates a copy of them while the actual person is subjected to Murder by Cremation.
• Prison Rape: Peter was subjected to this by the employees at The Upload.
  Guard: Hey, before we put him back in—wanna get the red wig out and have some real fun with him? Last time was a—
• San Dimas Time: Norman Osborn's time machine is capable of sending Peter, Kitty-Kat, and several mini-goblins decades into the past in order to prevent the apocalypse. But they only have 48 hours to get the job done.
• Sequel Non-Entity: J. Jonah Jameson, a main character in the previous series, does not appear or get mentioned in this one (not counting the alternate past version of him that Spidey has a brief run in with).
• Serial Escalation: While Spider-Man: Reign was already set within a dystopian future, things get even worse in the sequel with the reveal that the entire world outside of Manhattan is dead due to some unknown catastrophe. The stakes get so dire that the narrative escalates into a Time Travel plot where Peter goes back in time to try and prevent this future from ever happening.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The plot kicks off with Peter and his allies being sent back in time by Norman Osborn in order to prevent their dystopian future from ever happening. From there, Peter becomes overwhelmed by the desire to save MJ and is willing to cross whatever line he deems necessary in order to make that happen. This single-minded mission becomes Deconstructed over the course of the story, as Peter's constant attempts to change history directly resulted in the Time Crash that brought about the apocalypse in the first place.
• Simulated Fantasy, Post-Apocalyptic Reality: "The Upload" is the proposed plan by Wilson Fisk to create a Cyberspace sanctuary for everyone in order to escape the grim reality that mankind as we know it is on the brink of extinction. Peter himself had his mind trapped in this virtual reality for an unspecified amount of time while the state of the real world continued to fall apart. The dark truth behind the simulation is that it only copy and pastes your mind onto the virtual world while the still living subjects are ushered off to be burned alive in a industrial furnace once the process is completed. The Upload is also a giant scam as the apocalypse that justified its existence is a lie fabricated by Fisk in order to continue his reign of tyranny over NYC.
• Stripped to the Bone: The fate of everyone who failed to make it into Manhattan before the WEBB went back up, including Harry Osborn and Gwen Stacy. Or so we're initially led to believe...
• Temporal Duplication: Revealed to be the reason why Peter can't remember any of his previous attempts to change history, as numerous Peters across similar timelines had the same idea to use Osborn's Time Machine to try and save MJ to varying degrees of failure, inevitably resulting in the Time Crash that destroyed the world.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Subverted. After suffering the Trauma Conga Line of the previous series compounded with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance, Peter is now willing to cross whatever line he deems necessary in order to save MJ and by extension the rest of the world. This includes killing any member of his Rogues Gallery that stands in his way.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Due to being force-fed "protein units" made from bugs as nutrients during the time he was stuck in Fisk's VR world, Peter, despite still being elderly, is considerably more bulked up compared to his emaciated build in the original Reign mini-series, allowing him to make short work of Beetle and Vulture when he is sent back into the past by the Green Goblin.
  • Miles Morales is now a towering brute with a hulking physique more akin to the Doom Slayer than any mainline Spider-Man. When Peter and Miles inevitably come to blows, the former is forced to target the vulnerable parts of the latter's body just to gain an edge against him...only for Miles to No-Sell all of his attacks.
    Peter: He's big, so I go for soft parts. Only with him, there's nothing soft to hit. Every part of him feels like stone.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Eddie Brock appears as Venom in a flashback, but it is never mentioned what became of him when the Venom symbiote bonded with MJ.