Comic Book / Spider-Man's Tangled Web

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Spider-Man's Tangled Web is a 2001 series by Marvel Comics.

The series was written by various writers not usually associated with Spider-Man, each of whom were allowed to display their take on the characters. Most of the stories focus not on Spider-Man himself, but instead center on either the various members of the supporting cast and the rogues gallery, or on how ordinary New York City residents interact with the Wall-Crawler.

Spider-Man's Tangled Web provides examples of:

• Animalistic Abomination: Notable in that he used to be human, but Carl is now a Spider Swarm version of The Worm That Walks.
• Anthology Comic: The series had a revolving door of creative teams, some for an issue only, others for a small two- or three-part arc.
• Ax-Crazy: The consumption and death of his mother at his hands may have been an accidental killing, but what Carl did to his dad and girlfriend was perpetrated willingly and for little more than sick kicks. After going underground to get used to his new state and to build up his strength for Spider Man, he spent his time taking his violent urges out on the homeless population and whatever unfortunate happened to cross his path.
• Bed Trick: In a particularly horrifying case, it's implied through the art that Carl had sex with his father while possessing his mother's corpse before killing him and taking over his body.
• Body Horror: Carl's powers embody this trope.
• Break Them by Talking: What Carl tried to do to Peter during the time he bullied him, in addition to the physical violence. Emphasis on tried, as already back in school Peter, along with everyone else, saw right through him and knew he was nothing but a sadistic and pathetic sociopath who only knew cruelty and fear, and was only a threat to Peter on account of his larger size and greater physical strength.
• Bully Brutality: During his Evil Gloating, King nonchalantly recalls doing such things to Peter as forcing him to eat dog crap, dangling him off the Williamsburg Bridge, and holding a knife to his crotch purely because he messed up his math paper.
• Card-Carrying Jerkass: In high school, Carl was an even more vicious bully to Peter than Flash Thompson; in the present, he revels in the memory of how much he made Peter's life miserable and freely admits he was a "rotten kid." As the Thousand, he's crossed the line into Card-Carrying Villain.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Carl acknowledges himself as a supervillain after admitting he killed his parents to Spidey.
  Thousand: You remember what a rotten kid I was, Parker. It's hardly surprising I turned out to be a rotten supervillain, too.
  Spider-Man: A supervillain?
  Thousand: I think I fit the profile.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • "I Was a Teenage Frogman" is a slice-of-life piece that centers on Frog-Man, the ever-bumbling C-list superhero. It proves a Decon-Recon Switch for his status as The Fool, showing how insecure it makes him to know he's an incompetent who only succeeds through luck - and show how heroic he is to go out and save lives anyway, knowing full well any time he could still die.
  • "The Last Shoot" is about Crusher Hogan, the wrestler Spider-Man beat during his brief wrestling career. He's now a washed-up janitor whose only joy comes from spinning tall tales about how he helped Spider-Man start his superhero career, only to wind up helping Spider-Man stop a group of criminals for real.
  • "Behind the Mustache" centers on J. Jonah Jameson.
• Didn't Think This Through: Having seen what the radioactive spider bite did to Peter, Carl decided to break into the exhibition building to acquire one for himself. It was only after he did so that he realized he had no idea how to irradiate a spider, and the spider that bit Peter was dead, leaving him with "Plan B" - eating the spider's corpse.
• Disposable Vagrant: The Thousand's main source of nourishment is New York's homeless population.
• Entitled Bastard: Carl's insanely jealous of Peter's fame and power as Spider-Man, firmly convinced such things are rightfully his.
• Evil Counterpart: Carl King to Flash Thompson, who does not appear in the story. Both bullied Peter, but while Flash did so due to his troubled home life and own insecurities, Carl did it simply because he was a sadistic sociopath. Both idolized and wanted to be like Spider-Man, and while Flash looks back on his time as a bully with embarrassment and shame, Carl revels in the memories of his past misdeeds.
• Even the Loving Hero Has Hated Ones: Spider-Man normally doesn't hate anyone, and even against the evilest of foes, he's still open to delivering wisecracks and jokes at their expense. With Carl? Peter straight-up calls him pathetic with a blunt and serious tone, never making a single joke once when fighting against him. Considering Carl's history as an unrepentant bully towards Peter, his shamelessness about hurting others, and his insanely self-absorbed reason for wanting publicity, it's no wonder why Spider-Man had such contemptuous and disdainful thoughts toward him.
• Eviler than Thou: In "Double Shots", Norman Osborn stuns all the villains in the Bar with No Name when he reveals what he did to Spider-Man's girlfriend.
• Evil Gloating: After biting Spider-Man and paralyzing him, Carl ties him up and goes on a long monologue, explaining his origins, his powers, and how he plans to Kill and Replace Spidey. This, combined with the interruption of Peter's landlord, who King promptly devours, buys Spidey enough time for the poison to wear off. Spidey even lampshades it before breaking free and attacking him.
  Spider-Man: You're in love with the sound of your own voice. You strut around smirking like a two-year-old who's just finished potty training. You can't resist laying out every detail of your descent into evil and your big, bad plan... and you get so into it you forget your paralyzing poison is about to wear off.
• Face Death with Dignity: In "Severance Package", Tom Cochrane, a lieutenant of the Kingpin, answers a summon from his boss despite knowing he's going to be killed because of one failure. He does this because he knows it's his best chance at making sure his family isn't killed off along with him.
• Fatal Flaw: Carl's pathological need to gloat and grind Peter's face to the dirt when he has him at his mercy. See the Evil Gloating entry above.
• Fat Bastard: As Carl, and Peter's landlord Mr. Ambrose.
• For the Evulz: Carl regularly bullied and tormented Peter in high school for the hell of it. In his current state, he's just as bad, admitting he's a supervillain and recalling how he ate children with a smile on his face.
• Giant Spider: Carl's main spider is about the size of a human head.
• Genius Bruiser: The Rhino briefly in Flowers for the Rhino.
• Genius Serum: In the story, "Flowers for Rhino", the dim-witted Rhino is tired of being treated like a joke and undergoes a dangerous surgical procedure to greatly increase his intelligence. He eventually becomes so smart that he thoroughly trounces Spidey in a fight and uses an algorithm to determine his Secret Identity. But he soon begins experiencing Intelligence Equals Isolation as he simply grows bored of everything and can only see the numbers and science behind the world around him instead of enjoying it for what it is. As a result, he ends up getting another surgery to revert his intelligence and make him dumber than he already was.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Carl is solely motivated by envy for Peter's life as Spider-Man, believing it to be perfect.
• Humanoid Abomination: When Carl’s wearing his latest victim and pretending to be human, he perfectly embodies this. He can act and look perfectly normal up until the moment he feels he has the upper hand. At which point he can distort and warp his host body (which is little more than a bag of skin animated by his spider form) into a varied array of horrific configurations to overtake his opponents. He’s also completely divorced from humanity both in his natural state and mental state, as well as believes himself to be vastly superior both to normal people and Spider-Man alike.
• Hated by All: Carl King boasts that no one wanted to help Peter when they were teens because they all hated Peter and liked Carl. Peter, however, doesn't view his high school years with the same Nostalgia Filter as Carl and states absolutely no one liked Carl because of what a vile person he was. Tellingly, in all of Carl's flashbacks, not once is he ever shown associating with anyone but Peter to back up his claims that everyone liked him better. It's all but outright said that even Peter's other bully Flash Thompson, and perhaps the thoroughly unpleasant Sally Avril and Jason Ionello, were disgusted by Carl's antics.
• Hate Sink: The Thousand, who is just as loathsome as he is horrifying. Originally Carl King, a particularly nasty bully to Peter Parker, he transformed into a colony of a thousand spiders that could crawl into a human's body, devour them from the inside out and then wear their skin like a suit after eating the radioactive spider that gave Parker his powers. He goes through several bodies each year to grow stronger, with some of the victims being children, and hunts down Spidey for the sole purpose of stealing his body and taking over his life, under the belief that he should have been Spider-Man instead of Peter Parker. Even among Peter's worst foes like Norman Osborn and Carnage, the Thousand has none of their bravado or even slightly sympathetic qualities. He's a vicious, entitled bully who kills and torments for the pettiest of reasons, and a vile, predatory abomination both literally and figuratively. This just makes his ultimate demise of being electrocuted and having his last spider squished by a random passer-by all the more satisfying, and he has never reappeared since.
• High-Voltage Death: Spider-Man electrocutes Carl, reducing the Thousand to the One. While swearing vengeance, the remaining spider is stepped on by an oblivious passerby.
• Hive Mind: The Thousand is a single mind in one thousand little bodies.
• I Can't Sense Their Presence: Carl's immune to the Spider-Sense.
• It's All About Me: Carl is incorrigibly selfish, using everyone else for his entitled pleasure and punishing them for failing to satisfy his wants.
• Kill and Replace: The Thousand's plan for Spider-Man.
• Karmic Death: Despite twisting himself into a hideous abomination and going on a killing spree, all with the end goal of killing Spider-Man to take his fame and glory for himself, it’s gloriously cathartic for Carl to end his pathetic quest for recognition as a smear on the bottom of an average citizen’s shoe, crushed to death as his killer continues on with their day blissfully unaware of his presence.
• Kayfabe: The comics treated the fight between Peter and the wrestler as real, though it was explained in issue #14 of Spider-Man's Tangled Web that Crusher Hogan was actually a "shoot" wrestler—in which the outcome of the match is not scripted.
• Killed Off for Real: As if to demonstrate how unworthy he is even to be a supervillain, Carl gets killed at the end of his introductory story and has never come back.
• Lower-Deck Episode: Many of the stories center on ordinary New Yorkers and their relationship with Spider-Man. Most of them focus on ordinary civilians, with the exception of "Severance Package" (set from the perspective of one of the many henchmen Spidey clobbers) and "The System" (centering on the NYPD).
• Madness Mantra: "It should have been me!"
• Meta Origin: Ever wonder about what happened to the spider that bit Peter?
• Never My Fault: Carl blames Peter for his condition and how it led to him devouring his girlfriend, even though he immediately dismisses normal human lives as worthless and, as Peter points out, he had a choice every step of the way.
• Orifice Invasion: The Thousand's spiders invade a person's body this way, devour their innards, and wear their leftover flesh as a suit.
• The Paralyzer: Carl's bite can temporarily immobilize others.
• Parental Incest: It's heavily implied that Carl, while puppeteering his mother's corpse, pulled a Bed Trick on his father. That said, he was technically no longer human by that point.
• Psychopathic Manchild: For all his power, Carl is nothing more than a Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up, utterly fixated on Peter and insanely jealous of his fame and glory as Spider-Man. During their fight, he rants about how he believes he should have become Spider-Man and how he deserves Peter's "perfect life." Spidey even lampshades it, remarking that Carl hasn't changed at all from the pathetic bully he was when they were kids.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: In addition to what Spidey says to Carl before breaking free and attacking him, there's also what he says when he's laying into him.
  Spider-Man: I remember you, Carl. [punches him in the face] Not quite the same way you do. [punches him in the stomach] You think the kids at school liked you? You think they liked that you picked on kids like me? You were pathetic, Carl! You didn't know how to make friends! You were terrified of girls! All you knew was cruelty and fear, and making people nervous to get your attention! And look how far you've come, Carl! [kicks him in the chin] You're just the same old SADIST you always were!!
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: The spiders.
• Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up: Except Carl never did grow up, physically or mentally.
• Secret-Keeper: In "Gentlemen's Agreement", it's revealed that a cab driver named Charlie Clemmens knows Spider-Man's Secret Identity and occasionally calls him to let him know about a crime that's in progress.
• Self-Made Orphan: After becoming the Thousand, he murders his own parents and takes over their bodies.
• Self-Serving Memory: Like most bullies, Carl is under a delusion that he was popular. He violently denies Peter's argument about how pathetic everyone, including the other bullies, actually found him.
• Smug Snake: Carl's nowhere near the threat he thinks he is.
• The Sociopath: Carl only cares for himself and what he wants, and is obsessed with becoming Spider-Man, believing he's entitled to the power and position Peter has. Other human lives are nothing but stepping stones to satisfy his wants, and he casually admits to Spidey that he ate dozens of people to grow stronger, including his girlfriend, his parents, and children.
• Spider Swarm: The Thousand is a swarm of spiders in a human shell.
• Stalker Without a Crush: Carl stalked Peter and followed his exploits as Spider-Man for years.
• This Cannot Be!: When Carl is about to take over Peter's body, he gives a speech about how Peter is still weak and pitiful compared to him even after getting superpowers. Peter stuns him with a single sentence.
  Spider-Man: Carl...I'm not afraid of you at all.
  Carl: But....
• Trampled Underfoot: Carl's last spider gets squished.
• Undignified Death: Carl escapes Spider-Man's electrical attack with one spider left and vows to return and exact revenge... only to get squished by a random bystander who didn't even realize he was there.
• Villain Episode:
  • "Flowers for Rhino" takes place entirely from Rhino's perspective.
  • "Double Shots" centers of the Vulture, the Grim Hunter, and Norman Osborn trading war stories about fighting Spider-Man.
  • "Heartbreaker" centers on Tombstone coping with the aftermath of suffering a heart attack.
  • "Call of the Wild" centers on the Grizzly feuding with the Rhino as he tries to make it to a date he scheduled with his online partner. Eventually, he and Rhino realize they were each other's dates.
  • "Alphabet City" centers on C-list villain Type-Face finding out even he has an Arch-Enemy, Spellcheck.
• Wham Line: "Double Shots" centers on a mysterious man in a fedora amiably listening to the Vulture and the Grim Hunter trade stories about fighting Spider-Man. At the end, they finally ask what his history with Spider-Man is.
  Man: [removing his fedora] I kidnapped his girlfriend. [places a pumpkin bomb on the table] And killed her. Right in front of him. [Beat. Norman grins.] It was a blast!
• Whole-Plot Reference: "Double Shots" centers on the Vulture and the Grim Hunter (and Norman Osborn) sharing stories about fighting Spider-Man while out at a bar. It's a very clear reference to "Almost Got 'Im".
• Would Hurt a Child: Carl willingly admits to Spider-Man that some of his victims have been children, which is far from the only atrocity he admits to in the long-winded account of his past.
• The Worm That Walks: Carl's true form is a swarm of a thousand normal-sized spiders and one big one; he wears the skin of anyone he kills, after devouring their insides.
• You Have Failed Me: "Severance Package" shows the Kingpin kill a lieutenant who's served him loyally for twenty years because of one failure from the lieutenant's point of view.