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As different Spider-Man multimedia adaptations write off Aunt May for good, is it time for the comic books to do the same?
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home, now playing in theaters.
With Spider-Man: No Way Home well on its way towards becoming the biggest movie of the year, one of the most heartbreaking moments of the film has the Green Goblin murder the Aunt May of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Mortally wounded as Norman Osborn betrays Peter Parker and leads a cadre of multiversal villains to rampage across the MCU, May imparts the iconic “power and responsibility” axiom to her nephew before dying in his arms and setting up Peter’s final showdown with the escaped supervillains. With May’s death in the MCU, along with similar deaths of the character in different media, perhaps the comic books set in the main Marvel Universe should follow the same trend of writing off the venerable character for good.
May’s death in No Way Home is presaged in Marvel’s Spider-Man for the PlayStation 4, with Peter’s mother figure befalling a similar tragic fate. The acclaimed 2018 video game had May infected with the Devil’s Breath virus unleashed by Doctor Octopus as part of his ambitious revenge scheme against OsCorp. While Peter is able to develop a cure for the terminal virus, he does not produce enough in time to mass-manufacture the cure for the entire city and also save May’s life. While revealing she was aware of Peter’s superhero secret for some time, May tells Peter to use his cure sample to mass-produce it to save the city as she succumbs to the illness.
While numerous alternate reality Spider-Man comics have also killed off Aunt May, there are two major instances where the main line Marvel Universe nearly eliminated May for good. In 1995’s Amazing Spider-Man #400 by J.M. DeMatteis and Mark Bagley, May appeared to die of natural causes before this was retconned in 1998’s Peter Parker: Spider-Man #97. The 1998 issue revealed that as part of his elaborate revenge against Spider-Man, Norman Osborn hired and genetically altered an actor to resemble May before killing her off to emotionally strike at Peter, with the real May imprisoned the whole time. 2007’s Amazing Spider-Man #538 (by J. Michael Straczynski and Ron Garney) saw May shot and mortally wounded by an assassin working for the Kingpin after Spider-Man’s secret identity became public. After Peter and Mary Jane Watson made a deal with Mephisto to save May’s life and restore his secret identity, May returns in full health.
Aunt May is Peter’s last parental figure and one of the few blood relatives he has left in his life. She also serves as a living reminder of his late Uncle Ben and the wisdom he imparted to his nephew. With Peter now very much his own man in the comics, the death of Aunt May could serve as another major coming-of-age moment for the character and one that could provide interesting new storytelling directions for Spider-Man. While superheroes can certainly have surviving family members, there is the feeling that May hasn’t been given any substantial role in the comics for some time and may have passed the point of relevance.
The growing popularity of the MCU has led the comics to mirror plot and character developments over the years and the death of Aunt May could mark another shift to better reflect the shared cinematic universe and the bestselling video games that began with Marvel’s Spider-Man.
Aunt May is an important part of the Spider-Man mythos but, with the character spinning her wheels in the main Marvel Universe and the multimedia adaptations of the superhero moving beyond her, it may be high time that the comics finally follow suit and catapult Spider-Man outside of her and Uncle Ben’s shadow for good.
Directed by Jon Watts, Spider-Man: No Way Home is in theaters now.
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