I maintain that Spider-Man’s deal with Mephisto was one of the biggest missteps in comic book history. It’s one thing to have a hero make a mistake, but to make a bargain with a stand-in for the actual devil is a pretty terrible idea for someone who is supposed to be an everyman hero.

But that damage was done in 2007, and it’s been almost two decades since then. So let’s see where our friendly neighborhood wall crawler has gone in the years following that disastrous deal.

Brand New Day

With Mephisto’s deal made, Spider-Man assumed a new status quo that hammered hard on the “back-to-basics” theme. He was once again struggling to find work, wearing engineered web-shooters, and bumming snacks off of Aunt May.

Also, his friend Harry Osborne, aka (one of) the Green Goblins, was alive again for reasons unexplained. The details of Mephisto’s scheme remain undefined to this day, and almost everybody would just prefer to forget it ever happened.

Playing into Peter’s new single status, Marvel tried to give him a rotating cast of love interests, but none of them really took off. A lot of fans were still angry about “One More Day,” and most of the new romantic interests were written in problematic ways. Even old flames, like the Black Cat, struggled to find footing due to unforced writing errors. In the Black Cat’s instance, for example, Spider-Man and the Black Cat broke into a honeymoon suite, had sex with their masks on, and ruined some poor couple’s wedding night as a result. It’s not that a relationship with the Black Cat was a bad idea…it’s just that it was written in a really bad way.

Like it or not, the “Brand New Day” arc established a new direction for the character that has now lasted for over 15 years. It also brought a whole slew of new attempts to shake up the character, which in turn brought new costume changes.

Horizon Labs and the Future Foundation

Part of Peter Parker’s new status quo was an emphasis on the “Parker Luck,” which is shorthand for “bad luck all the time.” (I really disagree with this take, but that’s another rant for another time.) This meant that he was often out of work and looking for new opportunities–in no small part because he doctored a photo and got blackballed by J. Jonah Jameson as a result.

Eventually, Peter started leaning on his science nerd background and landed a role with Horizon Labs, a cutting-edge tech company. We don’t really need to know what their specialty is, because in true superhero fashion they make basically every sci-fi gadget under the sun. This allowed Peter to experiment with some new suits, such as a “stealth suit:”

and a suit of “spider armor” that helped protect him when he temporarily lost his spider sense:

Meanwhile, outside the pages of Amazing Spider-Man, the Human Torch died (don’t worry, he got better quickly enough). This meant that the Fantastic Four was down to three. They rebranded as the Future Foundation and added Spider-Man to his ranks. During his short-lived membership, Spidey got a white suit made of unstable molecules:

The changes in Spider-Man’s life were many at this point, but the biggest change was still on the horizon. Spider-Man was about to become something…superior.

The Superior Spider-Man

Amazing Spider-Man wrapped up with issue #700 (which is a bit of a dodgy count since Marvel loves to change up the numbering all the time), and it did so with Doctor Octopus finally getting a stunning victory over his long-time foe.

Doc Ock was dying, but at the last second he swapped minds with Peter Parker, becoming Spider-Man and leaving his enemy to pass on to the great beyond. Peter stayed dead for quite a while as status quo shakeups go, and Otto Octavius took over as the new “Superior” Spider-Man.

Otto tried to prove himself to be a better hero than Peter, and he didn’t really do a terrible job of it. He was much more ruthless, but he generally fought alongside the good guys. Ultimately, though, he found that being Spider-Man was harder than he expected. When faced with a seemingly unwinnable fight against Norman Osborne (now the Goblin King), he gave Spider-Man’s body back to the lingering traces of Peter Parker’s consciousness, thus restoring the original Spider-Man.

Otto would return in a cloned body later and act again as the Superior Spider-Man for a while before making a deal with none other than Mephisto to get his original form and villainous persona back. Because Marvel just has to keep reminding me of the worst story they’ve done this century.

Teaming Up with Norman Osborne

The vigilante known as the Sin-Eater took the evil out of Norman Osborne with his magic gun (look, just…comics, alright?). Hoping to give his old foe a shot at redemption, Spider-Man teamed up with Norman Osborne for a while. This resulted in a new suit and a…spider glider?!

As you might guess from a team-up with Norman Osborn, things eventually went bad. Peter Parker got temporarily possessed by the same insanity that had driven Norman nuts, temporarily becoming a very effective and dangerous villain. This arc ended with Norman taking his sins back into himself, saving Spider-Man but restoring the inevitable status quo that will certainly see Osborn flying around as the Green Goblin once again.

Spider-Man Today

It’s hard to nail down an exact status quo for Spider-Man because, as one of Marvel’s most popular characters, he appears in multiple books every month. But as of 2024, he’s swinging around and cracking wise, just like always.

Mary Jane has been a consistent part of the comics even without their marriage, which leads one to wonder why it was so important to split them up. Perhaps the reason is that it creates more soap opera situations, such as when Mary Jane got stuck in another universe, married another person, took in foster children, and then mourned the deaths of both kids.

Personally, I don’t think Spider-Man ever recovered from the whole Mephisto thing. While there have been shining spots in the character’s books since (particularly The Superior Spider-Man), a lot of it has felt pretty aimless. More than most superheroes, Spidey has run into a problem where the refusal to let the character grow up means that nothing will really have long-term consequences. It seems like it our favorite webslinger will be stuck as a 20-something bachelor perpetually between jobs for all time. Hopefully, I’m wrong and I’ll be writing Part Three for this character in a few years.

_{Images: Marvel Comics}