Spider-Man Officially Moves To California – And He Hates It
Warning: SPOILERS for Deadly Neighborhood Spider-Man #1Marvel’s Spider-Man finally moves from his longtime home of New York City to Los Angeles in California…and he absolutely hates his new home. Peter Parker, ever the city kid, has lived his entire life in the shadows of tall skyscrapers, the benefits of which are immediate to a swinging Spider-Man who uses his webshooters to traverse the city. But Deadly Neighborhood Spider-Man #1 begins with Peter’s new horror-based adventures in LA: a city with wide-open spaces that Peter detests for more than one reason.
Canonically, Peter lives in the Forrest Hills neighborhood of Queens in New York. However, he spends the vast majority of the time as Spider-Man in Manhattan, the most well-known area of the city with giant buildings, alleyways, and subway tunnels that he uses to move around town faster than any vehicle. His familiarity with New York works against him whenever he’s out of his environment: Spider-Man: Far From Home in the MCU demonstrated this when Peter traveled to Europe and had to stay far closer to the ground than he ever had to do in NYC.
In Deadly Neighborhood Spider-Man #1, written by B. Earl and Taboo with art by Juan Ferreyra, Peter moves to LA as a key scientist in a research project. While there, he’s allowed to stay at a fellow researcher’s house – a massive place with large glass panels that overlooks the ocean. While Peter doesn’t mind the view, he does miss using his webshooters to swing between cars and buildings, mostly because it allows him to gain an advantage in a fight. Case in point: Peter saves campers from a bear, but must fight on the beach with zero verticality.
Unfortunately, wide open spaces aren’t the only things bothering Peter in the series. The book is full of horrifying imagery, derived mainly from Peter’s nightmares but also from a mysterious artifact he holds in his hand. Peter’s inner demons manifest in his mind as a result of his ever-present guilt – and unlike the picturesque scenes of LA, his mind is represented by a massive circular maze with seemingly no way out.
The issue ends with only clues to the artifact’s origin, but Peter is still stuck in LA. A car trip on the freeway takes over an hour; this is a usual commute for a resident, but takes an eternity for Peter. Spider-Man has absolutely no way to commute without a car (he hitches a ride on a bus later on in the issue, but he has no control over his route). The demons that inhabit Spider-Man’s own mind will likely play a villainous role in future issues of Deadly Neighborhood Spider-Man, but so too will the setting of LA itself.
