Peter Parker gets a new job in "Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man"

As much as it pains me to say it, print news is kind of a dying industry. It’s a trope in superhero media that superheroes have news-like jobs so they have an excuse to be near the action, and so it’s been up to writers producing more contemporary versions of classic superhero stories to figure out how we should adjust the heroes’ jobs. Many of them pivoted to media companies or video news, including the CW’s Supergirl and My Adventures with Superman, but according to DiscussingFilm on Twitter, the new animated show Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man has taken a slightly different approach. They have updated Peter’s job working as a photographer at the Daily Bugle and transformed it into Spider-Man being an online streamer.

I love this so much.

Back in 2018, after the new appearance of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, fans became interested in Peter Parker as a Gen Z teen and what that might look like. This, of course, led to many jokes and memes about ways Peter would interact with the social internet and how he should carry himself and his secret identity in this new world. One such joke on a thread about “acceptable jobs for Spider-Man” comes from a Tumblr user known as theguantumqueer:

“I'm imagining “being spider-man” as his full-time gig and i just
he has a patreon. the description is just the words “I’m Spider-Man” and all he ever posts is specifically-requested selfies from people who want to be sure its really him. pinned to the top of the page is a picture from the top of the empire state building (not the observation deck, the real top) of his spider-gloved hand holding a bagel that is on fire, with 34th street in the background.”

Spider-Man with a Patreon was extremely funny to many fans, just imagining him doing crazy tricks for tips online and what videos he could or would post just being Spider-Man.

This reveals that the new animated series has taken that joke and elevated it to Spidey actually being a streamer, which is so funny and feels so right. It highlights the local celebrity of Spider-Man as a persona while still making him accessible and personable. He’s friendly. He’s from the neighborhood. He streams his patrols so people can see he’s on the job and message him if they need help.

In reality, would this be at all practical? Absolutely not; we’d have people spamming the comments with false alarms all the time. But in this world of a comic TV adaptation, it’ll function more as a bat signal: a vehicle through which Spidey can see there’s a problem and swing toward it to bring justice.

It’ll also be a really good way to deliver those Spider-Man quips we’ve come to expect when there are no other characters there for him to talk to. The “Blitzkrieg Bop” montage scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming was great, but it deprived us of that crucial Spidey humor we’d be getting from on-page narration in a comic. This way, with Spidey as a streamer, he can be narrating his patrols to chat, and we’ll still be getting those block text jokes we’d otherwise be missing from a motion picture adaptation. It’s just genius any way you look at it!

This reveal has made me very excited for what kinds of stories Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man might have coming our way, and I can’t wait to see what a streamer Spidey might do next.