7. Spider-Man: Noir
Marvel ComicsIn 2009 Marvel put together a line of alternate reality books that transplanted some of their biggest heroes into a noir-inspired universe, which is to say everything was kinda monochrome and dirty and all the women were treated more like sex objects than they were anyway (
which is saying a lot). Along with pulp fiction takes on Wolverine, The Punisher and Daredevil was the four-issue Spider-Man: Noir, where...well, actually, he wasn't all that different from the regular Spider-Man, at least on the surface. He was still called Peter Parker, he still had some superpowers and his web shooters, he just wore black and skulked around in the thirties. Set during the Great Depression, the noir take on Spidey initially focusses more on journalist Ben Urich, who has a network of informants under the alias of the Spider that are helping him break stories on shadowy crime lord The Goblin. It turns out Urich actually has no interest in taking The Goblin down, instead using the threat of such as a way to blackmail him and get money to feed his drug habit. Dark! Gritty! Noir! Peter Parker arrives on the scene when Ben saves his socialist activist Aunt May from a baying crowd and takes Peter under his wing. Accidentally turning up to a dodgy deal Urich received a tip about, Peter gets bitten by a spider that comes out of a broken antique statue and wakes up with the usual Spider-Man powers, minus the wall crawling, because that is not dark or gritty or noir enough, apparently. Then things get properly pulpy as J Jonah Jameson is kidnapped by The Goblin so his paper can't publish any of Urich's material, replacing him with a doppelganger, and then sends an assassin to kill the reporter. Little does he know, though, that femme fatale Felicia Hardy - owner of the Black Cat Club (eh? Eh? Get it?) - was witness to the murder. It's like flipping Raymond Chandler or something. A second miniseries introduced speakeasies, Nazis and race relations into the mix, but then it also had Doctor Octopus, so it still wasn't strictly noir. Still, seeing a Peter Parker who wasn't a million miles from the one we're used to placed into a different context was fun, and watching how Spider-Man would react to a Long Goodbye situation was pretty crazy too.