2. Darkest Timeline Webhead
Marvel ComicsAs dark as Spider-Man: Reign and that murderous Peter Parker seem, it never got worse than for the version of our hero that cropped up during the multiverse-hopping adventures of the Exiles, true believers! In their time this mutant team, whose mission was to visit alternate realities and "fix" them, they met a psychopathic Spidey who was on death row after merging with the Carnage symbiote and going on a killing spree; a mutant member of Emma Frost's X-Force team; even a lesbian Spider-Woman, Mary Jane Watson, who was a freedom fighter battling against the techno-organic virus which was ravaging the Earth and its superheroes. None of them, though, were as insane - or upsetting - as the Peter Parker we met in X-Men Unlimited #41. There's a
PSA comic featuring Spider-Man and Power Pack that was produced in cooperation with the National Committee For Prevention Of Child Abuse, which was designed to do just that: teach kids about the signs of molestation or abuse, and how they can deal with it. In Spider-Man's half of the story he empathises with a young boy who suffers abuse by sharing his own story of being groomed by a creepy old dude as a kid. It's debatable whether that's a part of mainstream Spider-Man canon, but it'd be preferable to the sort of horrors happening in X-Men Unlimited. In that universe, Peter Parker is not only abused as a child but abused by his kindly Uncle Ben, the saintly relative who's meant to instill the values that eventually lead to his nephew becoming a superhero. Ben keeps him locked in the cellar, which is a lot less Harry Potter than it sounds, where Peter befriends a terrifying spider-like monster. The Exiles are instructed to bring Wolverine to the Parker shack to deal with this nightmarish situation. What actually happens is that everybody dies - the spider monster, Wolverine, and Uncle Ben - apart from Peter, whom the spider bites. So he's a kid with a traumatic childhood whose just seen his only friend and living relatives die before him, and now has to contend with whatever effect the spider bite has on him. Considering how depressing the rest of the story was, we're willing to be he just gets poisoned and dies. Comics!