10 Most Evil Spider-Man Villains

6. The Thousand

The Thousand Spider-Man
Marvel Comics

What's worse than a man made from a swarm of bees? Why, a man made from a swarm of spiders, of course!

Nothing against spiders or anything - they're just out here trying to chill, let's be honest - but they are nightmarish in the right context. For Spider-Man, said nightmare would come in the form of The Thousand - one of the most infamous rogues in the wall-crawler's gallery.

The Thousand (real name, Carl King), is what you get when you hand Garth Ennis the keys to Spider-Man. King was another of Peter's bullies at high school, but one who actually witnessed his run-in with the radioactive spider. Seeing the gifts the arachnid had bestowed to Parker, King decided to do the normal thing and ATE IT, which led to less than wholesome results.

Following the ingestion process, King's entire body became inhabited by a collective of spiders. Remember Vincent D'Onofrio's bug from Men in Black? Like that, only instead of it being One Bug, it was hundreds. Yeah... not pleasant.

King only lasted another couple of issues before his death, but it's safe to say he made one heck of an impression.

Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.