

Miles Morales' first appearance, in 'Ultimate Fallout'#4 from 2011. Said Bendis in a 2011 interview with USA Today, “I saw him in the costume and thought, ‘I would like to read that book.’” But his introduction was fast-tracked when Bendis saw the Season 2 premiere of the NBC sitcom Community, where Donald Glover - the actor/rapper fans petitioned to play Spider-Man in a movie reboot that would become 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man with Andrew Garfield - wore Spider-Man pajamas in the episode.

The creation of Miles Morales had been brewing at Marvel since 2008, prior to the election of President Barack Obama. But we really believed in what we were doing. No one was going, ‘I wish Spider-Man was just a little bit something else.’ So changing something so drastic in the franchise is daunting. “The extra added fear with Miles was that we were trying to be additive to Spider-Man. “It’s genuinely scary to put out something in the world that’s brand new,” Bendis says. In an email interview, Bendis tells Inverse how terrifying it was to introduce a character such as Miles to a well-established continuity with a massive readership. Miles was created by veteran Marvel scribe Brian Michael Bendis and artist Sara Pichelli. Instead, the film tells the origin story of Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), an Afro-Latino teenager from Brooklyn who made his comic book introduction in the series Ultimate Spider-Man in 2011. Notably, Spider-Verse doesn’t center around Peter Parker, the brainy kid from Queens who becomes the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee. It’s other Oscar-nominated movies like Disney’s Incredibles 2, Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, Mamoru Hosoda’s Mirai, and Disney’s Ralph Breaks the Internet, all of which are in the running against Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse for Best Animated Feature at the 91st Academy Awards on Sunday. Spider-Man is up against some serious enemies this weekend, but it’s not Doc Ock or the Green Goblin.
