I wasn’t sure what to anticipate from Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man following the highly impressive X-Men 97 and the less enjoyable What If…? which just concluded its three-season run. From the previews, the most noticeable aspect was the show’s strange visual style, which felt both flat and three-dimensional, along with a surprisingly low framerate.
About Spider-Man show
Having watched the first two episodes, I can confirm that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is a genuinely good series. The animation style, while initially odd, becomes something you quickly acclimate to, and it ends up being less distracting than you might expect. The show features some fantastic action scenes and effectively embraces its comic-book aesthetics, occasionally transitioning into actual comic panels. It may not be my favorite art style, but it serves its purpose, and if you’re not fond of it, you may eventually overlook it.
I won’t compare this to the exceptional quality of X-Men 97, but Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man possesses a certain charm, and some moments made me laugh heartily. After witnessing Spider-Man confront actual cosmic deities and multiversal antagonists lately, it’s refreshing to see him engage in an action sequence where he battles a villain in a pet shop, awkwardly saving corgis and fish.
The series notably avoids retelling Peter’s Spidey origin story, opting instead for a twist where he gets bitten by a spider that comes through a (spoilers) portal created by Doctor Strange, likely of alien origin (considering Strange is battling a symbiote, after all). We skip to the early days of his being Spider-Man, where Peter sports a quirky yet likable suit complete with a web tank on his back and tubes connected to his web-shooters. Yes, those tubes do get snagged on things. This show excels in its attention to detail.
The cast is another intriguing aspect, featuring Pete alongside Nico, who serves as a different best-friend character than what we’re used to seeing. He has an alternate crush and a unique “bully” boyfriend who surprisingly turns out to be a genuinely nice guy, subverting some typical tropes. It’s evident that a variety of Marvel characters will be introduced throughout the series. We start off with Strange, and Daredevil is expected to appear. At the moment, Peter is teaming up with the future Hulk, Amadeus Cho. I anticipate a lot of developments in these ten episodes, which will be airing over just four weeks.