I’m happy to announce that my Guide to every Spider-Man comic from 2018 to the present day s is now available to all CK readers! This guide covers every Spidey ongoing, mini-series, and event unless it’s headline by another character with their own guide, like Spider-Gwen or Spider-Ham. That includes all of Nick Spencer’s Amazing Spider-Man (2018) run, the 2021 BEYOND! run starring Ben Reilly, and the current Zeb Wells Amazing Spider-Man (2022) run that spun out the Dark Web event. This guide exists thanks to the ongoing support of the amazing Patrons of Crushing Krisis.
Guide to Spider-Man, Peter Parker (2018 – Present Day)
I have a love/hate relationship with my main Guide to Spider-Man, of which this new guide is a spin-off.
If we’re being honest, that main Spidey page less of a guide and more of a complete reading order, not unlike my mega-popular Definitive X-Men Reading Order Guide. It’s one of the longest pages on all of CK. It has literally every Spider-Man appearance from 1963 through the mid-2010s from every single ongoing title, mini-series, and guest appearance.
That’s a lot to wrangle when I want to add just one new collection!
Updating that page can be a chore due to the sheer quantity of new Spider-Man comics and collected editions every month. However, over the past few years making updates has also become a scary prospect when it comes to balancing readability standpoint and a SEO (search engine optimization) perspective.
A simplification to improve readability could ruin my search placement. Trying to perfectly balance its search attunement might make it harder to read. And, simply adding constant new content makes the page heavier to load – which hurts readability and search placement!
That’s why I realized last September it was time for Spider-Man comics after the Dan Slott era to graduate to their own brand-new guide page. Actually, Nick Spencer’s Amazing Spider-Man decided for me: his 2018 run was so complex, with so many sub-issues and one-shot tie-ins, that when I tried to add it to the Spider-Man page table of contents it made it unreadable!
Instead, I created a new page to my highest standards of organization and readability, and put all things Spider-Man in that one place – even the comics for his Playstation game! If you are looking for a Spider-Man comic that came out after January 2018, it is included in this Guide to Spider-Man, Peter Parker (2018 – Present Day).
The big question on my mind is how to simplify the Spider-Man Guide-slash-Reading-Order even further. I’ve considered pulling the 2010-2018 Dan Slott material out to its own guide, but there were many other non-Slott Spidey-series in that time and I’m not sure how to best handle them. I’ve also considered treating Spidey more like X-Men where each individual title gets its own guide – but, unlike the X-Men, Spider-Man is all one person! It feels odd to split his continuity across 5+ pages.
If you’re an avid Spider-Man fan and Spidey-Guide reader, I’d love to have your perspective. Is this new guide useful to you? How can I help you find the Spider-Man comics you want?