Despite his formidable superpowers, pull his punches in a fight to keep from seriously injuring anybody – but this isn’t true of every version of Spider-Man.
In some alternate universes, for instance, Peter becomes a more violent Spider-Man – including one where he evolves into a trained assassin. Other universes also show what would have happened if the radioactive spider had bitten someone with fewer moral scruples like Flash Thompson. And then there’s the MC2 Universe with a Spider-Man who’s deadly for a very different reason.
An alternate future timeline in Marvel’s multiverse, the MC2 Universe depicts a mostly bright future where new heroes like J2 have taken over for now-retired or aging heroes like Spider-Man and Captain America. Many of these new heroes are the children of classic superheroes who inherited their powers naturally from their parents – but one child proved a disturbing exception.
Introduced in the pages of Spider-Girl, Gerald “Gerry” Drew is the teenage son of Jessica Drew, the original Spider-Woman. Jessica gained her own spider-powers as a child when she was stricken with a rare disease, causing her father to inject her with a spider-based serum and place her in a healing capsule. While Jessica enjoyed a long career as Spider-Woman, her powers eventually faded in the MC2 timeline and she chose to settle down and raise a family.
Unfortunately, history repeated itself when Jessica’s son Gerry also came down with a rare blood disease that threatened his life. His condition strained Jessica’s marriage causing her to get a divorce. However, Jessica was unwilling to give up on Gerry and tried to repeat the same experiment her father once conducted on her by placing Gerry in another healing capsule. The process was long and painful, and Jessica tried to distract Gerry by telling him stories of legendary heroes, especially Spider-Man. As expected, Gerry soon developed spider-powers of his own - but there was a catch.
While Jessica’s time in the healing capsule cured her disease, Gerry was still stricken with his blood disease and realized he only had a short time left to live. Wanting to make the most of his life, he fashioned a new Spider-Man costume (based somewhat on designs Alex Ross had created for the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies) and began fighting crime as the new Spider-Man. Jessica ed him and even helped train him, but worried that her son’s activities were threatening his life.
And she was right – in more ways than one. At one point, a different Spider-Woman – Julia Carpenter – tracked down Peter Parker on behalf of Jessica to tell him about Gerry. Julia mentioned that Gerry’s blood disease made him a danger to not just himself but to everyone around him. What she meant exactly remains unclear. It’s possible that since Gerry’s disease caused him to periodically go into convulsions and experience great pain that he could lose control during a fight and endanger the people around him.
A more disturbing possibility, however, was that Gerry’s blood – which was gradually poisoning him – could also be toxic to anyone who came in with it. Certainly, when Gerry got cut during a fight, he panicked at the thought that his wound could become infected and kill him. These instances got Peter to temporarily come out of retirement and speak to Gerry as Spider-Man. Gerry was thrilled to meet his hero and chose to listen to Peter when he asked him to focus more on his health and accept treatments designed by Reed Richards to cure his condition.
While Gerry’s tenure as Spider-Man was very brief, he proved to be an enthusiastic, if somewhat arrogant and careless, hero. Much of his heroics were motivated by the fact that he felt he only had a short time left to live, causing him to frequently act recklessly on the battlefield. One suspects Peter wouldn’t approve of this particular MC2 successor and was relieved when he finally got help for his deadly blood disease.
