Spider-Man's rogues gallery is the set of villains he fights again and again, and it is the deepest bench in comics. Its two biggest names are the Green Goblin (Norman Osborn), who knows who Spider-Man is and made it personal, and Doctor Octopus (Otto Octavius), the scientist who keeps building teams to finish him. The most famous of those teams is the Sinister Six. Beyond the villains sits the Spider-Verse: the idea that every universe has its own spider-hero, from Spider-Man 2099 in a future New York to Spider-Ham, a cartoon pig.
This follows the comics and names the films, cartoons and games where they differ. The heroes and villains here are on the Spider-Man shelf; Venom, who began as Spider-Man's black suit, has a shelf of his own and his own explainer.
The Sinister Six: who is in it
The Sinister Six is a team of six Spider-Man villains, and the original line-up answers most quiz questions: Doctor Octopus (the founder and leader), the Vulture, Electro, Kraven the Hunter, Mysterio and the Sandman. Each had already lost to Spider-Man alone, and Doctor Octopus's pitch was simple: together they cannot lose.
Their first plan undoes itself. Instead of fighting as one, they take him on one at a time, each waiting in a separate trap, and he beats them in turn.
The seats change with almost every reunion. When the team returns in 1990, the Hobgoblin takes the place of Kraven, who is dead by then. The 2012 story "Ends of the Earth" sets Doctor Octopus beside the Chameleon, Electro, Mysterio, the Rhino and the Sandman. The 2018 Spider-Man game for PlayStation has its own six: Doctor Octopus leading Electro, the Vulture, the Rhino, the Scorpion and Mister Negative. The live-action films never assemble the team; the nearest is No Way Home, which pulls five villains from earlier films into one story: the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Electro, the Sandman and the Lizard.
Green Goblin vs Doctor Octopus
Norman Osborn is the head of Oscorp, a rich industrialist who tests an experimental formula on himself and comes out stronger, sharper and insane. As the Green Goblin he rides a glider, throws pumpkin bombs and, unlike most of the gallery, learns that Spider-Man is Peter Parker. In the comic's best-known story he throws Peter's girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, from a bridge, and she dies. In the next issue the Goblin is impaled by his own glider. The comics brought Norman back in the 1990s, and his son Harry has worn the mask too.
Otto Octavius is a brilliant, bitter scientist who built a harness of four mechanical arms for handling radioactive material. A lab accident fuses it to his body and lets him move the arms with his mind. In their first fight he beats Spider-Man so badly that Peter loses his nerve for a while. Much later, dying, Otto swaps minds with Peter and lives in his body as the Superior Spider-Man for a time.
So which is the bigger enemy? The Goblin is the personal one: he knows the face under the mask and has hurt the people behind it. Doctor Octopus is the professional: the planner, the founder of the Six, the man who needs to prove he is the smartest in the room. The early-2000s film trilogy gives each a turn, the Goblin in the first film and Doctor Octopus in the second. Great Power puts both of them on one back with Spider-Man.
Spider-Man 2099: Miguel O'Hara
Spider-Man 2099 is Miguel O'Hara, the Spider-Man of the year 2099 in Nueva York, a future New York run by corporations. He is a geneticist at Alchemax, the company that runs much of the city. When he tries to quit, his boss doses him with Rapture, an addictive drug that only the company may legally sell. To flush it out he uses a gene-splicing machine to rewrite his own DNA, and a jealous colleague rigs the process so that spider DNA is spliced into his own.
His powers are not Peter's. He has talons on his fingers and toes for climbing, fangs with a paralysing venom, sharper eyesight, and webbing his own body produces from his forearms rather than from a gadget. He has no spider-sense. His suit began as a Day of the Dead festival costume made of unstable molecules, patched with fabric from a wrecked hang-glider so that he can glide. In the animated film Across the Spider-Verse he is the stern leader of the Spider-Society, which polices the multiverse. Nueva York is named for his city.
Spider-Ham: Peter Porker
Spider-Ham is Peter Porker, a parody that outlived the joke. His origin flips the usual one: Peter was an ordinary spider until May Porker, a pig scientist, zapped herself with an atomic-powered hair dryer and bit him. He became a pig with a spider's powers. He lives in a world of talking animals, and most of the jokes are puns on Marvel names.
For years he was a footnote. Then the multiverse made him useful: he fights beside the other spider-heroes in the 2014 comic event "Spider-Verse", and he is one of the spider-people pulled into Miles Morales's world in the 2018 film Into the Spider-Verse, where he runs on cartoon physics, giant mallet and all. Spider-Ham gives him a back of his own.
The Spider-Verse explained
The Spider-Verse is the idea that the Marvel multiverse holds countless spider-heroes, at least one for almost every reality. The comics made it an event in 2014: a family of life-force vampires called the Inheritors, Morlun among them, hunts spider-powered heroes across realities to feed on them, and spider-people from across the multiverse band together to stop them.
The animated films take the idea somewhere new. In Into the Spider-Verse, Miles Morales, a Brooklyn teenager, gains spider powers just as the Kingpin's particle collider tears open his world and drops in other spider-people: an older, worn-out Peter B. Parker, Gwen Stacy as Spider-Woman, Spider-Man Noir, Peni Parker and Spider-Ham. In Across the Spider-Verse, Miles learns that the spider that bit him came from another universe, and that Miguel O'Hara's Spider-Society treats certain tragedies as "canon events" every spider-hero must live through.
Miles began in the comics, in a separate universe: bitten by a genetically altered spider that his uncle carried home from a burglary at Osborn Industries, he gained Peter's basic powers plus two of his own, camouflage and a venom strike that stuns with a touch. He now lives in the main Marvel universe beside Peter. Brooklyn Crouch is named for his borough.
On the shelf
On the back of a tee
Peter Parker and his enemies fill the Spider-Man shelf, drawn from canon reference art, and the black suit that became Venom also sits on the Venom shelf. Check the size guide before you pick a size.
Why it works on the back: the red and blue suit with its black web lines is a pattern as much as a costume, and it reads at a glance from the far end of a room, which is the whole job of a back print.
On the shelf
Read next: Venom, Carnage and the symbiotes explained (where the black suit went) and The Punisher and Daredevil: Hell's Kitchen's two codes explained.
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