Marvel Animation first revealed plans for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man at 2022's San Diego Comic-Con. The show was titled Spider-Man: Freshman Year at the time and was mistakenly identified as a prequel to Captain America: Civil War.
While it would have been pretty spectacular to see what Peter Parker was up to before meeting Iron Man, we'd later learn that the animated series takes place in an alternate reality where Norman Osborn becomes his mentor in place of Tony Stark.
Jeff Trammell (Craig of the Creek) serves as Head Writer and recently sat down with The Official Marvel Podcast to share new details on what fans can expect from the web-slinger's return to animation.
"You know, I want to give a cliche, 'Expect the unexpected' answer but, honestly, I think you can expect Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man," he teased. "He's hanging around New York; it's not a huge intergalactic adventure."
"It's him at his roots and there are a lot of things we, as a fanbase, take at first glance and are like, 'Oh yeah, I know this part of the story.' That's been really fun to dig into: 'Maybe you don't know everything.' There are some surprises in there and I'm really excited to dig into those. It was really fun to subvert those expectations when they've been built up for so long," Tramell added.
A snippet of the trailer shown to fans at D23 earlier this month recently leaked online and revealed that the spider which bites Peter has supernatural origins, meaning that's at least one of the big changes being made to the hero's story.
Another is the characters Spidey finds himself surrounded by.
"There are so many characters that aren't prototypical Spider-Man characters that we got to introduce in this series," Trammell explains. "The big one is Nico Minoru of the Runaways. I'm a huge fan of that series and Nico. I'm very excited that she's in our show."
"There's Pearl Pangan, Lonnie Lincoln...there's a few characters we're familiar with from other series as well as Spider-Man classic characters we're excited to mix it up with. I'll also say, Amadaes Cho and Jeanne Foucault will appear in our series. There's a lot of cross-pollination from the comics within this world I'm excited to dig into."
Pearl is an obscure character who first appeared in War of the Realms: New Agents of Atlas #1; she took on the name Wave after gaining the ability to control water. Lonnie Lincoln is, of course, Tombstone and Amadaes Cho is the boy genius who eventually becomes a Hulk.
As for Jeanne, she's believed to be the daughter of Taskmaster and was enlisted to join the Avengers Academy.
That's a seriously deep dive into the comics and more than a few characters will be making their MCU debuts in Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. Like X-Men '97 season 2, What If...? season 3, Eyes of Wakanda, and Marvel Zombies, the series is expected to premiere on Disney+ sometime in the next 18 months.