Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man makes good use of some relatively obscure characters from Peter Parker's corner of the Marvel Universe...and beyond. For example, The Runaways' Nico Minoru becomes a key supporting player in the web-slinger's life as his new best friend.
In an interview with ComicBook.com, showrunner Jeff Trammell revealed that Nico's role in the Marvel Animation series very nearly went to a de-aged Jessica Jones!
"What can I say? There was another character that we considered," the writer started. "I don’t know if I can say. Well, I’ll say first that, yes, as we knew we were going to do something different. It was kind of like, for this story we want to tell, we need certain characters to fit these roles. And for me, I love Nico. I love Runaways."
"This is very much like an amalgamation of just characters I love that I would love to interact with Spider-Man. So being able to pull [Nico] over, being able to pull Jeanne Foucault over, being able to bring Amadeus Cho - so many of these characters that have a rich history, but also, hopefully this opens them up for even more audiences to go become fans of those characters in the comics."
"In terms of who Peter’s classmate was almost going to be," Trammell continued, "we had a lot of conversation about, de-aging, Jessica Jones and using her in that spot."
For those of you who may not be aware, comic book writer Brian Michael Bendis retconned Jessica into being one of Peter's classmates. She actually had a crush on him, only for Spidey to never really notice his classmate.
Later, Jessica became the hero Jewel before a run-in with Purple Man resulted in her giving that moniker up to become a hard-nosed P.I.
In the same conversation, Trammell said it was "very early on" that he and the rest of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man's creative team decided it shouldn't be set on the MCU's Sacred Timeline.
"I would say within the first two months of just coming up with the story, we were like, 'Well, we’re very limited here. Let’s move it over, out of the 'Sacred Timeline,' gives us a bit more freedom," he explained.
"So, if we want to tell a show that’s not only fun and engaging, but not kind of like, 'Well, this person can’t find out because they find out in Homecoming' or, 'We can’t do this grand scale thing because people would have noticed that by now,'" Trammell added. "It really freed us up. But also allows us to pick and choose the moments of the MCU continuity that we do want to address."
The series was originally announced as Spider-Man: Freshman Year, with the assumption being that it would explore Peter's time as Spidey before Iron Man showed up in his apartment. Having watched the season in its entirety, we can safely say scrapping that idea was the right decision.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man follows Peter Parker on his way to becoming a hero, with a journey unlike we've ever seen and a style that celebrates the character’s early comic book roots.
You can read our recaps of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man's first two episodes here and here.