Super heroes are mythical figures. Their stories get told and a canon of their exploits and adventures gets built up from the stories that people like enough to bother retelling. Sometimes a definitive work is written that incorporates basically all of a mythical cycle in one text, like Le Morte d’Arthur, and sometimes the myths never get collected in one place but the overall life story of a character still emerges from all the different stories, like the Trojan War (of which the Iliad recounts only the crucial turning point, not the entire story).
For example, here’s the rough life story of Batman that has emerged from 100 years of stories:
Bruce Wayne’s parents, Thomas and Martha Wayne, are killed by a mugger in front of his eyes as a child. When he grows up, he dedicates himself to martial training, physical and mental discipline, and leveraging his wealth towards becoming the crimefighting vigilante Batman. Early on he’s angry and brutal, and his butler Alfred is his only confidant. His foes are organized crime gangsters like the Falcone Family, Penguin, and the Black Mask. As his career goes on he forges relationships with allies like Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent, and begins training an expanded roster of sidekicks who graduate into hero allies: Batgirl, Robin, Nightwing, Huntress, the Bat-family. Batman’s growing roster of allies allows him to finally start healing from seeing his parents die as a child, as he begins raising a family of his own, of sorts.
The relatively ordinary criminals who were his nemeses fall to the wayside under his caped crusade, but the power vacuum gives rise to a menagerie of more bizarre foes: Scarecrow, Mr. Freeze, the Riddler, Twoface (after a tragic accident disfigures Harvey Dent and pushes him over the edge), and most iconically, the Joker. Batman and the Joker fight for the soul of Gotham for at least a decade, long enough for Jason Todd to go from Robin to Red Hood. During this era, Batman joins the Justice League, becomes friends with other heroes but especially Superman.
At some point, Joker dies. The myths vary as to how, exactly. Sometimes Batman finally breaks and kills him, sometimes he gets himself killed in one of his fits of reckless showmanship. Regardless, once Joker’s gone, the fight for Gotham is basically over. Other supervillains continue on, but by this point defectors are starting to line up for Batman’s side. Catwoman, initially a wild card, is firmly on Batman’s side (though not a reliable ally). Red Hood, initially sided firmly with the rogues gallery, is now more or less on the Bat-family’s side. Talia al-Ghul flips sides completely and mothers the youngest of the Robins with Bruce Wayne.
Batman Beyond may or may not fit into the mythic cycle. It’s a specific work written with only the Animated Series in mind, skipping over the entire Death-of-Joker era (which the Animated Series didn’t have) to set up its post-Batman setting. Batman Beyond is well-regarded so the motive is there to try and incorporate it into the cycle, but it’s also hard to reconcile the state of Gotham City in Beyond with the unambiguous fact that late stage Batman has a huge reserve of sidekicks and hero allies most of whom are younger than him. What happened to Nightwing? What happened to Talia? What happened to Damian Wayne? Terry McGuinness is a really good Batman but it’s weird that he’s on his own with just an aging, physically incapacitated Bruce instead of playing Robin to Nightwing or Damian.
Anyway, the somewhat confused state of the end of the Batman cycle is both totally normal for mythic cycles and also doesn’t detract from the greater point. Nobody ever set out to gather all the Batman stories into one collected narrative, but people have told stories of young Batman and old Batman and a rough outline of Batman’s life has emerged from it all.
So what does all this have to do with Spider-Man? Well, Spider-Man’s been a more soap operatic character for a long time. The core of Spider-Man is the coming-of-age story, of learning how to wield the power he’s been given. Spider-Man can never seem to get past, at maximum, the age of about twenty-eight or so, and he’s noticeably falling behind his peers in standard life milestones by then, with no children and not even married. And it’s not because he doesn’t want these things. Black Cat offers very much to lead Peter into a life that rejects the standard social norms, and while he dabbles with the idea, he never actually does it. In the end, Peter Parker’s love interest is Mary Jane, not Black Cat, and the usual vibe of a Black Cat arc is that Black Cat misunderstands who Spidey is and why he is where he’s at. She assumes that Spider-Man is failing to marry Mary Jane because he doesn’t really want to, that he’s being pressured into pursuing it by societal expectation, but the course of the arc reveals that Peter Parker very much does want to be a regular boring member of society, he’s just crushed by the dual-burden of also using his superpowers to keep people safe from supervillains.
And if Peter ever gets past that angst and struggle, he won’t be Spider-Man anymore. People want Peter Parker to eventually figure things out and get to live a happy, balanced life, but there’s not really any story there, so we only ever see Peter in that 15-28 age range. Unlike Batman, there’s no phase where his rogues gallery crumbles away to leave behind a board full of allies arrayed against a shrinking number of enemies, and implicitly total victory is now imminent. Flash Thompson gets to mature from high school bully to a hero-without-powers, Eddie Brock/Venom gets to become an anti-hero who’s finally gotten over his vendetta with Peter, but Peter himself has to be tormented by angst, trapped in eternal purgatory, never able to grow past being a well-intentioned high school or college student who’s doing his best to handle the enormous responsibilities life has thrust on him.
Until Miles Morales. As originally introduced in the Ultimate comics, Miles Morales is a replacement for a dead Peter Parker. That’s a valid way to do his character, I guess, but it does mean that Miles tends to be basically just Peter Parker but again. Having no active Peter Parker to contrast against, it’s easy for Miles to gobble up all the usual Peter Parker things that people expect from a Spider-Man story.
The version of the story told by the Spider-Verse films, though, tells it differently. Sort of. It actually repeats the Ultimate plotline pretty straightforwardly for Blonde Peter Parker. But Blonde Peter Parker isn’t our Peter Parker. Our Peter Parker struggles under the burden of being both Peter Parker and Spider-Man, and frequently fails at one to pull out a win for the other, almost always sacrificing Peter Parker for the sake of saving the city as Spider-Man. He doesn’t have a high-tech spider cave, he has a shed. He’s Peter B Parker, the man who was never able to be there for Mary Jane or anyone else in his life as much as he wanted to be, because there was only one Spider-Man, and it had to be him who saved the city, every time, and usually there wasn’t any time left over to be Peter Parker after that.
Until Miles Morales. Now there is another Spider-Man. Now Peter can take the night off to be with MJ while Miles takes care of things. Finally, at long last, he gets to marry Mary Jane (yes, they did get married in the comics, but the relationship worked so poorly that even though fans utterly loathed the arc that decanonized it, they still never went back on it). He gets to raise Mayday Parker. He gets to have all those things that his myth cycle up until now has only portrayed him as wanting and not getting to have.
Like Batman Beyond, the Spider-Verse films are very hard to fit into the overall myth cycle of Spider-Man, although (also like Batman Beyond) they’re sufficiently well-received that people might damn well try anyway. That is, it’s hard to fit the events of the Spiderverse movies into the generic life and times of Peter Parker that emerges from what stories get retold over and over again. Spider-Man has the advantage that the entire second half of the protagonist’s life is basically blank, though. While the majority of Batman stories take place when he’s in his 30s, stories about Old Batman are very much a thing in a way that stories about Old Spider-Man aren’t, really, which means “what’s Peter Parker like in his 50s” or even “what’s Peter Parker like in his mid-to-late 30s” does not have an agreed-upon answer in the myth cycle so far, so although the Spiderverse answer is deeply incompatible with many, many other stories in a way that, for example, the Venom symbiote is not, the lack of competition means that Spiderverse might win anyway.
But even if the Spiderverse angle gets contained to the Spiderverse movies and gets ignored by other Spider-Man stories (like the Insomniac video games), I think Miles Morales is crucial to Spider-Man’s overall myth cycle. Spider-Man needs to be angsty, a mess, unable to keep up with all the responsibilities thrust on him by both his regular life and his superpowers. But if Miles Morales is the main character, then Peter Parker doesn’t have to be like that – he can finally get his ducks in a row, figure out his life, be Spider-Man part-time to help show Miles the ropes and provide backup for major crises but spend most of his time raising his spider-baby with Mary Jane and living a normal life.
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