Black Latino Miles Morales Is Officially The New Spider-Man

By Kenrya Rankin Jun 22, 2015

Peace out, Peter Parker. Say hello to Miles Morales, the Spider-Man alter ego who will be slipping into the iconic suit for good when Marvel relaunches the comic series this fall. After appearing in the “Ultimate Spider-Man” series since 2011, the character—who is a black Latino teenager—will become the official holder of the webslinger.

The series will be written by Brian Michael Bendis, a Jewish writer and artist from Cleveland who launched “Ultimate Spider-Man" back in 2000. It will be illustrated by Sara Pichelli, the Italian artist who drew Morales when he first debuted.

“Many kids of color who when they were playing superheroes with their friends, their friends wouldn’t let them be Batman or Superman because they don’t look like those heroes but they could be Spider-Man because anyone could be under that mask. But now it’s true. It’s meant a great deal to a great many people,” Bendis told New York Daily News. “Our message has to be it’s not Spider-Man with an asterisk, it’s the real Spider-Man for kids of color, for adults of color and everybody else.”

The news comes a week after Wikileaks released an agreement between Sony Pictures Entertainment and Marvel Entertainment specifying that one of the “core elements” of Spidey on the big screen is that “he is a heterosexual Caucasian male” named Peter Benjamin Parker, which means that Morales may not make it to local movie theaters any time soon. 

Watch Morales, voiced by Donald Glover, meet Parker in an episode of “Marvel’s Ultimate Spider-Man: Web Warriors.”