So we said, ‘Well, OK, let’s hop back even from the comic and say that there’s an anime version of SP//dr and Peni that existed and inspired the guys who made the comic to make the comic.’ So animation and anime, it just seemed like a perfect kind of confluence of character and approach.” Honouring Comic-Book Origins I think our take on Peni and SP//dr, really, we were looking for a bold statement to make with her and we kind of went back, in a way, not just to the character as she exists in the comics but to the inspiration for her in the comics - which is obviously anime. “I think she’s made only a very small number of appearances, so there wasn’t a huge storehouse of stuff to draw on when it came to Peni. “The thing we discovered was that there’s very little on Peni in comics form,” says Peter Ramsey. Peni, voiced by Kimiko Glenn, is an anime-style character, who comes from a universe in which she’s bitten by a spider that lives inside a robot - called SP//dr – which she pilots. And she’s a fascinating addition to a Spider-People line-up that also includes Nic Cage’s Spider-Man Noir and Porky Pig-alike Spider-Ham, voiced by John Mulaney. No, you do not.” Peni Parker Anime-influenced Peni Parker. Rothman is direct in his response: “I’m going to straight-up say no.”Īnd if we were still in any doubt, Peter Ramsey adds, “Let’s stop being coy, let’s just be honest. With Venom smashing the box office this summer, there’s been some speculation around whether we might see Gwenom in Spider-Verse - a comic-book character created when the Spider-Woman version of Gwen Stacy bonds with the Venom symbiote in her universe. She has complicated feelings about Peter Parker, and all that stuff plays out in the movie.” No Gwenom So she has very complicated feelings about being Spider-Woman. She’s a few years older than Miles but she’s far more experienced than he is and she comes from a parallel universe where Peter Parker was her best friend and was jealous that she was bitten by a spider, and made some choices off of that that changed her life. Rodney Rothman adds, “She’s a teenager in our movie.
#SPIDER MAN INTO THE SPIDER VERSE GWEN STACY HOW TO#
“She’s a really strong, powerful Spider-Gwen in our movie, and she befriends Miles and ends up helping him figure out how to use his powers.” “We meet a Gwen Stacy in Miles’s world that actually was the one who was bitten by a spider, and not Peter Parker,” says Peter Ramsey. And while this may come as no surprise to avid comic-book readers, fans of superhero movies and casual cinemagoers alike may well be surprised to see a woman - Gwen Stacy, no less - don the wallcrawler’s suit. It’s no secret that Spider-Woman aka Spider-Gwen appears in the film we’ve seen her in the trailer, voiced by Hailee Steinfeld. With so much interest in the women characters of Into the Spider-Verse, we asked the directors - Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman - all about the film’s most prominent Spider-Womenfolk to get the lowdown on how they figure and how they’re represented in Sony’s new animated webslinging world. But one of the most significant consequences is an influx of women characters into the historically male-dominated screen-superhero arena, as women take on the role of Spider-Man, and other characters, in the numerous other universes. It allows Miles Morales to pick up the Spider-Man baton and receive training from a Peter Parker from another dimension (among various other Spider-Peeps), for goodness’ sake. You might say that the most exciting thing about Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is the opening up of alternate universes and, consequently, multiple possibilities within Spidey’s on-screen world.