The nineties were a… weird time for comics and one of the strangest things to come out
of it was the cyberpunk Marvel 2099.
While most of 2099 pretty much died out, one comic stuck around, Spider-Man 2099.
In the year 2099, the mega corporation Alchemax pretty much rules the world and one of their
engineers, Miguel O’Hara, was sick of being pressured to get human test results on his
genetic modification research, like say...
giving someone the powers of the legendary Spider-Man.
When he tried to quit, Alchemax bigwig Tyler Stone gave him a glass of wine laced with
a highly addictive drug that only they distribute.
Miguel tried to restore his genetic code back to normal with his research since he was using
his own DNA for its basis.
However, we he gets into his pod, a disgruntled co-worker sabotages the experiment and unknowingly
modifies Miguel’s DNA into the previously mentioned copy of Spider-Man.
Oh, and he also gets talons on his fingers and toes.
These talons rip through everything except for fabric made out of unstable molecules
and the only garment that Miguel has of said material is this, a costume that he wore in
Mexico for a Day of the Dead festival.
With this outfit to mask his identity, Miguel became the hero of the future and tries to
take down Alchemax as Spider-Man 2099!
Miguel went on a series of adventures, taking on multiple overdesigned nineties villains,
teamed up with Peter Parker because of time traveling shenanigans, was a founding member
of the 2099 Avengers, found Captain America who was in suspended animation for a second
time, even helped him become Thor, and Miguel lifted Mjolnir himself… because comics.
Don’t worry because none of that actually happened because it was all retconned away
so Miguel could show up in Superior Spider-Man.
In it, Miguel appears in 2013 to help stop a time anomaly and is from an alternate version
of that old 2099 series.
I mean bits and pieces of all that still happened, but it’s not really clear on what.
Miguel gets stranded in 2013 right when his grandfather, Tiberius Stone, helped form Alchemax.
It’s here that Miguel takes up the name Michael O'Mara, works as Stone’s assistant,
and he basically tries to protect his grandfather so he won’t become unborn and also tries
to steer Alchemax into NOT becoming an evil corporation that takes over the world.
Miguel was quickly interrupted by an agent of T.O.T.E.M.
who has come to erase Miguel from the time stream because his presence in the past was
disrupting the future.
This fight ended up in the office of Alchemax CEO Liz Allen whom the T.O.T.E.M.
agent recognizes as the source of the time anomaly.
Miguel saves the day, but Ms. Allen realizes that Spider-Man was able to respond quickly
because he is most likely an employee of Alchemax.
Liz accuses Miguel about HIM being Spider-Man so to throw her off his trail, Miguel reveals
that he IS from the future as well as his relation to Tiberius Stone.
However, he lies and claims that he’s on a mission to make sure that Stone reaches
his full potential.
Not too long after this, Miguel starts having visions of his multiversal counterparts being
killed off by the villain Morlun.
Miguel asks Peter Parker for help which led to the huge Spider-Man crossover event, “Spider-Verse”,
where Miguel’s role is honestly not very important.
What is important though is that at the end of the event, when all of the spider people
were being sent to their respective home realities, Miguel chose to go back to 2099.
Much to his surprise; however, Miguel landed in a broken version of his reality destroyed
by Alchemax and ruled by the Maestro.
Maestro assumes that Miguel was Peter Parker come to the future so he beats him up and
puts him in prison with the Doctor Strange of that reality.
Strange and Miguel have a jailbreak, flee into Maestro’s museum, and use Doctor Doom’s
time machine to return to the present.
Now safe in the present, Miguel makes it his mission to stop the messed up future he escaped
from and even though the Secret Wars event destroyed the entire Marvel multiverse, this
is still Miguel’s goal in the brand new Spider-Man 2099 relaunch.
In said relaunch, Miguel is tired of criminals not stopping no matter how hard he tries.
So Peter Parker offers him a job at his company as the head of research and development where
Miguel continues to investigate what caused the future to go to shit.
Oh and Miguel’s girlfriend that he cured of leukemia, but also accidentally turned
her into a bug monster until he fixes her is pregnant now and may or may not be dead.
Congratulations, you’re all caught up and ready to start reading the all new Spider-Man
2099 series!
If you want to get started with Miguel, you can either start at the beginning with the
original Spider-Man 2099, the Marvel Now 2099 run for his adventures in 2013, or you can
hop on with the brand new Spider-Man 2099 that just launched at the end of Secret Wars.
But hey, which spider person do you want to know more about?
Spider-Gwen or Ben Riley?
Click or comment to cast your vote!
If you watched this video, then you probably like Spider-Man so you should click on this
annotation to go to a playlist of all my Spider-Man videos.
It’s just common sense.