Original Comic Creator Reveals the One Spider-Noir Move That Would Make Aunt May Furious

Amazon 's Spider- Noir is off to a hot start with viewers — 93% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes — but the guy who co-created the Spider-Man Noir comics, David Hine, has some notes. He digs parts of the show. He also thinks it sanded off a big, defining edge from the books.

The politics the show dialed down

Hine says the series very deliberately steers clear of the real 1930s politics that powered the original run. In the comics, the era wasn't just window dressing — it was the story. They pointed straight at actual movements and names that existed in the U.S. at the time.

"Our version was explicitly political. We named names. We referenced the Friends of New Germany and the rise of actual Nazism in the US. Everything referenced was historical reality, except for the obvious elements of pulp weirdness."

He adds that his Peter Parker was a radical communist — and so were Aunt May and Uncle Ben. Compared to that, he sees the show's stance as soft left. In his view, the Aunt May he wrote would have torn into this version. He would have loved a bolder swing.

Why this adaptation makes different choices

To be fair, the series isn't trying to do a 1:1 transfer. One big change: it ties Spider-Man's origin directly to the origins of his villains. That approach doesn't really fit the younger Peter Parker from the Spider-Man Noir comics, so the show had to rework the setup pretty dramatically.

Hine actually respects a lot of that. He says the world-building is cohesive, the show leans even harder into noir than the books did while still keeping the pulpy DNA, and the black-and-white version is flat-out gorgeous. He also points out you can feel how much the people making it are into it. And he hopes the series becomes a gateway back to the comics. As he puts it, he and his team had to fight to get that version into print in the first place, and the character's success backed them up.

What hit for him — and what did not

• Standout performances: Karen Rodriguez, Brendan Gleeson, and Li Jun Li. Hine says they are operating at the top of their game.
• Nicolas Cage: he likes Cage's dry humor and the way Cage lets the creepier, arachnid side of the character live in his body language — Hine says he hasn't seen movements this spidery since Steve Ditko's original work.
• The knock: when it comes to web-slinging, Hine thinks Cage sometimes looks awkward — more stiff than smooth.

The comic's Aunt May was a flamethrower

This is where the differences really jump out if you know the source. In Spider-Man Noir, Uncle Ben dies trying to unionize workers, and Aunt May is a full-on activist. The story even goes to some gnarly places: that universe's Vulture literally ate Uncle Ben. When Spider-Man Noir saved May from Vulture, she still scolded him for killing the guy. That's the level of fire Hine is talking about, and he doesn't see it in the show.

Bottom line

No adaptation is going to be perfectly faithful — shifting mediums pretty much guarantees changes. Spider-Noir has been widely praised so far, and a lot of its bigger liberties haven't really been dinged because the specifics of the comics aren't common knowledge. Hine's take lands in that middle ground: he respects the craft, he just misses the sharper political edge. If the series nudges people to pick up the books and meet the original version — where the politics aren't a subtext so much as the text — he will call that a win.