In my experience, black widow spiders are rather meek beasties. I’ve come into contact with a few of them while working outside – twice while up on a tall ladder. No envenomations – just a quick retreat. For a while I had a large specimen that set up housekeeping outside a bathroom window to provide something for me to watch while I was just sitting there.
There are literally dozens of Spider-People across multiple Marvel universes and continuities at this point. They even made a movie about it.
It was kind of funny/sad when a bunch of racist internet trollies freaked out at the early trailers for Into the Spider-Verse basically saying “…b-b-but Spider-Man is a white kid named Peter Parker!!!” and the response was guys this movie has three white guys named Peter Parker in it, four if you count the brief flashback of the one from the Spider-Gwen universe.
My friend was out watering her garden and (as we do) covered the outlet end of the watering hose with her thumb, thus finding a black widow sheltering there. She’s the one who lost the baby.
Another sat down on a couch, not noticing the spider who’d recently taken up residence under it. She recounts how much it hurt, but no lasting harm.
ETA: She corrects me: it was among some blinds. Another had set up housekeeping under the bonnet of a car and when she reached in to open it got bitten. Must be something about her; I’ve lived in black widow territory longer than she has and never bitten once.
My favorite bit from Anthony Lane’s 2002 New Yorker review of Spider-Man (emphasis mine):
There is, it emerges, nothing disgusting about becoming an arachnanthrope. Peter fails, for instance, to sprout a further quartet of limbs or a funky tarantula fuzz on his upper thighs. His cutest new knack is for ejecting long, twangy threads of sticky stuff from his wrists; there is, perhaps, a happy touch of Portnoy to this unfamiliar gift, and I think that Maguire is wise to it. Certainly, the smartest scene in the movie comes when, full of the joys of his spring, he leaps onto a roof and tries, for the first time, to shoot his silk into the void. “Go, web, go!” the desperate teen-ager cries, madly flipping his hand back and forth. Hmmm.
Yeah, I was trying to be funny. Emphasis on trying. I expected to be smacked down.
In my defense, however – while adding that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is my favorite animated film at the moment; my wife and I were counting the days from when the first trailer dropped and saw it in the theater three times in one week – how many of them exist that are from the same universe? If all of them were sent home, how many could share a bunkbed?
I honestly don’t keep up with the plethora of Spiderman comics, so I don’t really know. For a brief time (in the movie at least) Peter Parker’s Spiderman from Miles’ universe was around at the same time as Miles. Could it be that the universe had to adjust because there can be only one?
Still quite a few. For example, the Earth-616 universe has Peter Parker, Ben Reilly (Parker’s clone), Mattie Franklin (one of several Spider-Women) plus a bunch of impostors, pinch-hitters, ripoffs and wannabes.
In kids they frequently cause symptoms that mimic appendicitis. My brother almost had his belly opened until an astute general surgeon noticed the bite on his leg.
Each version has its points. Superhero origin stories often reflect the anxieties of the day. That’s why 60s-era radioactive/radiation-born heroes (the Hulk, the Fantastic 4, early Spidey) gave way to genetically-based ones (Marvel mutants of every stripe, retconned Spidey). The next generation of metahumans will probably have powers based on global warming.
Bio-Spidey makes intuitive sense, since spiders do webs and it’s odd that he’d just happen to also be the genius inventor of web-fluid. (Plus having tech-based webbing lying around Manhattan for anyone to analyze raises the question of why he’s the only one who can ever make more.) But then tech-based webbing lets the writers show that Peter Parker (or the secret identity appropriate to your universe) has depth and value beyond getting the right spider to bite him.
Personally, I think that the webs are his least important power/accessory. He basically never fights villains who aren’t effectively immune to being webbed up (not that it stops him from trying for the first ten minutes of the fight). They’re not even that useful for getting around, even in the half a mile or so of Manhattan where there are enough tall buildings to make it practical. (Pendulum physics say his top speed is about 40 mph.) Spider-sense, which is to say plot armor with a given name, is much more useful and interesting.
Or Iron Man, because you know, if your public identitiy is beinga billionarie and a CEO has some benefit rather than to be say a journalist with a temperamental boss.
I did specify that those were just some of the ones from the Earth-616 universe, in response to the direct question “how many of them exist that are from the same universe?”
Miles Morales is from the Ultimate Marvel universe.