Noah Hawley On His Sentimental ‘Amazing Spider-Man #1000’ Comic Book Debut: “He’s The New York Mets Of Superheroes”

SPOILER ALERT: This interview includes major details about Amazing Spider-Man #1000’s “Still Standing”

EXCLUSIVE: There’s no need to state the obvious, but being a superhero takes a lifelong toll. It’s a thankless job, and for Peter Parker, aging gracefully only dredges up unresolved regrets.

That’s the idea at the heart of Noah Hawley’s featured anthology story “Still Standing,” cementing his comic book debut in the Amazing Spider-Man #1000, a celebratory issue marking a historic milestone for Marvel’s flagship series. Only two other major superhero titles—DC’s Action Comics and Detective Comics—have reached the 1,000-issue mark. Undoubtedly, Spider-Man is having a moment. As Spider-Man: Brand New Day continues its record-breaking theatrical run, recently becoming the highest-grossing film in North American box-office history, the Amazing Spider-Man #1000 is generating major demand of its own, with more than 400,000 orders ahead of its Sept. 30 release and Marvel already moving to a second printing. (And the issue also features a fortuitous interview between Tom Holland and Destin Daniel Cretton prior to the current accolades).

For “Still Standing,” Hawley teamed with artist Patrick Gleason to imagine a Peter Parker decades removed from the Spider-Man fans have long known. Now in his 80s and living at Forest Hills Nursing Home, Peter can feel the pull of the life he left behind, while his son and grandson offer reminders of the life he built beyond the mask. But as Peter looks back, one regret continues to haunt him: the death of Gwen Stacy. The story finds Peter confronting his memories and the possibility that they may not be as reliable as they once were. When a woman who appears to be an older Gwen Stacy enters his life, Peter is forced to confront the past in a story that carries the bittersweet weight of a hero reckoning with his own mortality.

Below, Hawley, who has explored the depths of fractured realities and psychologically complex characters throughout his work, speaks with Deadline about why he wanted to give Spider-Man the “dignity of age,” and exploring what happens when the battles are over but the emotional scars remain.

DEADLINE: How did your collaboration with Marvel to write “Still Standing” come about?

NOAH HAWLEY: Nick Lowe [executive editor at Marvel Comics] reached out to me and said they’re doing the celebratory Spider-Man #1000 and he’d love it if I contributed something. And let me tell you, the one thing I don’t have is time [laughs]—but I felt like it was a really momentous issue to hit and I was honored that he asked. I was so excited, and then I had to figure out what I was going to do, how I could write the story, and everything else. In the end, I wrote them something longer than they had anticipated, but they accommodated it, which I appreciated. It’s been a super great experience so far.

DEADLINE: I know you’re a New Yorker what’s your relationship to Spider-Man, anyway?

HAWLEY: I still have a photo of all my action figures from when I was a kid. There was a Hulk, there was a Spider-Man. I know the theme song. I watched the cartoon in my youth. What everybody loves about Spider-Man is, on some level, the innocence of youth that he carries with him. There’s an optimism and a good-naturedness that I think a lot of our superheroes can end up like tortured demon hunters. You know what I mean? They’re suffering so we can sleep at night. I like that too, but there’s just something to a character who is always going to make the best of it. That’s really inspiring to audiences. It’s what’s great about Tom Holland and those movies and certainly his introduction in Civil War. And it is that New York thing for me. It’s like, oh, it’s my superhero. He’s mine. He’s the New York Mets of superheroes.

The story is about the idea that Peter can see the path from where he grew up to where he is now, yet the one thing in his life that still eats at him is Gwen’s death and how he feels he failed her.

Noah Hawley

DEADLINE: Your story, I feel, belongs in the same vein of Jeph Loeb’s Spider-Man: Blue, in the sense that Peter is still reflecting on his relationship with Gwen Stacy. But the story also takes it one step further, as he still acknowledges his life with MJ, his own mortality in old age, his son who doesn’t pay much attention to him, and his grandson who indulges him… So, how did you parse what your story was going to be about? And what’s the emotionality you were trying to capture here?

HAWLEY: I started with the issue number. Spider-Man #1000 makes Spider-Man an old man on some level, and there was something about that legacy where it’s like, well, let’s give him the dignity of old age. We’ve forced him to be this eternal youth for us on some level. And that’s where my head went to this idea that he’s passed on this legacy to his son, who then passed it on to his grandson. And all of us, even the maestros at a certain age, your kids are like, “Oh, Dad, it’s enough already with the old stories.” But the grandchild loves to hear the old stories. You know what I mean?[laughs].

DEADLINE: Right.

HAWLEY: So there was something about that dynamic between [his own living family, after MJ passed away]. Also, the story is about the idea that Peter can see the path from where he grew up to where he is now, yet the one thing in his life that still eats at him is Gwen’s death and how he feels he failed her. So, it’s a bit like Legion, in the sense that, when it starts, you meet a man; he’s in a psychiatric institution, he’s either mentally ill or he has superpowers, and we don’t know which one is true. He’s seeing things that aren’t there. He is hearing things that aren’t there.

In Spider-Man, you have a guy who’s in his 80s, and he’s in a nursing home, and is he getting dementia. Is something else happening to him? I think the audience would like to think of him as still sharp and that he’s just being manipulated. And then throwing in an older Mysterio into the mix—so many of these supervillains wear a mask all the time. Who would even know what Mysterio looks like? So that idea that there’s just somebody right next to him who’s preying on him, I thought that was a really insidious idea.

DEADLINE: Patrick Gleason did the art for this comic; what was that collaboration process like?

HAWLEY: He illustrated the words and sent me storyboards. There were a couple of places where I realized that the visuals themselves needed more clarity because I’m a big fan of economy and storytelling, but I also know that there’s a lot that’s being established very quickly for the audience, the world-building. And so there were a couple of places where I thought, oh, we need to be clearer visually or add a thought bubble or something to really orient us at every moment. But otherwise, I was just impressed by everything that he showed me.

We mostly thought about tone of voice. And how to depict this world of being in a retirement home. Is it colorful? Muted? Optimistic? This is a depressing location, but you don’t want it to be too grey and subdued, since it’s entertainment. I’m a big fan of Dark Knight and that style of storytelling, but that’s not what this was, so I was glad that he understood that immediately.

DEADLINE: What was the most challenging aspect of putting this story together?

HAWLEY: Well, again, it’s the economy, right? It’s how do we get these three big thoughts across? One is our Spider-Man is in his 80s. He has a son and a grandson, so that legacy continues. He’s in a nursing home. He meets [a person who presents themselves as] Gwen, but it can’t be because she’s dead. And even if it is issue #1000, you can never assume that people know the backstory. But I was told this run is already sold out before the debut, and they’re printing more copies. It’s going to be a keepsake item, so people who might not even know much about Spider-Man are buying it. So, part of the challenge was: how do you get in enough clarity for less-informed readers without it being boring?

And for the twist, for example, when Gwen is being attacked and Peter goes to her room, how do you make sure that what’s happening is clear for the reader? I can use all the words I want to describe it, but visually, you really want to make sure the reader is like, “I think it’s an attacker, but what’s going on?”

DEADLINE: Does it make you nervous that this is going out into the world with that much sales success surrounding it? 400,000 copies sold and then some… that’s no joke.

HAWLEY: I feel good. You can never predict if anyone’s going to like a thing, but the vision that I had has been fully realized, and so that’s what matters the most.

I’ve created a lot of villains in my day, and I’m always looking for points of empathy for a viewer or reader because when you have a villain, it usually means violence is coming. And we’re trained, certainly in America, to believe that the only way to really resolve conflict is black hat versus white hat in the town square at noon. But I never want violence to feel like a good idea.

Noah Hawley

DEADLINE: Back to what you said before, so did you approach this like a screenplay then? Or what’s the difference between writing a comic and a TV series?

HAWLEY: A little bit, although the format is very different in terms of the mechanics of panel one, panel two, and so on. I could have written it as a screenplay, but I wanted to try using the comic book format to communicate with the artist and the reader. So that was a learning curve to some degree. But a comic book is not a dialogue delivery device, either. There is dialogue in it, but if you get to four pages that are just people talking to each other, you’re not happy as a reader. You feel like, “Oh God, I got to read all this. I read comic books, so I don’t have to read all that.” And this was a more contemplative story, so how do you make something contemplative be action-oriented? So it still feels to a reader like there’s a villain, there’s a confrontation, there’s a setback. All the things that you want to feel in a comic book story, you want to feel in this, even though there are no fight sequences. He doesn’t even use his superpowers.

That was the challenge of it, as well. So, I mean, people are going to like it or not. I don’t know. But Marvel asked me to do something, and I did something [laughs].

DEADLINE: Do you have a hard-and-fast rule for adapting things to different mediums like this?

HAWLEY: Look, my philosophy always, when I was doing Legion or Alien even, it’s like the danger with adaptation is that you take issues 120 through 130 of a comic book, like the beloved Dark Phoenix Saga, for example, and you turn it into a two-hour movie, and inevitably you have to compress some things and change some things, maybe consolidate some characters. Whatever you change will make people angry. I have a friend who worked on Star Trek who said, “Nobody hates Star Trek more than a Star Trek fan.” There is that idealism of, “All right, what you got?” But my thing was always, “Look, if I take the character of Legion, and I don’t try to tell you stories you already know, but I create new stories with characters you love, isn’t that a gift? Where you’re like, ‘I’m going to do something. I’m going to move past the ghost of Ripley and tell you an entirely new world-building story that has Xenomorphs in it, or I’m going to take you on a journey with Legion that will ultimately involve Professor X, but the story has to stand on its own two feet before he comes in.'”

And so that was my thought here with “Still Standing,” to offer people something different, something that maybe nobody else would. And they can like it or not. But I also felt like people are going to buy issue #1000 who maybe haven’t bought a comic book since they were 16, and now they’re 50. And so they’re thinking about getting old, and so here’s a story that feels relevant to them [laughs].

DEADLINE: Your version of Mysterio is a good example of that reflection in old age. He’s doing these things to Peter that are so hurtful, and eventually, he actually recognizes that.

HAWLEY: There’s a lot of regret going on here. Mysterio thinks that he’s finally getting his revenge in torturing Peter. He thinks it’s going to give him a sense of closure and pleasure, but it turns out that it really didn’t do either of those things. It was just mean. And I guess he’s looking at his endgame too, and he was like, “Well, maybe I’m not that guy anymore.” There’s something about the redemption of it all. I’ve created a lot of villains in my day, and I’m always looking for points of empathy for a viewer or reader because when you have a villain, it usually means violence is coming. And we’re trained, certainly in America, to believe that the only way to really resolve conflict is black hat versus white hat in the town square at noon. But I never want violence to feel like a good idea.

It’s like violence is problem-solving without an idea. And so when you build empathy, when you see, well, there’s no such thing as a villain. There are. Historically, there are some true psychopaths. But for the most part, you have people with grievances or people who feel wronged and who are trying, like a lot of people, to fill a hole they just can’t seem to fill, and they’re just bitter. And every time that Spider-Man takes them back to jail, they’re like, “See, I’m the victim.” Which is a very Fargo mentality for villains. It’s like, “I’m the victim.” So I guess I wanted to put these two old men in a room after the fighting was done and to go, not, “I’m sorry,” but maybe all that villainy was just a waste of time.

DEADLINE: So, if Marvel called tomorrow and offered you another character to write for, is there anybody that comes to mind?

HAWLEY: I’d have to think about that. But, I mean, the X-Men were my jam when I was a teenager. That world was really compelling to me.

DEADLINE: You need to go talk to Lee Sung Jin about that new X-Men movie.

HAWLEY: Listen, I have no shortage of work, but there’s something about the idea of mutants versus superpowers where it’s like one is a very empowering word and the other is a very judgmental word. There was something about that idea that it was an evolutionary right turn that your body had done out of the blue that just seemed interesting to me versus gamma radiation or some origin story lore or whatever. And then it comes on in adolescence, which is really a metaphor for feeling different in adolescence and everything. So that felt really rich thematically for me.

DEADLINE: Are you a gamer? Do you know anything about Marvel’s Wolverine on PlayStation?

HAWLEY: I do some gaming, and I have a 13-year-old son. So he and I, we keep up. He keeps up, and he keeps me informed, and we play things together. I definitely love that last Spider-Man game. I don’t know too much, but that trailer for Wolverine looks great. I think he suggested that what he was reading was that maybe they guide you a little too much in the game.

The X-Men were my jam when I was a teenager.

Noah Hawley

DEADLINE: Yeah, there’s a lot of back and forth about that online.

HAWLEY: But for the casual gamer, I don’t mind that. If the skill level required is too hard, I just don’t want to play it. But I know that for their core audience, they want a sense of accomplishment. When he’s playing Elden Ring or whatever, it’s hard. That game is hard.

DEADLINE: Bloodborne and Elden Ring will never see me coming, that’s for sure. And last but not least, you mentioned Tom Holland earlier. This comic issue includes an interview with Destin Daniel Cretton and Tom about Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which is now one of the highest-grossing North American films of all time. What say you about its success?

HAWLEY: It comes back to the optimism of the character. It’s interesting because that story is about “everybody’s forgotten me, and I’m trying to be OK with that, but I’m lonely on some level.” And then it’s also clearly setting up some elements for the next Avengers movie. It’s a good time in the theater, which I think is what’s driving people to see it, especially at this scale, and Tom Holland is so likable, right? And not to [get into their business], but it’s also about who he is married to, and the year they’ve both been having. You want to see him and Zendaya together because it feels like a lived-in relationship on and off-screen. But either way, the movie delivers, and that’s the headline.

Amazing Spider-Man #1000, which features several stories from Dan Slott, Brian Michael Bendis, Triple H and more is now available wherever comic books are sold.