Spider-Man #12
Marvel Comics, March 2017
Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
The cover to this comic book, produced by American comic book publisher Marvel Comics, features two people, upside-down, kissing in a nod to the famous kissing scene between actors Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst in the motion picture “Spider-Man” (2002). Both of the characters featured on the cover of this comic book, Spider-Man and Spider-Woman (a character in her own title, called “Spider-Gwen”), are irregularly moulded, in a figurative sense. The large American comic book publishers maintain vast but frayed continuities, and use parallel universes as a plot device to allowing various characters to interact, where common sense or the publisher’s continuity itself would otherwise dictate that they should not interact. In this case, Miles Morales, a version of the famous Marvel character Spider-Man by originating from now defunct parallel universe, is kissing Gwen Stacey, a version of Spider-Woman but from yet a separate dimension. This is much like a shell game: it takes concentrating to follow the sleight-of-hand and determine in which universe the characters are operating.