Marvel's Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover is a prequel novel to the video game Spider-Man (PS4), written by David Liss and published by Titan Books. It was released on August 21, 2018.
The story follows Peter Parker, a 23-year-old college graduate and research assistant who gained superhuman abilities after being bitten by a radioactive spider. Peter is in his eighth year of crime-fighting under his super heroic alter ego of Spider-Man, who has become highly experienced at this point, but struggles to balance his superhero and personal lives.
Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover contains examples of:
- Actually Pretty Funny: When Spider-Man tries talking Echo down, he remarks on how inconveniently enormous Fisk's hands are, going on a tangent about how he could unwrap a stick of gum with hands "like bowling balls made out of ham." Despite herself, she laughs at this.
- Book Dumb: Maya notes Bingham might have an “animal cunning” but is nonetheless being ignorant and uneducated. Fisk notes he’s “not very bright.”
- Character Tic: Fisk opens and closes his fists repeatedly when he’s trying to control his anger.
- Contrived Coincidence: The place Bingham decides to bomb during a fake Shocker attack just so happens to be Peter’s favorite sandwich shop and where Anika just so happens to be so that she can die when the bomb goes off.
- Corrupt Politician: It’s implied that Osborn is a little too friendly to business interests and is neglecting the ordinary people of New York. He’s also wiling to appoint Wilson Fisk— a man he very much knows is a violent crime lord— to Commissioner of Finance.
- Darkest Hour: Immediately following Spider-Man’s appearance at Fisk’s gala where he was tricked into an altercation with the cops, his entire life falls apart. His reputation is in tatters from the incident. He’s forced to sever his working relationship with Yuri due to the heat it brings. He gets fired from the lab for failing to show up to work at that time. An assistant district attorney sympathetic to Spider-Man is killed by Bingham. Worst of all, MJ assumes Peter jumped into the gala fiasco so recklessly out of an over abundance of concern for her safety and breaks up with him because she feels smothered by him. When the story jumps forward by a few weeks, Peter is still in a funk over it.
- Disposable Woman: Anika is introduced as a new coworker of Peter’s. They share a mutual attraction, potentially setting up an obstacle for Peter’s relationship with MJ. However, she’s present for the faked Shocker attack and dies in the explosion.
- Dragon with an Agenda: Fisk hired Bingham to sully Spider-Man's reputation. Bingham wants to take it a step further and usurp Spider-Man and his legacy all together. The would eventually lead to Fisk taking over by holding the last remaining flash-drive of his illicit activities with Oscorp hostage.
- Establishing Character Moment: Bingham is introduced as the Blood Spider killing a teenager who thought he was Spider-Man. As Bingham, he introduces himself as an eccentric loner to Fisk's Foster daughter Maya Lopez, revealing himself to be more clever and cunning than initially let on. He introduces himself to New York by blowing up a restaurant full of innocent people while pretending to be a heartless version of Spider-Man.
- Maya is introduced in a sparring session with three men for Fisk’s entertainment where she disabled them with minimal injury. This establishes her as competent, calculating, and devoted to Fisk but also unwilling to unnecessarily hurt anyone.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Bingham doesn't understand why Spider-Man cares for and protects people, rather than abusing his power to lord over and terrorize the city. He sees that as proof that Spider-Man is unworthy for his power.
- Evil Counterpart: Blood Spider is an Ax-Crazy psychopath who believes that he is the real Spider-Man and is willing to kill anyone he is able to in order to prove it, having undergone experimentation to give him similar powers to the Wall-Crawler and a custom-made (and inferior) web-shooter.
- False Flag Operation: Bingham organizes a scripted fight while dressed as Spider-Man in a sandwich shop with an actor adorned in the Shocker’s gear to tarnish Spider-Man’s reputation.
- Foregone Conclusion: Given the book is a prequel for the video game, certain aspects like Peter and MJ breaking up are inevitable.
- Formerly Fat: Bingham was overweight as a kid which he was bullied for.
- Frame-Up: Bingham was hired by Fisk to do this to Spider-Man and ruin his reputation. He also blackmails a guy to pose as The Shocker in a hostage scheme to blow up a restaurant.
- Freudian Excuse: Bingham grew up as a special needs kids who was bullied and moved to New York only to live homeless until Oscorp made him a test subject to duplicate Spider-Man’s powers.
- Go-Karting with Bowser: Spider-Man shows up to the Bar With No Name looking for Shocker. He ends up butting into their trivia game which annoys the villains.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: Fisk has one he’s trying to keep under wraps to maintain his new image as a philanthropist. Several passages note how he needs to remain calm in situations where he’d normally just descend into violence.
- Handicapped Badass: Maya Lopez/Echo is completely deaf, but this does nothing to impede her. She can understand what people are saying if she can see their lips moving and as Echo, she is able to match toe-to-toe against Spider-Man despite having no powers herself.
- Hero with Bad Publicity: As Bingham and Fisk continue to organize situations that make Spider-Man look bad, more and more of the public turn on Spider-Man.
- Hijacked by Ganon: Inverted. Despite Hostile Takeover featuring a number of Spider-Man's well-known villains, they are mostly regulated to minor cameos. Fisk is the Big Bad of the novel, but the Blood Spider ends up pushing him to the wayside, despite the latter being a more obscure villain in the comics.
- I Reject Your Reality: Bingham has a bad tendency to try to rework the world through his own perspective. Case in point, he doesn't consider Spider-Man worthy of his power and title, hence he himself is the the Spider-Man and the hero of New York is an imposter. Also, he makes up claims that his mother neglected him despite the fact she was one of the few people in his life to be genuinely kind to him.
- It's All About Me: Michael Bingham is the center of his own world and wants to be the center of everyone else's. He has this trope so bad that he only considers caring about other people when they are nice to him, and thinks nothing of them when they die.
- Karma Houdini: Mayor Norman Osborn is heavily implied to be as evil as any average incarnation of him in other universes, but suffers zero consequences for anything in the story.
- The Mole: Bingham actually works for Norman Osborn and has quietly absconded with all of Fisk’s blackmail material on Osborn.
- Mythology Gag: Peter walks by what is almost certainly the Sanctum Santorum, home of Doctor Strange, and notes how he’s pretty sure it’s haunted.
- Out-Gambitted: Osborn plays Fisk for an utter fool and walks away from the whole mess clean by using Bingham to recapture whatever blackmail material Fisk had on Osborn.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: Bingham mocks Maya’s deafness multiple times.
- Psycho for Hire: Michael Bingham has no loyalty nor is he officially a henchman to Fisk. The scene where he's properly introduced has him explain that he's a contract killer.
- Psycho Prototype: Since Bingham gained Spider-Man-esque powers from experimentation at Oscorp, Blood Spider can be considered this to Miles Morales.
- Rage Quit: Discussed by Echo when she says that overturning the board is the counter-move to checkmate.
- A Real Man Is a Killer: Blood Spider believes that what should make him worthy of being the "true" Spider-Man is that he is willing to push everyone around and kill innocent people.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Robbie chides MJ for not going through the proper channels when she starts to antagonize Fisk but is clearly appreciative of her bravery and integrity in doing so.
- Rogues' Gallery Transplant: Echo’s appearance here mirrors her debut in the comics except substituting out Daredevil for Spider-Man as the hero Fisk dishonestly tells her killed her father.
- Running Gag: Bingham’s Spider-Man suit’s web lining is too close together to perfectly mimic the actual suit. Everyone from Yuri to the Scorpion to the ADA points this out.
- Self-Serving Memory: Bingham prefers remembering people and versions of events the way he wishes to as opposed to reality. It's noticeable regarding his mother; in his childhood flashbacks, he has fond memories of how she'd take care of him and she was one of the few people who was genuinely kind to him; as an adult, to go along with his Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds narrative that he made up in his head, he now likes to imagine his mother was negligent.
- Smug Snake: Bingham is nowhere near as clever as he thinks he is. It’s only because of his usefulness in smearing Spider-Man’s reputation that Fisk even tolerates him.
- Stupid Evil: While he is capable of planning and pragmatism, Bingham is also rather impulsive and lets his emotions get the better of him. Also, he's on a power trip as the Blood Spider and thinks Spider-Man should use his power to lord over others.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: After the fake Shocker attack, Peter watches a TV news segment where most of the commentators note all the incongruities of it and how it’s highly unlikely the Spider-Man there was actually the real deal. Even Fisk notes it’s only because the modern social climate where some people will believe anything that Bingham’s tactic even works on anybody.
- Unskilled, but Strong: Blood Spider can physically do whatever Spider-Man can but lacks the technique and skill Peter does, relying mostly on brute force and the boxing training he picked up from one of his mom’s boyfriends.
- Villainous Breakdown: Blood Spider absolutely loses it when Spider-Man shows up in public to expose him and Fisk. Bingham immediately rushes to the scene (blowing every chance he had of actually framing Spider-Man) and attempts to fight Spider-Man to the death, far more angry and violent than what he's shown before.
- Villain with Good Publicity: Kingpin is trying a play for this to insulate himself from legal troubles.
- We Win, Because You Didn't: Basically what the heroes’ efforts against Fisk boil down to in the climax. They can’t truly take him down (yet), only stop him from succeeding this time. However, the novel directly leads into the events of the game where Fisk is finally brought down.
- You Killed My Father: Maya Lopez believes that Spider-Man was the one who killed her father and left her orphaned, a falsehood that her foster father Wilson Fisk fed to her.
