In Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Season 1, the destruction of Midtown High School means Peter Parker ends up in Rockford T. Bales High School. From there, his story plays out differently, with Norman Osborn now the web-slinger's mentor in place of Tony Stark.
In terms of Peter's friends, the likes of Ned Leeds, MJ, Liz Allan, and Betty Brant are swapped for Nico Minoru, Lonnie Lincoln, and Pearl Pangan. So, while this story plays out in a world similar to the MCU, Spider-Man's life in Queens is vastly different.
Ahead of Season 2's premiere this Fall, concept artist Kal Athannassov has shared some of his work from Season 1, when it was still in "very early development." As you'll see below, Ned was briefly in line to appear before creative plans evolved.
"In 2021, I was fortunate enough that Marvel Studios came knocking - looking for me to do some dev work on their upcoming animated Spider-Man show," the artist explained. "Ultimately, my work was merely in service of trying out a style to see if it was a good fit - the project went in a different direction (one that I think was the better call), but I was so happy to play around in this world."
"At this stage, the project assignments were simply to find a style, and it was not yet known if this Spider-Man would be the MCU Peter or a different one, so my explorations focused on Peter and his friends," Athannassov revealed. "This was my chance to try things out and see what stuck."
"I was looking for ways to power down his homemade suit, and I had seen some concept art where he had a bike helmet, and I thought it looked so fun! So that’s where the helmet and pads came in - I was always a fan of how they made him look even more inexperienced and like a kid," he concluded.
What's particularly interesting is that this confirms that when Athannassov started work on Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Marvel Studios was considering setting the series on Earth-616.
Even when the show was announced, it sounded like that was the plan, with the idea being to explore Peter's time as a costumed hero before Iron Man recruited him in Captain America: Civil War. Ultimately, that was deemed to have too short a lifespan as a series—there were likely rights issues with Sony Pictures, too—and it evolved into a "What If...?" style tale.
You can check out these early explorations for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man in the Instagram gallery below.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man follows Peter Parker on his way to becoming a hero, with a journey unlike we've ever seen and a style that celebrates the character’s early comic book roots.
The talented voice cast includes Hudson Thames, Colman Domingo, Eugene Byrd, Grace Song, Zeno Robinson, Hugh Dancy and Charlie Cox.
The head writer is Jeff Trammell and Mel Zwyer is the supervising director. Brad Winderbaum, Kevin Feige, Louis D’Esposito, Dana Vasquez-Eberhardt and Trammell serve as executive producers.
In our review of the series, we concluded by saying, "Amazing, spectacular, and downright astonishing - Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man exceeds every expectation and is a true love letter to the world's greatest superhero...the end result is the ultimate Spider-Man TV series."
All episodes of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Season 1 are now streaming on Disney+.