One glorious benefit from there being so many different versions of our favorite wall-crawler in comics, film, and television, is that with each iteration we see new innovations and ideas. Sometimes these are new interpretations of Peter’s spider powers, other times new technologies incorporated into the design of Spider-Man’s suit.

The suit in Spider-Man Homecoming is very faithful to the original red and blue design. Sure, there are a few extra stripes and lines to suggest different materials or borders between different panels. But, for the most part, it’s classic Spider-Man. In fact, the filmmakers have come up with ways to accommodate some classic design elements that we haven’t seen before.

1: Auto-Fit Suit

This story line that started in Captain America: Civil War and carries into Spider-Man: Homecoming isn’t the first to make use of a plot device that chalks up technological advances that power the Spider-Man suit, as opposed to having a high school student simply ‘invent’ everything needed. In other stories, S.H.I.E.L.D. has supplied Peter with technology, and I think I recall Reed Richards coming to Peter’s aid in the comics.

Here, I’m assuming it’s more Stark technology that’s allowing Peter’s suit to be roomy and loose enough to be easy to put on, and then with the touch of a button it sucks in tight to his skin. You have to admit, it was a pretty inventive idea on the part of the writers and creators to create a pseudo-science, pseudo-technical explanation to how Spider-Man’s suit could be relatively easy to get in and out of, but still remain so form-fitting in action.

2: Classic Spider on the Suit’s Back

I’ve never thought of myself as a purist, but it’s really nice to see the classic spider emblem on the back of the suit. I know, it doesn’t really look that much like a spider, it’s more or less an ellipse with legs. There’s no separation between a head and thorax. And it doesn’t make a lot of sense that the suit would have one image of a spider on the front, and a decidedly different one on the back. But, that’s how it started, and that’s how it was for a very long time. Both in the comics and in the popular animated incarnations from the 1960s and 1990s.

Once the films starring Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield were made, it seemed that using a different spider on the suit’s back was an easy way to make the suit seem cooler and more modern. It’s hard to argue with that; the same logic was applied when the black suit showed up in the Secret Wars comics in the 1980s. I’m not saying any of those designs looked bad or were bad choices. It’s just nice to see a large element of the classic suit here, and I don’t think it looks dopey or uncool.

3: Expressive Eyes

Part of the fun of reading Spider-Man comics and watching him in animation is how much artists have done with the somewhat abstract shape of Spider-Man’s eyes. They don’t really have to be held to any anatomically-correct standards, and they can be distorted as needed to look like a squint, or be wide in surprise, or can be squeezed and stretched into any number of variations.

This is something we haven’t seen an attempt at recreating in live action, until we saw the first of this iteration of Spidey in Captain America: Civil War. I always get a charge out of how writers are able to come up with a plausible pseudo-tech back story for almost any feature like this. When Tony Stark first asks Peter if he can even see out of the homemade goggles he’s currently using, Peter reveals that he actually needs to limit his field of vision because his senses are so powerful. Sure, I guess I’ll buy that.

4: Souped-Up Web Shooters

When the first Sam Raimi / Tobey Maguire Spider-Man film was released, many fans were disappointed in the replacement of Peter’s mechanical web-shooters with organic web-shooters. While this seemed like a big change to the character when described to most fans, in the context of the films, the organic web-shooters are not as strange as they sound. And the fact that Peter’s web-shooting abilities came along with his other powers served to keep the story more focused than it might have been. Somehow, it’s a little easier to suspend one’s disbelief about getting superpowers from a radioactive or DNA-enhanced spider, than it is about a teenager inventing and building his own web fluid and web-shooters.

In 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man, Peter swipes the web fluid from Oscorp, but builds his own shooters. Here, we’re told that Peter invents his own web fluid, and he must have built some web shooters of own. The ones we see have been upgraded and overhauled by Stark. We can’t tell yet what they can and can’t do, but we see at least a couple moves. In one shot, we see Peter shooting a web two strands at a time. In another shot, he shoots a gob of web that sticks to a car and then snares a baddie as he’s running by. Is Peter making these adjustments to the shooters with his mind, or with some small mechanical or electronic switching system? I think we can assume it’s some kind of Stark tech, but it remains to be seen how many details surrounding these will be woven into the story.

5: Spider-Tracer Drone

I don’t know what to call this thing, or what it does. I’m calling it the spider-tracer for now, because Peter often had these small, fit-in-the-palm-of-your hand transponders in the shape of spiders, and if an enemy was escaping, he’d toss one on their back and he’d be able to track them down using his spider sense. This looks like it might be something significantly more advanced. Maybe this is some sort of drone that can fly and land and maybe even walk around for reconnaissance. Maybe it can send information or even video back to Peter’s eyepieces. Maybe it can even perform small tasks like delivering an electrical charge or picking a lock.

What Do You Think?

So, there are a few things we know, or at least we think we know, about Peter’s suit in Spider-Man Homecoming. Did you notice anything we didn’t? Are they any other features of the suit, or of Peter’s abilities, that you’d like to see explored in this film? If so, please leave us a comment, and thanks for reading.