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When Ben 10 co-creator Joe Kelly took over Marvel Comics' Amazing Spider-Man title in the summer of 2025, he wanted to to hit upon a forgotten part of the Spider-Man mythos: what can happen when a lab accident goes wrong. And in June 3's Amazing Spider-Man #30, a long-simmering storyline will come to the surface with the debut of a new Marvel villain, Spore.

Spore begin in comics as Brian Nehring, a childhood friend of Peter Parker's introduced way back in Kelly's first issue as the series' lead writer, in April 2025's Amazing Spider-Man (Vol. 7) #1. And while it's taken a year and 29 issues to get here, it was in the plans all along.

"When I came on the book, Nick [Lowe, Marvel's lead Spider-Man editor] and I started talking about certain pillars that we wanted to hit, or that are just part of Spidey DNA," Kelly tells Popverse. "The idea of a character who becomes who they are due to a lab accident just felt like OG Spidey. Spore is that character, but we've seen him get built from the beginning, which is cool. We introduced Brian in the first issue of my run. And you know this idea of, like, who's this old friend of Peter's, and what's his deal? He's kind of a jerk, but he's kind of endearing."

Related: The oral history of Marvel's Amazing Spider-Man 'Brand New Day' era

Nehring works as a myco-bioengineer at Rand Enterprises, and has been a fixture in the Amazing Spider-Man books over the past year, including the recent 'Death Spiral' crossover. But just as mushrooms have an incubation cycle, so does Nehring's incubation into the "mushroom-inspired weirdo" that is Spore.

"To watch him evolve, and then have this catastrophic misstep as a result of Peter not being around, not really being himself, because he's Ben Reilly at the time where Brian decides to do his own experiment unauthorized," Kelly continues. "I just love all those setup pieces. He's been lying in a hospital bed. He's been sort of dealing with the repercussions of his actions. But it's time for him to show up, and he is a guy who very specifically blames not Spider-Man for his problems, but Peter Parker. And I think that's the twist that's going to make him special."

To design this new supervillain Spore, Marvel and Kelly turned to an old friend of theirs — one of Kelly's Deadpool partners, Pete Woods — to design the character, and draw Spore's debut fruiting.

"Pete Woods is so good. He's so talented, and he's got a great design sense," says Kelly. "There's some stuff in the book that looks so exceptional, and it's just the care that he takes when he puts it into all the characters. But with Spore, Brian's a pretty vain guy, and so how do you sort of balance this monstrous mushroom-inspired weirdo with a guy who actually cares about how he looks? Pete really nailed it. He very much was sort of leaning into the monster man, and that's what we've gotten. We had a bunch of conversations."

You can enter the conversation after you read Spore's debut in June 3's Amazing Spider-Man #30.

Marvel's most reliable superhero has proven he can do a whole lot more than just 'whatever a spider can.' Swing into Spidey's history with Popverse's...

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Just watch out for that radioactive blood.