The Spot: the most unexpected… and most dangerous enemy of the Spider-Verse?

There are few examples in the whole of Marvel history as clear-cut as this one: a supporting character promoted to major threat without a single line of his concept being changed. The Spot was not rewritten, not beefed up, not handed new powers: he was simply taken seriously. And that shift in perspective was enough to turn an opponent people laughed at in 1985 into the most unsettling antagonist in the animated multiverse. Here is a look back at a trajectory quite unlike any other.

Jonathan Ohnn: a scientist in Kingpin's service

The character is born in the pages of Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man, with a cameo in issue 97 in late 1984 and then a full appearance in issue 98 in January 1985. He is the work of Al Milgrom and Herb Trimpe. Jonathan Ohnn is not a career criminal but a brilliant researcher, hired by Wilson Fisk for one precise job: to reproduce Cloak's dimensional powers in the laboratory, because Kingpin covets the ability to make whatever he touches disappear.

The experiment works far too well. Ohnn does indeed open a passage to another dimension, but makes the classic comics-scientist mistake: he steps into it. He comes back out with his body scattered with black spots, each one working as a portal in its own right. Kingpin, who wanted a weapon, ends up with an employee turned into a walking wormhole. This pattern of the scientist crushed by his own discovery runs through the whole of the web-slinger's world, as you can see in our complete guide to the villains.

How his spots actually work

The principle is fearsomely simple. Each spot is an opening onto an in-between dimension, and those openings are all connected. The Spot can peel one off his body, throw it at a wall, a floor, the air itself, then step through another spot and come out wherever he chooses. He can also place an opening in front of a fist thrown at him and send that fist back out into the attacker's own neck.

This mechanic produces an opponent against whom the web-slinger's usual reflexes are worth nothing. Strength does not reach him, speed does not catch him, and his spider-sense, built to anticipate a trajectory, becomes useless against an enemy who does away with the very idea of a trajectory. It is one of the hero's rare structural weaknesses, set out in our feature on the spider-sense.

Why the comics made him a joke for forty years

With a power like that, the Spot should have become a front-rank opponent. He became a punchline. The reason lies entirely in how he looks: a man in a white bodysuit dotted with black circles suggests pyjamas rather than terror, and Spider-Man has never held back from telling him so mid-fight.

There is a writing problem on top of that. For a long time Ohnn had no clear ambition, no personal tragedy, no particular relationship with the hero. He robbed banks because villains rob banks. So writers used him as comic relief between two serious arcs, whenever a visually inventive opponent was enough to fill a few pages. He ended up among the recurring second-stringers, alongside figures such as Shocker or Rhino, without ever seriously threatening anyone.

2023: the film that takes the joke seriously

The 2023 animated feature pulls off a remarkable piece of writing: instead of fixing what is ridiculous about the character, it makes that the subject. The Spot starts the story as a laughable opponent, unable to control his openings, humiliated in a corner shop, talked down to by a Miles Morales who does not even remember his name. The film lets the viewer laugh along with the hero. Then it turns that scene back on him.

Because every humiliation feeds the character's resolve. Ohnn learns to master his portals, then works out that he can travel between universes and absorb the energy of other realities' colliders to make himself stronger. His rise is no plot convenience: it is motivated, methodical, and caused directly by the contempt shown to him. The full film is analysed in our feature on Across the Spider-Verse.

The revelation that changes everything: he created Miles Morales

The film pushes the logic one notch further by establishing a causal link between villain and hero. Ohnn worked on the collider, and it was that machine that brought the spider from another reality into Miles's universe — the very one that bit him. It was then Miles's destruction of the collider that turned Ohnn into the Spot.

Each is therefore literally the cause of the other. That symmetry makes the Spot the first genuinely personal antagonist Miles has, where Kingpin or the Prowler belonged to other characters' stories. It also extends the saga's central theme, that of a destiny imposed from outside, which we explore in our explainer on canon events. To place the hero himself, his full profile and the Prowler's complete the family picture.

A power more dangerous than brute force

Most of the web-slinger's opponents threaten his body. The Spot threatens the coherence of the world. An enemy who hits hard can be dodged, tied up, worn down; an enemy who decides where space begins and ends offers nothing to grab hold of. He does not need to win a fight: he only needs to open a breach in the right place.

That is what places him in a category of his own within the roster, that of conceptual rather than physical threats — the neighbourhood of Morlun or the Inheritors, of whom Karn is the most ambivalent figure. The difference comes down to his origin: where those predators come from a mythology outside the story, the Spot is an industrial accident, produced by a human company — the one we describe in our article on Alchemax.

The challenge of animating a character made of empty space

The character's success owes a great deal to a graphic gamble. The Spot is not drawn as a man wearing a spotted costume, but as a white silhouette punched through with holes that are genuinely empty. His spots are not painted onto him: they cut through the image, and you can see straight through them.

The film pushes the idea as far as changing his line style as he grows in power. The character starts out in simple, almost childlike flat colour, then drifts towards an increasingly abstract inked rendering, until he becomes a shape you can barely read. Few antagonists have their threat level written directly into the animation technique. That formal virtuosity is the very thing that had already made the reputation of the saga's first film. The posters and the figurines in the shop draw heavily on that art direction.

How do you beat an opponent like that?

The question is still open, and that is precisely what makes the character interesting in narrative terms. The three usual answers to a villain of this calibre do not work here. Hitting him means reaching him, yet he moves the point of impact. Locking him up means a closed room, yet no room is closed to him. Outrunning him means a trajectory, yet he takes none.

That leaves two avenues, and the film hints at both without developing either. The first is technical: his openings are physical objects he can lose, have torn off, or see turned against him, which suggests a victory by manipulation rather than by combat. The second is psychological, and probably the real one: a character whose whole power comes from a wound to his pride can be disarmed by the very thing he was denied at the start, namely some form of recognition. This logic of the villain you defuse rather than knock down runs through the best web-slinger stories, starting with those devoted to Doctor Octopus.

What his case reveals about second-tier villains

The Spot's promotion is not an isolated accident. Cinema has got into the habit of digging characters judged minor out of the archives and giving them the depth the comics never did. Vulture, long reduced to an old man in a green suit, became an antagonist of social class; Mysterio, a fairground illusionist, turned into a thoroughly contemporary manipulator of images.

What these successes have in common comes down to one simple observation: the visual concept of these characters was already excellent, it was the writing that was thin. A man covered in portals is a remarkable idea as early as 1985; all that was missing was a reason to use it. As soon as a writer gave him a credible motive, the power stopped being a gimmick and became a threat.

This suggests the pool of usable villains is far larger than people think, and that the Spider-Man roster still holds several dormant Spots. It is also a lesson for readers: a character treated as a joke for decades is not necessarily a failure, sometimes he is merely badly served. The full panorama of that rogues gallery is in our analysis of the most powerful enemies, where the established hierarchy now deserves revising.

What the character still has to prove

The arc is not finished. The Spot leaves the second film at the height of his power, without ever being faced head-on, which leaves open the question of how much harm he can really do. The theories doing the rounds, and the other possible threats in the final instalment, are collected in our analysis of the villain in Beyond the Spider-Verse.

On the comics side, the opposite movement has begun: recent releases treat the character with a new seriousness, as though making up for forty years of mockery. It is one of the rare occasions where an adaptation imposes its reading on the source material rather than the other way round. The multiverse panorama helps place that shift within the saga as a whole.

Why he works so well with audiences

The Spot is a character of resentment, and that is what makes him contemporary. He wants neither money, nor power, nor domination: he wants to be acknowledged by the one person who did not see him. His engine is humiliation, his claim is to exist in someone else's eyes. Few super-hero villains state a motivation so unheroic and so immediately understandable.

There is also a form of narrative justice that audiences have relished: the character people had laughed at since 1985 takes his revenge, in fiction, on those who laughed. That tilt from the ridiculous to the tragic is the best argument in the Spot's favour, and explains why his costume and his mask have become safe bets at conventions, alongside t-shirts bearing the multiverse's characters. The other fancy-dress options are reviewed in our guide to villain cosplay.

A workplace accident turned super-villain

One detail often goes unnoticed and yet holds the key to the character: Jonathan Ohnn never chose to become a criminal. He was an employee. He was carrying out an order, in a laboratory funded by an employer who knew the risks perfectly well and kept them from him. His transformation is not a mythological curse or a pact entered into with open eyes, it is an industrial accident nobody has ever answered for.

That origin puts him closer to Doctor Octopus or Sandman than to the roster's demonic figures, and it gives his resentment a foundation writers took forty years to use. A man damaged by a company, never compensated, never acknowledged, then mocked by the hero supposed to protect the innocent: the anger that follows is in no way irrational.

That may be what explains the affection audiences feel for him. Where many villains want to conquer or destroy, this one simply asks to be granted that he existed before he became a monster. The theme is a constant with the web-slinger, whose best opponents are almost always victims of a system the hero himself never really fights.

Frequently asked questions about the Spot

Does the Spot really exist in the comics?

Yes, since January 1985. He appears in Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man issue 98, after a cameo in issue 97, written by Al Milgrom and drawn by Herb Trimpe. The film did not invent the character, it changed the way we look at him.

Is he more powerful than Venom or the Green Goblin?

A direct comparison makes little sense: he plays on a different register. Venom wins hand to hand, the Green Goblin strikes at the people around the hero. The Spot acts on space itself, which makes him theoretically more dangerous on a large scale and far less effective in a conventional fight.

Why does he hold a grudge against Miles Morales in particular?

Because it was Miles who destroyed the collider whose explosion transformed him, and because he was treated as a negligible opponent at their first meeting. In his eyes, he lost everything because of someone who could not even remember his name.

Do his spots have a limit?

They have two. First, he has to know where he is sending whatever he passes through, or he loses himself in the in-between dimension — which is what makes his early appearances so clumsy. Second, his openings are detachable objects: once separated from him, they can be picked up, moved, even used by someone else.

Why has his appearance changed so much between the comics and the film?

In the comics he wears a white bodysuit printed with black circles, which explains a good deal of the mockery. The film drops the costume idea altogether: the spots become real holes in the image, and the character no longer has a face or a stable outline. The concept is identical, the execution shifts register completely.

Do you need to have read the comics to understand the character on screen?

No, the film stands entirely on its own and rewrites his origin around the collider. Knowing the comics version only adds a layer of pleasure: you then get the measure of the promotion handed to a villain long considered minor.