Remember when Spider-Man had to use his webs to keep people and the whole world from literally falling apart, in the end using Reed Richards to do it? (2025)

For context, here's the summary from the marvel website

THE SPIDER TRAPPED IN A WEB OF HIS OWN MAKING! After reading from the ancient Darkhold, Spider-Man was meant to gain the power to enter the dread Chthon's dimension and stop him from spreading his mythic darkness across the globe. Instead the book drove him insane – but what does that mean for the stalwart Peter Parker? Dive into a warped world of Spider-Man's broken mind!

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Tathanen said:

So is the implication that... the world WASN'T falling apart? He was just going crazy? Did he web up some random guy's face?

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You'd hope not. Maybe things were partially broken but he also couldn't fix it? Like, for all we humor Spider-Man for being a bad-ass if any of the high-level Avengers ever got serious with him that'd be it. So I dunno why he'd be allowed to just travel around NYC doing whatever.

Tathanen said:

So is the implication that... the world WASN'T falling apart? He was just going crazy? Did he web up some random guy's face?

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Oh no, the world was falling apart because of Cthon using the Darkhold to conjure up the Unraveling virus. It's just that Peter, from Earth-76340 went completely mad because of it since it was his world and universe that got hit with it. He ultimately killed Reed, whom he combined with his own webbing, because he was also falling apart in the end. So that universe ended.

The 616 Spider-Man meanwhile, because he read only a very small part of the Darkhold, experienced those memories, twisting him for a while as well.

Vash said:

Oh no, the world was falling apart because of Cthon using the Darkhold to conjure up the Unraveling virus. It's just that Peter, from Earth-76340 went completely mad because of it since it was his world and universe that got hit with it. He ultimately killed Reed, whom he combined with his own webbing, because he was also falling apart in the end. So that universe ended.

The 616 Spider-Man meanwhile, because he read only a very small part of the Darkhold, experienced those memories, twisting him for a while as well.

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So that panel towards the end is Spidey injecting Reed with the virus? Is he doing it as part of some Hail Mary attempt to save the day (which ultimately failed), or because he read too much of the scary book and now he's on Team Cthon?

RiOrius said:

So that panel towards the end is Spidey injecting Reed with the virus? Is he doing it as part of some Hail Mary attempt to save the day (which ultimately failed), or because he read too much of the scary book and now he's on Team Cthon?

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Oh, that Spider-Man didn't read the book. His universe was affected by Cthon and the book though. Even his mind was being warped by it because of the stress in his life and his wife Gwen Stacy who died waiting for him to come home. That made him snap completely and deciding to use Reed, with Reed being stretched so thin and tortured that he kept asking Peter to kill him. Using Reed as the webbing to hold people and New York together worked though, for a while.

There was also no cure for it, it's a magical virus.

Before that, he used the Venom symbiote but it wasn't strong enough because it didn't have a host anymore. Brock fell apart inside the symbiote when Peter found it.