The Major Spider-Verse Character You Missed In Spider-Man: Homecoming

"Spider-Man," so we're told, "does whatever a spider can." And for a particularly weird moment in comic book history, one of the spider-can things that he did was make out with another spider-person. Uncontrollably, and with sweaty vigor. It was a different time. Namely, 2014.

Look, there's a lot to the Spider-verse character of Cindy Moon, and the best place to start is at the beginning. Spider-Man was first introduced to the comic-reading public in the 1960s. As you may already be aware, there was an accident at a science lab. A spider was exposed to massive amounts of radiation — the comic book kind, not the depressing Chernobyl kind — and, in its dying moments, the arachnid bit a young Peter Parker, granting him the speed, stickiness, and proportional strength of a spider.

What you may not know is that the spider, before kicking the bucket eight times (you know, with each leg? ba-dum-chhh), managed to chow down on another of the students in Peter's class. The recipient of this spider bite was one Cindy Moon, and she wound up even more spidery than her more well-known classmate.

Cindy was granted the same powers as Peter, with the added bonus of an even more powerful spider-sense and the ability to produce her own webbing from her fingertips. "So why didn't Peter ever run into her?" you may well wonder. Well, it's a funny story involving dungeons — and some sneaky movie appearances you might have missed in Spider-Man: Homecoming and Avengers: Infinity War.

Seven comic book years and around 50 real-world years later, readers found themselves waist-deep in the summer event series Original Sin, in which the heroes of the Marvel Universe are exposed to energy emitted from the eye of The Watcher, the bobble-headed voyeur of superhero society. Everyone learns the kinds of terrible secrets that keep fans coming back for all 58 issues at 5 dollars a pop. Deadpool finds out that he has a daughter, Thor finds out that he has a sister, and Spider-Man gets a good, long look at Cindy Moon.

Cindy, it turns out, has been trapped in a high-tech facility for years in an attempt to keep her safe from Morlun, an extra-dimensional predator with a taste for delicious spider-person giblets. Peter makes a quick stop at her dungeon to let her out, and the two pretty instantly start to do kissing thanks to a nigh-irrepressible attraction built into their arachnid subconsciouses. It's a complex relationship, given that neither of them is really in it on an intellectual level and Peter is still living with Anna Maria, the woman with whom Otto Octavius became involved while he was occupying Peter's body during the events following Amazing Spider-Man number 700. But hey, that's dating in the big city.

Anyway, that's the long version. The short version is that Cindy Moon, aka Silk, is a kickass Asian American spider-person with a rad costume and a cool backstory.

What's more, she's already made an appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, even if you didn't notice it at the time. In both Spider-Man: Homecoming and Avengers: Infinity War, she shows up briefly, played by Best Worst Weekend Ever's Tiffany Espensen. We haven't seen her bust out the webs or go HAM on Peter Parker's mouth with her mouth, but given that the MCU is now ballooning faster than Phileas Fogg, it seems like it's only a matter of time.