How Super Spiders Move

The Spider-Man comics have covered a lot of styles over the years, but one thing that's of particular note is how they handle movement. The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) and Spider-Man (1990) primarily utilize speed lines following behind the action to emphasize movement which is pretty typical for comics.

 

A kick with speed lines from The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #50
 

The latter's much more realistic art style allows the emphasis on the chaos of shapes from the webs to help emphasize this. They form into nonsensical shapes and patterns that grab the eye and embody flying through the air at high speed. The chaos of these webs even manages to break beyond the panels in a few places.

Flying with knots of webs in Spider-Man (1990) #1

A more recent example of a similar style is used in the comics with Spinstress which mainly use speed lines as a backdrop for more intense scenes with a focus primarily on the posing to show movement. Here dramatic poses serve to allow the comic to capture the theatrical style seen in many Disney princess films.

 

A distinct lack of speed lines seen in Edge of Spider-Verse (2023) #2
 

Some styles do a little more, however. Spectacular Spider-Man, for instance, has spectacular use of paneling to emphasize the movement of its characters. This can be seen where they appear to break out of the panels which emphasizes their shape, as well as in how they'll have multiple panels overlap one background which shows the movement and progression of time in a scene.

 

Paneling is used for emphasis in Spectacular Spider-Man (2003) #6

Spider-Gwen takes a different, very unique style where the character of Superwoman (Gwen Stacy) will be drawn multiple times within a single panel, almost the opposite approach to splitting up the paneling. It also uses its paneling well, though instead the size is much more explicitly emphasizing the time that the given scenes are taking up.

 

Gwen Stacy swings in from the background in Edge of Spider-Verse (2014) #2

Spider-Man Noir (2020) utilizes this style with ghosting on characters as well as with it's own unique take on speed lines. The more detailed backgrounds in it allow for the backgrounds to be blurred in a form of motion lines that emulate the motion blur seen in film, which inspired the style used by the comic overall.

The movement of the car is shown in Spider-Man Noir (2020) #1

 Overall though, speed lines have been the most consistent showing up in most of the comics. Of course, if it isn't broken there's nothing to fix.

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