Comic-Con: "Spectacular Spider-Man" on Kids WB!

Marvel’s webhead returns to TV toonland this spring with “The Spectacular Spider-Man,” produced by Culver Entertainment and set to air on the Kids WB! on The CW.

Catching up with some of the show’s creators at Comic-Con, they explained that they’re going for a real classic look and feel for the show.

Producers and supervising director Victor Cook says the show will feature a Peter Parker who’s still in high school. As the series begins, he’s been Spider-Man for a short while, but has yet to face his main villains. The first season will cover the fall of Peter Parker’s junior year in high school, beginning the day before school starts and finishing at Thanksgiving.

Other elements that will set apart this animated Spider-Man from previous versions include a kind of Hong Kong movie choreography to the action sequences — though it will not be done in the style of Japanese anime.

Character designer Sean “Cheeks” Galloway says the series will have a more updated look. Some characters will change race to diversify the classic casts — for example, Ned Leeds has become Ned Lee, who is Asian.

Cook says they want the series to be defining for the character in much the same way the look Bruce Timm developed for the 1990s “Batman” animated series has for that character. Cook says, though, that doesn’t mean copying Timm’s style, it’s more about following the example to find a look that works for Spider-Man.

Josh Keaton, who will providing the voice of Spider-Man and Peter Parker, says the approach on the acting is more naturalistic and less cartoony. For example, he says he’s making no conscious effort to give Spider-Man and Peter different voices. Spidey also won’t be using the latest slang in his trademark witty banter.

The show also will have its continuity. While not as complicated as something like “Lost,” look for stories to break in three-episode arcs. Cook says that allows characters to appear for a line or two in one episode and pay off down the line.

Supervising producer Greg Weisman also says that each character will get their own arc, and he’s working on giving them each distinctive dialog in the mode of Joss Whedon’s work on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
As for the comics influence, Weisman says the big influences were early issues of Amazing Spider-Man scripted by Stan Lee and drawn by co-creator Steve Ditko and John Romita. Weisman also says he looked at the Ultimate Spider-Man series, while Cook added that the late 1980s-early 1990s work of Todd McFarlane also is in the mix.