Silk and the Potential of a TV Series

The news came out very recently that Sony was working to develop a television series based off the character Silk, presumably to help build out their Spider-Man universe (AKA the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters).

Quick disclaimer, a studio developing a show does not necessarily mean the show will ever come out. There is a degree to which this could just mean they are thinking about it, and having a writer pitch them ideas. So, don’t take this news as a guarantee, but a possibility.

For those of you who have never heard of Silk, you’re probably in the majority. She has only been around since June 2014 when she first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man. Since then, she has had two relatively short runs of her own solo series, but primarily exists in other comics such as The Amazing Spider-Man and, more recently, Agents of Atlas.

While Silk hasn’t been around for a long time, she is a very cool character. The short version of who she is? Silk is the hero alias of Cindy Moon, a Korean American woman with Spider-Man-like powers, trying to find her way in the world after being locked in a bunker for over a decade.

As interesting a character as Silk is, the idea of creating a solo TV series for her might have some difficulties to overcome. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, let’s look closer at who she is in the comics.

(Note: there will be major spoilers ahead for her entire run of comics)

Comic History

Remember Peter Parker’s origin? Where he was bit by a radioactive spider that gave him all his abilities? Well, he wasn’t the only one who got bit that day. Cindy Moon was there too and was bit on the ankle just before the spider died.

Cindy’s powers are very similar to Spider-Man’s (strength, agility, sticking to walls, spider sense…) except for a couple differences with her webbing. Spider-Man relies on wrist mounted web shooters he has built, whereas Cindy creates organic webbing that she shoots from her fingertips, which she can even harden into claws. Not only that, but she can create clothes with her webbing, which is how she will eventually make her superhero costume.

Unlike Peter, Cindy was more open with her family about the bite and the changes she was going through. Soon after, a man named Ezekiel Sims enters their lives. See, Ezekiel has these kinds of spider-powers too and is here to help train her to use them. But he also works with an organization known the Spider Society, who worship spider deities and totems (people with these powers).

Soon after, Ezekiel discovers a man named Morlun, who (long-story-short) is essentially part of a family of interdimensional vampires-like people whose preferred meal is feasting on the spider totems from across every universe. Ezekiel creates a bunker under his company and tells Cindy and her family that the only way to keep her from being hunted by Morlun is to hide her inside of it. Her family agrees to let Cindy go, promising to find a cure for her spider powers so that she may one day come out again.

Inside the bunker, Cindy continues her training. There reaches a point where she is able to escape, but she doesn’t. She is so afraid of what can happen to her and her family if she leaves and Morlun finds her that she doesn’t let herself go.

Thirteen years go by! Spider-Man is involved in a big event called Original Sin, where huge secrets from Marvel’s past are made known to the heroes. Spider-Man learns about Cindy and how she is locked away in a bunker and rushes to free her. He breaks her out, and she fights him for it, fearing the consequences of what he’s done.

But, hey, Spider-Man’s already defeated Morlun, and Ezekiel is dead, there is no reason for Cindy to worry. Cindy agrees to leave the bunker, but to go web-swinging with Spider-Man she is going to need a costume. The original costume she makes is simply her webs (looking like webs) covering most of her body, and she tells Spider-Man to call her Silk. The first stop she wants to make is to see her family, but they are no longer in her old home.

Presumably because they were bit by the same spider, Silk and Spider-Man have a kind of connection, in a real teen sex-comedy kind of way. Basically, when they get close to each other, they really want to get physical, and struggle to keep this at bay.

Soon after, Spider-Verse takes place. Turns out, Morlun isn’t dead. Well, he has died twice, but he’s back (clones). Every Spider-Person from every universe in existence is being hunted down by the Inheritors, and Silk is wanted more than most. There is this big prophecy that the Inheritors are trying to make happen, where if they sacrifice three particular spider totems, known as the Other, the Bride, and the Scion, then no other Spider totem will ever come to be. And what would you know, but Silk is the Bride. If her blood is shed in this ritual, they say that no other spider totem will come to be out of chance, magic, curses, or unwanted luck.

After the Inheritors are taken care of, Cindy tries to start putting her life back together. She tries looking for her family but are seeming impossible to track down. She gets a job at Fact Channel News, working under J. Jonah Jameson so she can both know when trouble is happening in New York (for Silk reasons) and use the news network resources to track down her family (for Cindy reasons). Turns out, while Jameson has always hated Spider-Man, he is pretty much Silk’s biggest fan, and tries to act as a father figure to Cindy while she’s at work (even gives her a nickname, Analogue, because she is so bad with modern technology).

Fairly recently before Silk’s arrival in the comics, Green Goblin had built an army he called the Goblin Nation. This is an underground group filled with anyone from thugs to homeless children who have been given the goblin serum. Green Goblin is gone, but Phil Urich, the Goblin King, has been leading the Goblin Nation ever since. Turns out, Cindy’s lost brother was amongst them.

Reunited with her brother Albert, Cindy is still no closer to finding her parents. So, she turns to a life of crime, working under Black Cat! Well, not really. She’s a double agent, working undercover trying to get close to Black Cat while actually taking orders from SHIELD. She’s made a deal where if she can help them take down Black Cat, they will help her find her parents.

There is a quick Spider-Women crossover between Silk, Spider-Gwen, and Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew). The three head to Spider-Gwen’s universe for brunch but end up having to take on an evil version of Cindy. This whole event helps Cindy get closer to Black Cat, because evil Cindy comes to her universe to steal powerful weapons.

Cindy and Black Cat take down the Goblin King together, and Cindy starts to have second thoughts about just how bad Black Cat is. But Black Cat discovers what Cindy is doing and turns against her. Thankfully she is saved by a silent ghost-like figure who will come to be known as Spectro. He has popped in to help her from time to time for a while, with a big mystery around his identity. Turns out, he’s the ghost of her dead ex-boyfriend, who she dated back before being put in the bunker.

Meanwhile, Cindy’s two best friends from work, Rafferty and Lola (a very cutesy couple), are helping Cindy track down any leads about her parents as well. They even find out about Cindy’s secret double life as Silk in the process. As a group, they find a portal to the Negative Zone, that they are positive Cindy’s parents are on the other side of. So, together they head on through and end up in a fantasy world where they befriend a dragon named David Wilcox (who would prefer if you do not call him Dave).

David takes Cindy to her mother, who is currently fighting as a knight, and the two of them battle an army to save her father from a castle where he is held prisoner. The whole family is finally together again and head back to New York.

Cindy feels lost now that she’s got her family back. She has everything she had been fighting for. She quits her job and the Fact Channel and considers giving up being Silk. But, after her time working undercover, she was offered a job at SHIELD, and she decides to start going to a SHIELD academy to train to be an agent.

There is a big reveal that Cindy’s father had been working with another member of the Spider Society, a woman who goes by Fang. She claimed to be trying to help them cure Cindy but was actually trying to find a means to steal the spider powers for herself. Cindy comes in and kicks some butt. She is and always will be Silk.

This is where her solo runs end. She continues to be a part of the Marvel Universe, but her main story arc is complete.

The Difficulty of Adaption

It is probably obvious from the entire first half of her history, but the biggest difficulty in adapting Silk is how interconnected her origin is with Spider-Man as a character and with multiple major events in both Spider-Man and the greater Marvel Universe.

There are two big reasons why this is a problem. First, because she was a side character in The Amazing Spider-Man, the stories she is involved in at the beginning have him as the lead role. She isn’t totally lacking in agency but is pretty close to it. Even breaking out of the bunker had nothing to do with herself, it was about Spider-Man coming to save her.

Along the same lines is the fact that Spider-Man would be an overshadowing figure for her because of how much more well known he is. Much like how the first season of CW’s Supergirl avoided having Superman be any more than an e-mail pen pal to Kara, this show would probably want to steer clear of the risk of making this show feel like it is more about Spider-Man than Silk.

Next is that with her origin being so intertwined with these big events, it makes everything more complicated to explain. Both Original Sin and Spider-Verse are essentially her origin story, and neither of them is exactly built in a way that is conducive to a solo series pilot. These two events tell us both why she was in the bunker and how she got out, arguably as formative to her character as Uncle Ben’s death is to Spider-Man.

While it is not impossible to use the basic Spider-Verse premise as an origin (just look at how amazing Into the Spider-Verse (2018) did with Miles Morales), as the first season of television series it seems like a huge climax that the rest of the series would struggle to live up to.

This carries on past her origin too. While her brother being a goblin for a while is a big deal for her, the entire storyline that creates these goblins is rooted in years of Spider-Man comics, including a whole situation where Doctor Octopus was actually Spider-Man for a long time.

Finally, there is some legal problems with a totally faithful adaptation. Sony has the right to characters within Spider-Man, but not the greater Marvel universe. Original Sin, for instance, while being how Cindy comes out of her bunker is also tied to Avengers (which Sony does not own). Sony also does not own SHIELD, or Mockingbird (Cindy’s main contact with SHIELD), so that entire storyline would need to be shifted in some way.

But, hey, that’s enough looking at the negative. An adaption does not need to be an 100% exact recreation to be good. Honestly, I’d argue it shouldn’t be 100% if it wants to be good at all. So, let’s flip this discussion.

The Possibilities in Adaptation

Cindy Moon’s story is filled with exciting possibilities that would work great in television. The entire mystery of what’s happened to her family is a driving force that could fuel a show for seasons if it so chose. After her time in a bunker she is almost a more pessimistic and angrier version of Kimmy Schmidt.

While there is no chance of everything that happened in the comics happening in the same way for a television series, there is a lot of potential to create moments that are different enough to work, while still feeling right.

Take for instance, Ezekiel, Morlun, and the bunker.  This storyline of Cindy being locked away for a decade is incredibly important to who she is as a character. It is one that has her struggling to open up to others, has her become a fish out of water in the modern world simple because she missed out on so much.

There is no reason this whole plot can’t happen without going so far as having the entire Spider-Verse event (at least not right away). Morlun can be the big bad for the first season, but simply limit the scope of what we see to her perspective. She can be the Bride, a figure that Morlun is drawn to the moment she leaves the bunker but have her somehow able to defeat him on her Earth rather than join up with every other spider totem. Basically, play up her side of it all with a much smaller scope.

There is the question of how she could get out of the bunker without Spider-Man (because, let’s face it, this show will be stronger for Silk if it can go at least a while without introducing him as a character).

Well, what if she comes out because of Morlun and Ezekiel’s deaths? Even in the comics they have both died by the point that Cindy comes out. What if Ezekiel killed Morlun but sacrificed himself in the process. Maybe Ezekiel set something up where Morlun’s death triggers the door to open, maybe the Spider Society let her out because of what has happened. There are a lot of reasons that could be found to have her leave without Spider-Man needing to be there.

Cindy Moon herself is an amazing protagonist. There is so much intrigue involved in her story, but there is also so much struggle on a personal level. After her time in the bunker, she doesn’t know her place in the world. She has problems with being in rooms with locked doors, she goes to a psychiatrist to help her deal with her anger over it all. She’s also not a pure heroic figure. When she is undercover with Black Cat, she really does struggle with which side she should be on.

And there’s not just Cindy. Silk could have a great cast of characters. Ezekiel probably wouldn’t be around very long unless the show has a lot of flashback, but what Ezekiel does for training Cindy to be Silk, Jameson does for teaching her how to be a reporter. Rafferty and Lola as her friends at work that she originally feels the need to hide her Silk secret from. They are also introduced as just coworkers with a thing for each other and Cindy helps them get together. And then there is Hector, her long lost love, who eventually turns out to be Spectro.

It's easy to imagine at least four seasons of a Silk series. If my proposed change to how she gets out of the bunker could happen, then the first season builds to Morlun coming back. She’s starting to get her life together again, searching for her family, taking on her first villain (Dragonclaw, who she thinks sounds like a Pokemon), but then Morlun returns. It is the thing she’s been made to fear since she was first put in the bunker, and she takes him on alone.

If the first season can have small nods to the Goblin King and Black Cat rising to power, the second season can be Silk’s time as a double agent. Goblin King is unquestionably the bad guy, but Black Cat’s view of there being no good and no evil starts to appeal to Cindy. While the series can’t have SHIELD and Mockingbird, it is very possible to have her working undercover a new agency, or even simply have it be the FBI.

Season three could have Cindy finally reunited with her family, struggling to figure out what to do with herself now that she seems to have everything. All the while, Fang and the Spider Society and working in the shadows with the help of Cindy’s father. By the end, Cindy has to fight to keep the powers that have been the cause of all the problems in her life.

After all this time of Cindy being built into the great hero she is, season four could be an amazing time to do Spider-Verse. Moving the full version so far into her story gives her a chance to really shine while in the presence of so many other spiders rather than just seems to be one person in the huge crowd. She can take on Morlun (again) and all the Inheritors. If it is a final season, the bookending of the series that begins with her being locked in a bunker with her finally defeating the Inheritors can be fantastic.

Conclusions

If Sony goes through with making this Silk series, it has potential to be spectacular. There will be a relatively large hurdle at the beginning when it comes to reworking her origin to be more centered on herself rather than these major Marvel events and Spider-Man. But if the show solves this problem than the rest should fall into place in a very natural way.

While I have outlined a basic concept for how this series could work, and how seasons could potentially lay out, this is only one possible answer to what this series could do. If it were to happen, it is possible that they would go a different route entirely, they could step much further away from the specifics of her comic book to tell a much more original story with this character.

In the end, Cindy Moon is a great character. The key to making a series about her is going to come down to how she brought to life more so than most of the specific plot details and how they connect to the comics.