Spider-Man Mirai
This is from a story idea that occurred to me a few years ago, but I've begun refining it. The "Mirai" in Spider-Man Mirai is the Japanese word for "future." This is going to be a story about the legacy of Spider-Man set fifteen years into the future. It diverges from the end of the Clone Saga in the mid-1990s Spider-Man titles, with an alternate conclusion that leads into the beginning of Spider-Man Mirai's story.
Background: Two years before the conclusion of the Clone Saga, Janine Godbe became pregnant with the child of Ben Reilly, the clone of Peter Parker. When Parker's scarred doppelganger Kaine returned to inflict more suffering on Reilly, believing him to be the real Parker, Janine and the child were seemingly lost. However, Reilly did not know that Janine was pregnant and Janine never told him about the child even during their brief reunion two years later, having given the baby boy up for adoption. When Reilly died to protect Parker from the returned Norman Osborn, alias the sociopathic Green Goblin, he died without ever becoming aware of his child's existence. Simultaneously, Parker's wife Mary Jane Watson died giving birth to a supposedly stillborn baby daughter. Shattered by these tragedies, Parker put away his Spider-Man costume for good.
Story: 15 years later, the child of Ben Reilly has grown up to be Adrian Knight, a high school student who finds himself highly questioning of authority. He has attempted to use the school newspaper as a platform for "sparking the critical thinking skills of the student body (as he refers to it)," but his creative stifling by the school principal led him to quit the paper in disgust and start an underground online paper. In addition, he is notorious for getting into fights with the local "tough guys," who unbeknownst to him are part of the street gang known as the Goblins, who have modeled themselves after the goblin-themed villains in Peter Parker's rogues gallery. One night, Adrian comes home from a cramming/makeout session with his girlfriend Pandora and finds his adoptive parents dead with the tag of the Goblins sprayed all over his house.
A grieving Adrian is placed in the care of his adoptive aunt and uncle, only to run away from them later on to attack the Goblins. He manages to fight a few of them on his lonesome, aided by sudden bursts of superhuman strength, speed, and agility as well as a tingling sense that warns him of danger. When the Goblins start showing up in greater numbers, he is forced to retreat, ending up seeking refuge at Peter Parker's home. An older, cane-sporting Peter exits the house and aids Adrian in warding off the Goblins, only to suffer complications due to his injured leg. In the process of helping Peter, Adrian finds a closet full of Spider-Man costumes --- original red and blue, black, Scarlet Spider, and Ben Reilly's red and blue --- and discovers that Peter was once Spider-Man. Realizing an opportunity to avenge his parents while minimizing the chances of reprisals, Adrian steals the black costume and Ben Reilly's web-shooters, going out as Spider-Man to take on the Goblins. To his surprise, he hears Peter's voice telling him to come back with the costume and web-shooters and also explaining that he left tracers on each of his costumes in case someone did what Adrian is doing now.
Adrian ignores Peter's warnings, only to suddenly end up struggling to move, as Peter programmed the tracer to inject a paralytic on his signal if the costume's thief refused to return it. Due to his apparently superhuman physiology, the amount of paralytic injected into him is not totally effective, allowing him some degree of mobility. However, his sluggishness results in him being beaten quite brutally and Peter suffers an attack of conscience that prompts him to program the tracer to inject Adrian with the antidote. Adrian recovers quickly and delivers a savage beating to the Goblins, unmasking their leader only to find that he is one of the same "tough guys" he fought outside of his newfound costumed identity.
Sensing the makings of a hero inside Adrian, Peter decides to train Adrian as a new Spider-Man. He commissions Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four (expanded to Fantastic Five) to make Adrian a Spider-Man costume of his own. The costume Richards designs for Adrian is a "smart stealth" liquid metal suit colored black with a crimson spider emblem, crimson bracers, crimson lenses, and crimson anklets. As a "smart stealth" costume, it can either turn invisible or morph into any type of clothing Adrian thinks of. Additionally, it's armed with web-shooters, tracers attuned to his spider-sense, audiovisual amplification, bullet-resistance, and more. To provide a cover for Adrian's crime-fighting activities, Peter gets him a job managing the computer database of the NYPD as a kind of troubleshooter.
Near-future: The stories in Spider-Man Mirai will center around Adrian's development as Spider-Man and his relationship with Peter Parker, who comes to fill a paternal role for him. Like Peter, Adrian will struggle with balancing his crime-fighting activities with his civilian responsibilities and personal life, with the crime-fighting sometimes taking precedence over his civilian responsibilities and personal life, much to the irritation of Pandora and his friends. Adrian will end up facing enemies both new and old, many of the new descended from the old as he uses his troubleshooting job to gain access to the NYPD's database in order to bring justice to those who have it coming. Future arcs involve the debut of the new Black Cat, who will strike up a short-lived romance with Adrian in both their civilian and heroic identities, and the debut of a new Green Goblin, which will lead to the return of a more familiar foe.
Alliances: Adrian will meet several other superheroes in the course of his career, such as Darkdevil, the merger of a demon known only as the Beast, the spirit of Daredevil, and the former heir to the evil mystical ninja clan known as the Hand. He will also meet the Avengers, who in this time are also known as A-Next, as well as the X-Men. Hopefully, I will be able to spin some of them off into fanfic series of their own.