Kevin Smith Turns The Manosphere Into A Marvel Villain Team, Continuing A Career Pattern

Kevin Smith’s “Spider-Man/Hulk: Fire and Brimstone” #1 introduces a new all-male supervillain group called the Manosphere, led by Mole Man and stocked with C-listers including Stilt-Man and Sandman. Spider-Man narrates the issue as the team causes chaos across the Marvel Universe, with the loaded term doing exactly the work it’s designed to do: taking a real online subculture and turning it into a punchline villain roster for a Big Two superhero book.

Smith didn’t need to reach for a manosphere-branded villain team to fill out a Spider-Man/Hulk crossover. Marvel has decades of forgettable henchmen sitting in a filing cabinet waiting to be used. The choice to name the group after a specific, politically loaded internet culture is a decision, not a coincidence, and it fits a pattern Smith has run for years: importing whatever cultural hot button is nearby into a mainstream superhero book, then leaning on the shock value to generate buzz.

This is not new territory for him. Smith’s 2009 “Batman: The Widening Gyre” had a fifteen-year-old girl leave an infant with Daredevil, claiming a virgin birth and insisting the child was either the Messiah or the Antichrist. His run on “Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do” opened with Black Cat’s sexual assault as the inciting incident for the entire miniseries, then took four years between issues to finish telling that story, a gap long enough that readers had largely moved on by the time it wrapped. His “Daredevil” work on “Guardian Devil” gave Karen Page an HIV diagnosis that escalated to full AIDS as a plot twist, then reversed it entirely by revealing she was never sick in the first place, treating a real disease as a cliffhanger gimmick rather than a story worth telling honestly.

Add to that his reputation for simply not finishing what he starts. “Daredevil/Bullseye: The Target” shipped one issue of a planned four-issue run in 2002 and never continued. “The Widening Gyre” was billed as the first half of a longer story with a sequel that never materialized. Smith has openly admitted his lateness made him close to unwelcome in the industry before his Batman work gave him a second chance. A writer with that track record reaching for a culture-war villain name in 2026 isn’t taking a creative risk. It’s a reliable play from a well-worn deck.

Smith is about to become one of the most visible writers in the entire Marvel line. “Star Wars/Marvel: Hope Assembles,” his five-issue crossover with artist David Marquez, launches in January 2027 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of “A New Hope,” bringing Luke Skywalker, Leia, Han Solo, and Chewbacca into Earth-616 alongside the Avengers and Spider-Man, while Darth Vader and the Galactic Empire team up with Doctor Doom, Ultron, and Thanos. It is a genuine marquee event for Marvel and Lucasfilm both, positioned as a fiftieth-anniversary centerpiece, and it puts Smith in charge of one of the most anticipated superhero-meets-Star Wars stories ever published.

Fans hoping “Fire and Brimstone” was an isolated stumble should look at the twenty-plus years of pattern behind it. Smith has consistently used shock elements, whether it’s a fake virgin birth, a hero’s sexual assault backstory, a disease used as a plot twist, or now a named internet subculture turned into cannon fodder, as a substitute for stories that hold together without the gimmick. There’s no reason to expect “Hope Assembles” will play it straight when the writer has spent two decades reaching for the same trick.

Does Marvel actually vet what Smith puts in these scripts, or is his name alone enough to get a green light regardless of what he does with it?

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