Most post-credits scenes hand you a face. This one hands you a map reference, which is a far more interesting thing to be given.
Ned's Spider-Man tracker app, the running joke of the film, is showing Spider-Man in New York the way it always does. Then it glitches. It relocates him to outer space. The icon settles over a blank area near the moon and the app keeps cheerfully repeating that Spider-Man has been found.
No character. No dialogue. A place.
Why everyone lands on Battleworld
The immediate assumption was Avengers: Doomsday, which arrives on 18 December 2026. But Doomsday is a multiverse story and there is no particular reason for it to happen in space, which is what makes the moon detail odd rather than incidental.
The reading that has stuck instead is Avengers: Secret Wars, currently the only Marvel film scheduled for 2027. Secret Wars means Doctor Doom, and it means Battleworld: a planet assembled out of pieces of other worlds and parked, in the original comic, where the heroes could be dropped onto it.
I want to be careful here. This is a reading, not a confirmation, and Marvel are perfectly capable of pointing at one thing and delivering another. But it is the reading with the fewest holes in it, and it is the one worth understanding if you collect.
What Secret Wars actually was
Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars ran across 1984 and 1985 as a twelve issue maxi-series. Marvel's heroes and villains are pulled off Earth by an entity called the Beyonder, dropped onto a constructed planet and told to fight.
It is not a subtle comic. It exists partly because Mattel wanted a toy line. It is also enormously influential, because of one thing that happens in the middle of it.
Secret Wars #8: where the black suit comes from
In Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #8, cover dated December 1984, Peter Parker's costume is damaged and he goes looking for a machine that will repair it. What he finds instead is a black sphere that flows over him and becomes a living suit.
That is ground zero for the entire symbiote line of Marvel history. Everything that follows, Venom, Carnage, every symbiote film, starts on Battleworld in that issue. Mike Zeck drew the cover, and it is one of the most recognisable images of eighties Marvel.
Here is the wrinkle that trips people up, and it is a good one.
The suit appeared before its own origin
Readers saw the black costume for the first time in Amazing Spider-Man #252, cover dated May 1984, seven months before Secret Wars #8 explained where it came from. Peter simply turns up in New York wearing it and nobody knows why.
So there are two books, and they are not competing, they are doing different jobs:
- Amazing Spider-Man #252 is the first appearance of the black suit in the main title, and the cover is a deliberate homage to Amazing Fantasy #15, drawn by Ron Frenz.
- Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #8 is the origin of the suit and the actual start of the symbiote.
Both get called "first black suit" by sellers, and both have a legitimate claim depending on what you mean. If you are buying, decide which one you actually want before you bid on either. I wrote about that Amazing Fantasy #15 homage cover and the wider question of borrowed compositions in this piece.
And then Venom
The suit turns out to be alive, Peter rejects it, and it finds Eddie Brock.
Amazing Spider-Man #299, cover dated April 1988, has the Venom cameo. Amazing Spider-Man #300, cover dated May 1988, is the full first appearance, by David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane, and it is one of the defining books of its decade.
ASM #300 is worth understanding properly if you own one, because it is the poster child for why grade matters more than rarity. It was printed in enormous numbers and there is no shortage of copies. What there is a shortage of is copies in genuinely high grade, because it has a black cover, and black covers show every handling mark, spine tick and corner blunt that a comic ever picks up.
Which is also why it is one of the few books where grading is usually worth the cost, if the copy is clean enough to justify it. Most are not. Have a proper look before you spend money finding out.
What I would do about any of this
Nothing hasty, is the honest answer.
A post-credits scene is a hint. Secret Wars is eighteen months away at the earliest and film schedules move. Buying a comic today on the strength of a glitching phone app in a stinger is speculating, and I have watched enough people speculate on film rumours to know how that usually ends.
What I would do is the boring, useful thing. If you have eighties Marvel in the house, go and look at it. Secret Wars was bought by everybody, so complete sets of the twelve issues are common and are often sitting in lofts in the UK. Amazing Spider-Man #252 and #300 are both books that ordinary collections genuinely contain. None of them are rare. Some of them, in the right condition, are worth a proper amount of money.
Knowing which is which is free. Send me photos of the covers and the spines and I will tell you honestly what you have, including when the answer is that it is a nice comic and not much more than that.