Every character in
Brand New Day

I have lost count of the number of times a film has come out and someone has messaged me a photo of a box in a loft asking whether they are sitting on something. It is one of my favourite parts of this job, and it is also where most people find out that the comic they were told was valuable is a reprint from 1994.

So with Spider-Man: Brand New Day doing the numbers it is doing, let me do the useful version of the film cash-in article. Not a review. A list of every significant character in that film, the exact comic they first appeared in, and an honest note on whether that book is something a normal person might actually own.

Every issue number below has been checked. I am not writing these from memory, because memory is exactly how wrong first appearances end up repeated across the internet forever.

First, the scale of this thing

It is worth understanding why this film matters to the comic market more than most.

Brand New Day opened on 31 July 2026 and took 360 million dollars domestically in its opening weekend, beating the record Avengers: Endgame had held. Add the international take of 573 million and the worldwide opening came to roughly 927 million dollars. Inside seven days it had passed 1.15 billion and become the highest grossing film of the year. It also set a new record for the biggest single Tuesday at the domestic box office, ahead of No Way Home. Critics gave it around 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and audiences gave it an A on CinemaScore.

Destin Daniel Cretton directed. The reason the character list is worth writing about is that this is not a two villain film. It pulls in a street level vigilante, an Avenger, a mutant, a Black Widow, two Spider-Man villains from opposite ends of his history, and a government agency that most people watching will not realise has its own comic.

The Punisher: Amazing Spider-Man #129

Jon Bernthal is back as Frank Castle, and in this one he is hunting Tombstone over the murder of a deputy district attorney he served with in the Marines. There is a running gag about Spider-Man having saved him on Staten Island, which is a nice nod to how these two have always worked in the comics: not enemies, not friends, two men who disagree fundamentally about what to do once you have caught someone.

The Punisher first appeared in Amazing Spider-Man #129, cover dated February 1974. Written by Gerry Conway with interiors by Ross Andru and that unmistakable John Romita Sr cover. He was created as a one-off antagonist for Spider-Man and was never meant to carry anything.

This is a genuine Bronze Age key and one of the most consistently sought after books of the era. It is not a cheap comic in any grade that would make you happy, but it is also not out of reach the way the early Silver Age stuff is, and it turns up in UK collections more often than people expect because 1974 is well inside the window when British readers were buying American books off the spinner racks.

If you have a copy

Check the price box. Copies distributed in the UK sometimes carry a pence price rather than the 25 cent US price, and pence copies of key Bronze Age books are their own collecting category. I have written about the newsstand and edition question in more detail here, and it is worth two minutes of your time before you sell anything from this period.

Tombstone: Web of Spider-Man #36

Marvin Jones III plays Lonnie Lincoln, a crime boss with skin like armour, and the film gives him a proper rooftop set piece where he gets the better of Spider-Man before it turns.

Tombstone first appeared in Web of Spider-Man #36, cover dated March 1988, created by Gerry Conway and Alex Saviuk. Conway again, fourteen years after he made the Punisher.

This is the one on the list I would actually go looking for. Web of Spider-Man is not a title people treated preciously. It was a third Spider-Man book in a period when there were a lot of Spider-Man books, and copies were read, folded and stuffed in boxes. It is affordable, it is a real first appearance, and it is exactly the kind of book that sits unnoticed in a run somebody bought as a job lot.

The Scorpion: Amazing Spider-Man #20, and the trap in it

Michael Mando returns as Mac Gargan, a thread the MCU left dangling since Homecoming.

Here is where people get it wrong, and it costs them money in both directions. Mac Gargan the man first appears in Amazing Spider-Man #19, cover dated December 1964, as a private investigator hired by J. Jonah Jameson. The Scorpion first appears in Amazing Spider-Man #20, cover dated January 1965, where Jameson pays Farley Stillwell to turn Gargan into something that can beat Spider-Man.

Both are Ditko era Amazing Spider-Man, both are proper Silver Age, and neither is cheap. #20 carries the costumed first appearance and the origin, which is usually the one the market cares about.

The Hulk: Incredible Hulk #1

Mark Ruffalo turns up as Bruce Banner when Peter's powers start changing in ways he cannot control. Without spoiling the shape of it, the marketing rather oversold how much Hulk is in this film. There is one fight, Peter talks him down, and Banner is out of the picture after that.

Incredible Hulk #1, 1962, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. It introduces Banner, the Hulk, General Thunderbolt Ross and Betty Ross all in one go.

A detail worth knowing if anyone ever hands you one: the Hulk is grey in issue #1. He turns green from issue #2 onwards, because the grey was not printing consistently. It is a genuinely useful authentication tell as well as a nice bit of history.

Realistically this is a museum piece rather than a shopping list item. If one comes out of a house clearance I want to hear about it, but I am not going to pretend it is a book you go hunting for. The Hulk key that people genuinely do find, and the one I get asked about most, is Incredible Hulk #181.

Jean Grey: X-Men #1

Sadie Sink is Jean Grey, and for a good chunk of the film she is positioned as the villain, possessing people and using them to attack Department of Damage Control facilities. It is the MCU putting a mutant into a Spider-Man film and using her to open the door to the X-Men.

Jean Grey first appears as Marvel Girl in X-Men #1, cover dated September 1963, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. She was the original team's only woman and, for a long stretch of the sixties, its least interesting member. What happens to her later is one of the great turnarounds in the medium.

This one deserves more than a paragraph, and the Phoenix side of it is where the actual collecting story is, so I have given it its own piece here.

Yelena Belova: Inhumans #5

Florence Pugh's Yelena crosses paths with Spider-Man for the first time in the MCU.

Her first appearance is a small oddity and collectors love it for exactly that reason. Yelena Belova first appears in Inhumans volume 2 #5, cover dated March 1999, by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee. It is a brief scene in a book that has nothing to do with her.

The reason is publishing schedules. She was created by Devin Grayson and J.G. Jones for their Black Widow series, and the Inhumans issue simply came out first. So the character was designed for one book and technically debuted in another, which is why the Inhumans issue is the one that gets chased.

It is a 1999 comic, which means it was printed in numbers and there is no shortage of it. That makes it one of the few genuinely attainable first appearances on this list.

Damage Control: Marvel Age Annual #4

Tramell Tillman plays Bill Metzger, who runs the Department of Damage Control, and the DODC is central to the plot rather than background dressing.

This is my favourite entry on the list, because almost everyone gets it wrong. Damage Control is regularly listed as first appearing in Marvel Comics Presents #19 from 1989. That is not the first appearance. It is the second.

Damage Control actually debuts in Marvel Age Annual #4, cover dated June 1988, in a five page story called The Sales Pitch, created by Dwayne McDuffie and Ernie Colon.

McDuffie is a name worth knowing more broadly. Damage Control was his idea of what a superhero universe looks like from the point of view of the people who have to clear up afterwards, and it is one of the smartest concepts Marvel has ever run with.

Ned Leeds: Amazing Spider-Man #18

Jacob Batalon is back for his fourth outing, and the MCU's Ned shares a name with a real and slightly tragic comic character.

Ned Leeds appears in Amazing Spider-Man #18, cover dated November 1964, as an unnamed Daily Bugle employee, and is properly named in the following issue. In the comics he is a Bugle reporter who marries Betty Brant and later gets tangled up in the Hobgoblin storyline that starts in Amazing Spider-Man #238, cover dated March 1983.

Worth flagging that #238 is a book with a well known condition trap: it was polybagged with a cardboard tattoo, and whether that tattoo is still present makes a real difference to what a copy is worth.

What Brand New Day actually is in the comics

Here is the part the film's title is quietly referencing, and it is the most controversial thing Marvel has done to Spider-Man in my lifetime.

In 2007 Marvel ran a story called One More Day. It starts in Amazing Spider-Man #544, continues through Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #24 and Sensational Spider-Man volume 2 #41, and finishes in Amazing Spider-Man #545. Aunt May is dying. Peter cannot save her. So he makes a deal with Mephisto, and the price is his marriage to Mary Jane. The marriage is erased from existence, and with it his public unmasking, so the world forgets Peter Parker is Spider-Man.

Readers were, to put it politely, unimpressed. Twenty years of character development traded away, and traded to the devil, in order to reset a status quo the editors had decided was inconvenient.

Amazing Spider-Man #546, cover dated January 2008, is what comes next. That is Brand New Day, and it gave the character a genuinely fresh start: three writers rotating, a faster schedule, a new supporting cast and a set of new villains. The Brand New Day banner ran on issues #546 to #564, and the era it started is generally taken to run all the way to #647.

#546 is a key issue in its own right. It carries the first full appearance of Mister Negative, the crime boss with the inverted colour scheme who has since turned up in games and animation. His technical first appearance is a cameo in the Free Comic Book Day 2007 Spider-Man giveaway, a story called Swing Shift by Dan Slott and Phil Jimenez. So there are two books to know about, one of which was given away free and thrown away by the thousand.

What I would actually go looking for

If you are going through a collection this week with the film in mind, this is the honest ranking.

And the thing I always say when a film comes out, because it stays true: a film bump is a spike, not a floor. Prices move on release, they move again if the character gets a sequel, and a lot of them settle back somewhere near where they started. The books that hold are the ones that were already good books before anyone made a film about them.

If you have found something on this list in a box at home and you want to know what it actually is rather than what a listing title says it is, send me a photo. I do not charge for a look, and I would rather tell you it is a reprint for free than have you find out the expensive way.

Get an honest valuation