Miles Morales returns in Astonishing Miles Morales: Spider-Man — The Art of Thwip #1 with all the charm, chaos, and heart that make his stories stand apart. Writer Cody Ziglar, alongside artists Alessandro Miracolo and Ig Guara, delivers a fast, funny, and emotionally grounded adventure that balances street-level comedy with Miles’ deeper fears about family, identity, and responsibility. It’s a fresh, energetic jumping-on point that proves Spider-Man stories still have plenty of thwip left in them.
Bushwick Villains and a Very Unlucky Art Gallery
The issue opens in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where two broke young wannabe-villains named Ed (Bumbler) and his cousin Dana (Vespa) are scheming over instant noodles. They can’t pay their bills, they’re too new at villainy to pull off anything serious, and they need cash fast. Ed has what he calls a surefire plan — steal something from a place “guaranteed not to blow up in our face.” His cousin eyes an ad for a local Brooklyn Sculpture Exhibition, and Ed promises Spider-Man will never think to look there. Meanwhile, across town, Miles Morales is tagging along with his best friend Ganke and Miles’s dad Jeff, who’s just taken a new job at the F.E.A.S.T. Center working with the unhoused. Jeff drops the boys off at the very same Brooklyn sculpture exhibition for a school assignment before heading off to volunteer — the collision course is already set before either side even knows it.
Inside the exhibition, Miles and Ganke wander through the beautiful, gold-toned sculptures by a local Brooklyn artist. They chat casually — Miles giving Ganke a breezy update on hero life (“other than the occasional bruise or broken bone, I can’t really complain”) — when Miles bumps into a tall, familiar-looking kid in the hallway. He can’t quite place the voice or face. Then it clicks all at once: “Dios mio, it’s Bumbler and Vespa!” — the bee-themed villain duo he’s fought before. Ganke, completely unfazed, just asks if these are “those bee dudes you were telling me about.” Miles, already slipping toward a back room to suit up, has a feeling this is about to get messy.
The Honey Bomb Incident
Spider-Man swings in just as Bumbler and Vespa suit up in their yellow-and-black bee costumes, complete with insect wings, honey guns, and — naturally — a bee bomb. The fight is immediately hilarious. Bumbler is enormous in his suit, Vespa is nimble and loud, and between the two of them they have the tactical discipline of a fender bender. Miles swings circles around them, delivering rapid-fire trash talk as he dodges: “Because your aim is trash! I got this!” Vespa shoots honey all over the gallery — the elderly curator running alongside Miles begging him to be careful of the priceless artwork — and then Bumbler drops a bee bomb directly at Miles’s feet. BLOO M! The explosion showers the entire building in sticky golden honey. Miles, Ganke, the curator, and half the gallery are immediately drenched. “I got honey in places I didn’t know I could get honey in,” Ganke announces from somewhere in the mess.
The fight spills outside as Bumbler and Vespa grab the giant oak sculpture and attempt to fly off with it, only to discover it weighs a ton because the artist exclusively works in oak (“Did you not read the brochure, bro?”). Miles pursues, and after a chaotic rooftop scuffle — including Vespa pelting Miles with an RP-bee homemade launcher, knocking him flat — the pair actually think they’ve won. “Wait… did we… beat Spider-Man?!” They stand over a groaning Miles, genuinely shocked. Then Miles, flat on the ground, activates his Venom Blast — KAAA-BOOM — and blows every one of the Doombots — er, bee-bots — apart, scattering Bumbler and Vespa and retrieving the sculpture as it crashes to the ground in shattered gold pieces.
Honey, Webs, and a Job Offer
With the sculpture in ruins and Bumbler and Vespa cornered, Miles lays down the deal: they’re going to fix what they broke, or he’s going to find out what “making me mad does.” Bumbler and Vespa, completely out of options and pointing out that Vespa actually minored in clay at Empire State Extension, agree to help. What follows is genuinely one of the funniest sequences in recent Marvel comics: Miles, Bumbler, and Vespa — Spider-Man and two bee-suited villains — crouching together in the street, slapping chunks of golden honey and web fluid back onto the sculpture pieces in a makeshift kintsugi repair job. It actually works. The old curator stares at the cracked-but-glued-together sculpture and mutters, “I’ve never seen kintsugi of this kind before… who did this?” He’s half-horrified, half-fascinated, and before long he’s offering Bumbler and Vespa actual jobs repairing pieces in the gallery — just so long as they never steal from him again.
Miles drops the ultimatum — “You steal from me again, and ain’t no amount of web or honey gonna be able to put yous two back together.” They gulp and agree. Miles swings off, Ganke reminds him this whole trip was a school assignment for Mr. Akpolo’s art class, and Miles laughs it off — until Ganke informs him he’s writing the entire thing up in his paper anyway. “I’ll let you use half of my paper, but you’re buying me beef patties on the way home.” Deal. It’s the kind of warm, neighborhood-level storytelling that makes Miles Morales the best Spider-Man for stories about New York actually feeling like New York.
Rooftop Heart-to-Heart — The Weight of Legacy
One week later, labeled “Brooklyn — One Week After God War,” Miles is back on a rooftop with his crew: his clone-brother Shift, his girlfriend Starling (Gust), and his found-family-brother Jaime. Everyone is finally getting a breather after the cosmic chaos of the God War event, and Miles brings up something that’s been eating at him: a mysterious “creepy water lady” told him something he can’t shake — about whether he might be capable of the same dark things as Zip Zephyr, who may be his biological father.
Miles admits he never thought much about his dad’s identity because his mom didn’t want it to define them. But if Zip Zephyr really is his father — a man who’s done genuinely terrible things — does that mean darkness lives in him too? Jaime and Starling both push back immediately. “Sure, family can define us, but it doesn’t have to.” Jaime adds quietly: “Zip did bad, but he did the right thing in the end.” Miles, still processing, thanks them — he’s clearly not used to leaning on anyone for this kind of thing, admitting in a stammering, touched way: “I don’t really have anyone else to talk to about this stuff… it’s n-n-nice.” Then Miles mentions a therapist his friend Dr. Kwan might recommend, and the conversation is interrupted instantly — because someone just crashed through the wall behind them.
Hightail’s Heist and the Final Chase
The figure who crashes into them is Hightail — a green-and-yellow speedster in a sleek outfit, dark braids flying, clearly on a job. She snatches something from a police officer (YOINK) and bolts down the street at full speed, leaving cracked pavement behind her. Miles, Shift, and Starling give chase across Brooklyn’s skyline — “we got ourselves an old-fashioned game of tag!” Hightail is genuinely fast, and the chase is a blast to watch: Shift slamming into her mid-air, Starling hurling wind blasts, Gust (as Starling has also been called) using her newly controlled wind powers with growing confidence. Hightail taunts them the whole way — calling Gust a “newbie” and Shift the “second most useless member of the Cape Killers” — until Gust snaps, unleashing a full wind burst that sends Hightail and the case she’s carrying tumbling off a building in a blur of green lightning (WHASHOOSH!).
Miles shoots a web and yanks Hightail down hard, webbing her to the pavement. The case skids open — and what spills out isn’t money at all. “It wasn’t ‘money’ I was stealing, you moron! It was MEDICINE!” Hightail screams, furious. The whole team goes quiet. Starling’s face falls. The case contains medicine, not cash — which means Hightail wasn’t just some random thief. Whatever she’s doing, there’s more to it. Miles webs her to the ground anyway — she’s still under arrest — but the scene closes with a clear signal that the situation is far more complicated than it looked. The final panel reads: TO BE CONTINUED…
