Gwen Stacy is back. On the heels of Marvel Comics announcing that Peter Parker's long-dead girlfriend will be resurrected in the pages of a new Gwenpool comic book, Marvel's Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man series creator Jeff Trammell revealed that Gwen -- a.k.a. Spider-Woman, a.k.a. Spider-Gwen, a.k.a. Ghost-Spider, a.k.a. the Spider-Verse fan-favorite -- is joining the cast of the Disney+ series, which has already been renewed through season 3.
"Welcome to the neighborhood," Trammell announced in a social media post, along with the first look at Gwen Stacy/Ghost-Spider as she appears in Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man season 2.
It's not yet known whether this Gwen will be a transplant from another dimension like her comic counterpart, who recently permanently relocated from Earth-65 to Earth-616 in the Spider-Gwen: The Ghost-Spider comic run. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is set in an alternate timeline that branched off from the Marvel Cinematic Universe around the time of Captain America: Civil War, in which Peter Parker (voiced by Hudson Thames) was mentored by Oscorp industrialist Norman Osborn (Colman Domingo) instead of Tony Stark / Iron Man.
But the two-episode, timey-wimey season finale ended with Peter and fellow ex-Oscorp interns establishing the Harry Osborn-bankrolled Worldwide Engineering Brigade: W.E.B. for short. Although Norman has lost his Oscorp-sponsored web-slinger, it was revealed he was experimenting with genetically-altered animals, built a prototype glider, and now has a piece of alien symbiote -- setting the stage for the elder Osborn to become Spider-Man's archnemesis, the Green Goblin.
"Very early on -- I would say within the first two months of coming up with the story -- we [realized], 'We're very limited here,'" Trammell previously told ComicBook about deviating from the Sacred Timeline and branching off into an alt-MCU. "Moving it out of the Sacred Timeline gives us a bit more freedom."
"It really freed us up," he added, "but also allows us to pick and choose the moments of the MCU continuity that we do want to address, kind of built for our world."
Trammell also teased future character cameos and appearances after introducing this reality's versions of Daredevil (Charlie Cox), his sidekick Jeanne Foucault/Finesse (Anjali Kuanpaneni), Doctor Strange (Robin Atkin Downes), and classic villains including Doctor Octopus (Hugh Dancy), the Scorpion (Jonathan Medina), and the Chameleon (Roger Craig Smith). Peter's friends and classmates come from across the wider Marvel mythos, like his best friend, Nico Minoru (Grace Song) of the Runaways, crush Pearl Pangan (Cathy Ang) a.k.a. Wave, lab partner Lonnie Lincoln/Tombstone (Eugene Byrd), and fellow "friend-tern" Amadeus Cho/Brawn (Aleks Le).