THE THOUSAND

 

THE THOUSAND

Real Name: Carl King

First Appearance: Spider-Man’s Tangled Web (Vol. 1) #1, June 2001

Powers: Originally a baseline human with no superhuman powers, Carl King was a teenage boy who stole and ate the irradiated spider which gave Peter Parker his powers as Spider-Man. As a result, his body mutated into a hive-mind of one thousand spiders of various size and apparent genus.

The spiders can kill and liquefy the inner organs and structure of another human being in under a minute. While their insides are destroyed and slowly digested, the victim's skin remains intact. Carl therefore functions as a body-jumper, able to emerge from his current skin, kill a new victim, and then enter their skin to inhabit it from that point onward. The Thousand spiders can organize themselves inside a skin so that they look and move just like a normal person would, with no outward signs of their presence. When they aren't hiding, however, the spiders can move and twist the skin in inhuman ways, such as spinning the neck all the way around or contorting due to their lack of bones. Carl reportedly killed at least twelve people a year this way, meaning a "skin" could last at least a month. Whether it was necessary to repeatedly jump bodies is unknown.

The Thousand demonstrated a superhuman level of strength and agility, equivalent to Spider-Man or higher, as well as wall-crawling abilities conducted through the skin. The teeth of the "skin" could deliver a paralyzing bite to incapacitate his victim, making consuming them from the inside easier to accomplish. The Thousand seemed to communicate telepathically when not in a "skin", or at least not with any clear mouth or voice to express themselves. They also did not trigger Spider-Man's spider sense.