While Spider-Man has become a classic Avengers member after joining forces with them on a number of missions throughout Marvel Comics history, his association with the team wasn’t always a given as he actually took quite a while to commit to the superhero squad at all. In fact, Peter Parker took so long that he wasn’t even the first Spider-Man to join the Avengers, as that honor was bestowed upon someone much more sinister.
Peter Parker aka Spider-Man first got the offer to join the Avengers in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #3 by Stan Lee, John Romita, and Don Heck. In that issue, the Avengers are considering allowing Spider-Man to join their team, so they hold a tryout for the Wall-crawler to see if he is up to the task. Unfortunately, things go sideways and Spider-Man ends up fighting all of the Avengers over a petty dispute. Basically, the tryouts couldn’t have gone more wrong. However, the Avengers still decide to give Spidey a chance, so they give him the task of finding the Hulk who they had lost track of some time before. While Spider-Man was able to locate the Hulk, he realized that Hulk was just a lost soul with the mind of a child and didn’t pose any actual threat, so he let him go and told the Avengers that joining the team wasn’t for him. However, years after that first encounter, Spider-Man would align with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes just as an alternate version of the Web-slinger had done years prior.
In Avengers #11 by Stan Lee and Don Heck, the villainous Kang the Conqueror is hatching up a scheme to dismantle the Avengers and eliminate the team once and for all. To do that, he uses his advanced futuristic technology to create a robot look-a-like of Spider-Man who he observed to be a hero with no real ties to anyone else, making him the perfect template for his Avenger-infiltration plot. Since no one knew Spider-Man’s secret identity, or really anything else about him, Kang’s trickery isn’t easily discoverable. So, Kang sent the fake Spider-Man to the Avengers’ base and had the robot ask to join the team, using the real Spider-Man’s heroic experience as the basis for that request. While the Avengers initially refuse to allow Spider-Man to join, they reluctantly bring him in as one of their own after Spider-Man reveals he knows the whereabouts of Iron Man, who had gone missing during the events of his solo title.
Even though it was preliminary, Kang’s robot Spider-Man technically joined the Avengers in this issue, which is the first time any Spider-Man, human or otherwise, had been able to call themselves an Avenger. While this may seem like a fun, and even insignificant story in regard to Spider-Man’s career with the Avengers, it could have had an impact that stretched further than even Spider-Man was aware of. In this issue, the fake Spider-Man betrayed the Avengers, earning their trust only to bring them to their impending doom. Fast forward to the events of Amazing Spider-Man Annual #3 where at least half of the Avengers are wary about allowing Spider-Man to join, perhaps because of the distrust planted in their minds by Kang.
Regardless of whether or not Kang’s ploy to destroy the Avengers by using Spider-Man’s likeness had any impact on their lasting opinion of him, the fact remains that an android version of Spider-Man was able to join the Avengers before the original–a truly unorthodox and, quite frankly, unfortunate beginning to a long-standing relationship between Spider-Man and the Avengers.
