Warning! Spoilers for Non-Stop Spider-Man #3 ahead!

Most drugs have their downsides—from a mean case of the munchies to psychedelic trips—but the newest designer drug to hit Spider-Man’s beat just might take the cake with a twist straight from Soylent Green.

In Non-Stop Spider-Man, Peter Parker discovers that the new drug called A-Plus on Empire State University’s campus may help stressed out students boost their grades, but it is also pushing them into an early grave. The students are mostly the children of immigrants trying to make it through the long, difficult years of academia. Their deaths and hospitalizations are what first alert fellow student Peter Parker to the dangerous drug. Horrified by what’s happening to his classmates, he takes to the streets as Spider-Man and, with the help of Threats and Menaces reporter Norah Winters, follows the trail of the drugs straight to the local dealers—the luchador-themed Zapata Brothers.

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In Non-Stop Spider-Man #3, by Joe Kelly and Chris Bachalo, Norah and Peter make a narrow escape from the Zapata Brothers (and also an oncoming subway train) only to be cornered again amongst the tight-packed buildings of New York. This time, it’s not Spidey’s fighting prowess that takes down the Zapata Brothers, but Norah Winter’s journalism as she shows the two men images of the people that A-Plus has harmed, explaining their backgrounds, and dropping a major bomb straight from the sci-fi classic Soylent Green: “Those super-smarts you’re rocking. Did your employer tell you it was a designer drug? Or were you aware it was made from dead kids?”

The drug, it seems, drains the students of their intelligence when taken, with too much of the brain-booster killing them. Simply put, this drug is made out of people. Icky ethics aside, the twist is not exactly a new one. The 1973 sci-fi film Soylent Green depicts a slightly more apocalyptic scenario, where a man discovers that the food supplements given to the starving masses is made from the dead. While Spider-Man’s new drug isn’t exactly ground up dead people, it still derives its potency from the minds of its users. The comic makes it clear A-Plus is definitely made from people. Coincidentally, DC recently released a Catwoman comic that showed Poison Ivy being kept and experimented on, with a poisonous new street drug being made from the woman herself.

It’s unsurprising that this creepy, borderline cannibalistic way of making and selling drugs comes from the twisted mind of Baron Zemo. The former HYDRA member and new Spider-Man baddie makes perfect sense as the mastermind behind a drug that specifically targets students of color just trying to make it through the academic year. The comic ends with the Zapata Brothers’ intelligence literally overwhelming their minds and engorging their brains, in a bizarre final image, and it’s certain to leave readers wondering just what exactly the benefit to this Soylent Green plan could possibly be.

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Bug Norman
(127 Articles Published)

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Bug Norman is writer, reader, and lover of popcorn television. A current ESL educator, she’s answered phones, scrubbed toilets, worked as an intern on a film set, and now writes comic news for Screen Rant. She currently travels the world teaching English, and video chats with her elderly cat, McGonagall.

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