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The Spider Clock · 1962–2026

One Thread, Sixty-Four Years

Fifty-five chapters of Spider-Man on a web where one turn is a decade. The thread is a single line for fifty years — then, after 2011, it splits and never comes back together.

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This is a timeline that refused to be a line. Sixty-four years of Spider-Man — from Amazing Fantasy #15 in August 1962 to the issue on sale this month — are laid out on an orb web whose capture spiral makes one complete turn every ten years. Time runs outward from the hub, so a chapter's angle is its year-within-the-decade and its distance from the centre is how long ago it was. The consequence is the whole point of the shape: every year ending in the same digit lands on the same spoke, and the story's habits stack up in a column. The fifty-five chapters are beads hanging on the thread, sized by how hard each one pulled the web, and the thread itself is coloured by whoever was wearing the mask. It is a single unbroken line for fifty years — two brief interruptions aside — and then, from 2011, it splits into several threads that never rejoin.

How it was made

The data

Fifty-five chapters across ten parts, each pinned to its publication month — the month the issue went on sale, not the date inside the story, since nobody in the comic has aged sixty-four years. Where a chapter is a season rather than a moment (Secret Wars, the Clone Saga, Spider-Verse) it carries a start and an end and is drawn as an arc. Three hand-built layers sit on top: who wore the mask and when (Peter Parker, Ben Reilly, Otto Octavius, Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, and everyone else after Spider-Verse), eight snapped strands for the deaths the story could not hold, and a 1–5 tremor score per chapter — the one openly subjective number in the piece, and the one worth arguing about.

Built with

  • SVG
  • JavaScript
  • Wave physics
  • Canvas

The web is generated rather than drawn: an Archimedean spiral in polar coordinates, sampled adaptively so the sample spacing stays constant in pixels however far out you are, then given the scalloped sag that a real orb web has between its radials — scaled by radius, or the inner turns come out as a squiggle instead of a web. Hovering a bead fires a travelling wave packet from that point: every vertex on every thread is displaced along the vector away from the pluck by a damped sine inside a gaussian envelope that moves outward at a fixed speed, and the beads and the snapped strands ride the same displacement, because they are attached to it. Crowded chapters are separated by a relaxation pass that may only push a bead along its own radial — so a bead can move away from its neighbours but never away from its own moment in time — and each one keeps a short tether back to its true position on the thread. The whole piece runs from a single file with no libraries and no build step.

Problems, and how I solved them

  1. The problemA spiral timeline can only be read if the reader knows where in the turn they are, and a plain spiral gives them nothing to hold on to.

    The fixThe revolution was fixed at exactly ten years and the twenty radial threads were spaced at half-year intervals, so every spoke means a fixed year-digit — the same digit on every turn. The decade numbers run up the twelve-o'clock spoke like the numbers on a clock face, except they go outward instead of round.

  2. The problemFour chapters share a single issue — Amazing Fantasy #15 — and several others fall within weeks of each other, so the beads landed on top of one another near the hub where there is least room.

    The fixA relaxation pass pushes overlapping beads apart along their own radial only, clamped so nothing can be shoved into the hub, and each bead keeps a visible tether back to its true point on the thread. The four origin chapters end up hanging together on one long strand, which is the honest picture of them.

  3. The problemColouring the main thread by who wore the mask made the whole web read as a set of red rings — a chart of one colour, and not a web at all.

    The fixPeter Parker's fifty years were given the web's own colour, so he simply is the thread. The only coloured interruptions in the main line are the year Ben Reilly wore the suit and the year Otto Octavius did, and the extra threads that appear alongside from 2011. The split is visible from across the room.

  4. The problemThe reading order of the ten parts is not the publication order — the wedding is written after the burial it precedes, and Miles Morales arrives in 2011 but is told in Part Nine.

    The fixBeads are placed by date, never by chapter number, and a toggle draws the chords from each chapter to the next. The chords that run backwards in time are drawn in a different colour, so the places where the telling doubles back are a visible layer rather than a hidden fudge.

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