Who actually is Kraven The Hunter, and why should we care?

When Sony’s oddball “cinematic universe” comprising the Spider-Man characters it owned the rights to that weren’t Spider-Man first kicked off a few years back, it felt like it arrived already halfway towards the bottom of the barrel. Venom, sure: The character had name recognition, a distinctive visual design, and, against all odds, the utter commitment of a top-tier actor working to bring it all to life. But when your second offering is Jared Leto’s Morbius, and then you follow it with Madame Web, you’re not exactly distancing yourself from allegations that an entire billion-dollar franchise project is little more than an exercise in ridiculous futility. Enter Kraven The Hunter.

Played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the Russian big game hunter has always been a bit of a contradiction for fans of Spider-Man comics. On the one hand, the lion-vested Kraven only manages to not be the most ridiculously dressed member of Spidey’s rogues’ gallery by dint of that being a very competitive sort of anti-fashion show—looking at you, Shocker. And Mysterio. And…look, it’s a long line of tragic costume choices pretty much from the jump. On the other hand, Kraven’s big, signature story arcs have been so impactful that he managed the near-impossible task of staying dead in the Marvel Comics universe for more than 20 years, because nobody had the guts to try undoing his era-defining death. For a guy whose entire character was built out of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko riffing on old “man hunts man” tropes for a comic book in 1964, it’s a genuinely impressive run.

Here is a quick explainer on the life and times of Sergei Nikolaevich Kravinoff—the man, the myth, the magic death curses and unexpected squirrel-based friendships—offered in hopes of explaining why this particular novelty vest owner might actually be worth building an entire movie around, and getting you up to speed on his history before you go to see said film.

The Most Dangerous Game

The real-world origins of Kraven aren’t hard to parse: It takes the man roughly a single page, when introduced as a world-famous hunter stepping off a boat in The Amazing Spider-Man #15, to namecheck Richard Connell’s classic short story “The Most Dangerous Game.” Like his literary countryman General Zaroff, the jaded Kraven has become convinced that only man can offer him the hunting challenges he seeks—and if that man be spidered, all the better. By giving Spider-Man an antagonist actively interested in hunting him (as opposed to just executing the usual mixture of science disasters and robbery schemes for their hero to swing into), Lee and Ditko very deliberately put Peter Parker into the position where he works best: On the back foot. Because one consistent thing about Kraven, across 60 years of existence, is that he’s always been a credible threat, despite his eclectic choice of sleeveless tops. Sergei’s advantages in the field are numerous: Magical herbs that give him sufficient strength that Spidey won’t just accidentally punch his head off the first time they fight. Enough resources to bring to bear all sorts of nets, equipment, poison darts, etc. to his periodic attacks. A number of allies, most notably his persistent frenemy/half-brother/henchperson The Chameleon (who actually predated him as a Spider-Man villain, before being folded into his mythos.) But it’s his hunting instincts, and the challenge they offer to Peter’s Spidey-Sense—that quasi-mystical ability to perceive threats before they strike—that make Kraven dangerous. Lots of comics have presented Spider-Man as the apex predator of the New York underworld, plucking mooks out of the shadows and webbing them up to lampposts with ease; Kraven stories reconfigure the Wall-Crawler, inevitably, as prey.

Despite all that, for his first two decades or so of existence, Kraven was just another one of Spider-Man’s rogues, fighting him either alone, or as a member of the Sinister Six. Sure, he made the web-slinging life hard, forcing Peter to go on the run, dodging snares and traps. But it’s part of the central conceit of Spider-Man that every supervillain is just another hassle in the endless grind of young adult life. It wasn’t until 1987 that the character stopped just throwing punches, and actually made an impact.

Kraven’s Last Hunt

There’s an irony to the fact that Kraven The Hunter’s most famous storyline wasn’t written for the character at all; by his own account, J.M. DeMatteis had been pitching both Marvel and D.C. for years with stories about a superhero literally crawling out of the grave, before Spider-Man‘s editors finally bit. Even then, initial plans were to go with an original villain for the moody, murderous piece, until DeMatteis realized Kraven was a perfect fit for the flavor of grim melodrama he had in mind. The actual plot details of “Kraven’s Last Hunt”—which was a big enough deal that it took over all three running Spider-Man comics when it arrived in 1987—are inevitably bogged down in the minutiae of the comics of the era. (Cannibal supervillain Vermin, now remembered for this and pretty much nothing else, features prominently.) But the basic beats are pure opera: Deciding he’s getting too old to be jumping around on rooftops much longer, Kraven decides to defeat Spider-Man once and for all, eschewing his usual bare-handed approach and shooting Peter with a gun. (Readers were lead to believe the Web-Slinger was dead, and it’s possible some of the bigger dopes in the audience even believed it.)

Putting on Spidey’s costume, Kraven performs his take on a superior version of Spider-Man, beating, brutalizing, and even killing the minor villains of New York. When a tranquilized Peter drags himself out of his own grave two weeks later—thanks, magical super-tranquilizers!—Kraven kicks his ass one more time, writes a suicide note exonerating Spider-Man for the murders, and then fatally shoots himself. A little nihilistic, and even a skosh goofy, maybe, but it was a victory, of sorts—one so potent that Marvel kept the character dead for the next 22 years. (Give or take the odd ghost story or resurrected corpse; this was still comic books, after all.)

Modern Kraven

But nobody stays dead in comics forever (at least, as long as there’s profits to be made), and so Kraven inevitably outlasted his own last hunt. The resurrection came about in 2009, and hinged on complicated magical shenanigans involving Kraven’s family, his numerous kids, and his general survival-of-the-fittest mindset. (Few comics characters we’re supposed to find even remotely sympathetic have offed more of their own offspring than this guy.) He’s actually dead again at the moment, as far as we know, having tried to execute a frankly ridiculous scheme involving cloning himself nearly 100 times and making all the clones fight each other to see which one was best. (Pro-tip: When the words “Spider-Man” and “clone” start popping up in the same sentence, wise nerds make themselves scarce.) Interestingly, though, the best comics issues to feature Kraven since his resurrection weren’t in Spider-Man books, or even ones aimed solely at adults: Instead, they were in an adorably silly all-ages comic centered on one of Marvel’s most beloved, least-likely heroes.

Kraven The Hunter appearing in the first issue of 2015’s The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl actually makes a certain sort of sense, at least if you were already tuned into the wavelength of Ryan North’s hilarious, smart, surprisingly heartfelt comic. After all, Squirrel Girl—real name Doreen Green, originally an Iron Man joke character who’s taken on larger-than-life import in the decades since—is animal-based, Kraven’s animal-based, why wouldn’t the two run into each other? But his portrayal in the series also speaks to an undercurrent of honor that’s always lurked in the character’s “love of the hunt” roots, a sense of fairness that pervades at least the surface level of many of his Spider-Man fights. (And which will, presumably, be a big part of making the Aaron Taylor-Johnson version at least ostensibly sympathetic for movie-goers.) Kraven doesn’t fight to kill, after all, or to steal: He hunts Spider-Man because he believes he’s the greatest target on the planet. It speaks to the values of North’s comic that, after they end up in an inevitable fight, Doreen doesn’t beat her opponent through violence or a clever squirrel attack, but by convincing him there are better hunts still to come—possibly by chasing down giant undersea monsters like krakens or other deadly beasts. Wider Marvel silliness eventually got in the way—see above about the clone-boy fight club—but North ends up using the character’s repeated appearances in Unbeatable Squirrel Girl to tell a genuinely moving story about change, as Doreen’s belief in him helps Sergei be a little less murderous, a little more on the side of the angels. That lurking potential for good has been at the core of many of Spider-Man’s villains, usually employed to tragic effect; seeing it get a work-out in a comic for younger readers was genuinely sweet.

On the hunt

Which brings us back to this week, and the blood-soaked arrival of an R-rated Kraven The Hunter in theaters. Trailers for the film suggest a number of biographical details have been shifted: The movie character’s major familial conflict is with his father (Russell Crowe), who was largely a non-entity in the comics, while his powers now apparently come from lion blood. (Although his girlfriend Calypso, who provided some of his enhancements in the comics, is being played by Ariana DeBose in the film.) Also, there’s no Spider-Man to hunt, which feels like a pretty big gulf to cross for a character whose entire original base motivations are linked to the hero. (Instead, the motivation is now largely revenge-based, which seems to inform how brutally violent the film is aimed at being.) The basic concept of the character, though—of a guy so good at hunting that it’s functionally a superpower—clearly remains intact, even if director J.C. Chandor appears to be going for a slightly more grounded but sanguine approach for the movie. There’s been a core of something compelling, even noble, about Sergei Kravinoff for 60 years, even beyond the basic trappings of a colorful supervillain; it remains to be seen whether Taylor-Johnson’s performance, and Chandor’s movie, can draw those elements to the surface, or just drown them in waves of comic book blood.