This is Now A Spiderman Thread — 60s cartoon Spider-Man opening curtains with crude caption

This is Now A Spiderman Thread

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Published October 3, 2026

This is Now A Spiderman Thread is a 4chan thread derailment ritual where posters hijack a discussion by flooding it with 60's Spider-Man image macros and declaring the thread rebranded. The practice started on /a/ in April 2010 and got its name on /tv/ that July, going on to seed the broader snowclone 'This is now a X thread' across Funnyjunk, Imgur and dozens of unrelated forums.

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Overview

This is Now A Spiderman Thread works as a group shitposting move: one user drops a screenshot from the 1967 Grantray-Lawrence Spider-Man cartoon with the caption announcing that the thread has been rebranded, and other posters pile in with their own 60's Spider-Man panels until the original discussion is buried1. The visual grammar is specific. Low-budget frames of Peter Parker making weirdly expressive faces, scenes of Spider-Man loafing around his apartment, and bizarre non-sequitur dialogue bubbles were already circulating as reaction macros before being bundled under this label4.

The format later spawned the snowclone 'This is now a X thread,' where X was swapped for any other subject the hijackers wanted to force on a board. The earliest documented variant used My Little Pony as the replacement subject on 4chan's /a/ board8. The joke is less about Spider-Man specifically and more about the collective agreement to override whatever anyone else was discussing, which is why it still turns up on Comic Vine, IGN, and other forum communities whenever a thread goes off-topic.

Origin & Background

Platform
4chan (/a/, then /tv/)
Creator
Unknown
Date
2010

One of the earliest documented runs happened on 4chan's /a/ board on April 29, 2010, when posters bombarded a thread by dumping screenshots from the retro Spider-Man animated series2. The move itself was anonymous and had no name attached at that point. The label 'This is Now a Spiderman Thread' was coined months later, during a derailment attempt on 4chan's /tv/ board on July 30, 2010, where a poster used the exact phrase to announce the hijack1.

Because the practice emerged from anonymous 4chan boards, no individual creator is credited with the format. The 60's Spider-Man image macros that fuel it predated the ritual by years and were already a reaction-image staple before 20104.

How It Spread

The format moved off 4chan in early 2011. On February 25, 2011, Funnyjunk user andrewandreas uploaded a screenshot of a Spider-Man comment chain that had unfolded on the site four days earlier, and the post picked up more than 85,000 views and 1,331 upvotes over the next several years3. On December 29, 2012, Imgur user vojnik posted a 60's Spider-Man image under the title 'This is Now A Spiderman Thread,' which pulled in roughly 12,900 views and 102 points within two years5.

YouTube extended the bit into audio form. On January 23, 2013, the channel Special People TV uploaded 'Spiderman Thread Song (SPTV),' a sung medley stitched together from lines pulled off various 60's Spider-Man macros, which cleared 12,000 views in its first two years6. Later that spring, on May 28, 2013, Urban Dictionary user AntonioCastagnoli filed an entry defining Spiderman Threads for anyone who stumbled across one in the wild7.

Beyond those documented posts, the hijack move showed up on general-interest forums like Comic Vine and IGN as well as niche communities including Empires, Car Forums, and PlayDota, where posters would simply drop a Spider-Man image and declare the thread over4.

Timeline

2010-04-29

Earliest documented example on 4chan's /a/ board, where users derail a thread with Retro Spider-Man screenshots.

2010-07-30

The phrase 'This is Now a Spiderman Thread' is coined during a derailment on 4chan's /tv/ board.

2010-12-08

The snowclone variant appears on /a/ with a user attempting to redirect a thread into a My Little Pony Thread.

2011-02-25

Funnyjunk user andrewandreas posts a screenshot of a Spider-Man comment chain, eventually accumulating 85,000+ views.

2012-12-29

Imgur user vojnik uploads a 60's Spider-Man image titled 'This is Now A Spiderman Thread.'

2013-01-23

Special People TV uploads 'Spiderman Thread Song (SPTV)' to YouTube, stitching together lines from 60's Spider-Man macros.

2013-05-28

Urban Dictionary user AntonioCastagnoli submits a definition entry for Spiderman Threads.

Frequently Asked Questions