There’s a Spider-Man Villain Living in Jerry’s ‘Seinfeld’ Apartment

Spider-Man has battled alien monsters made of black goo and defeated mutant vampires, but no comic has called for him to participate in a masturbation competition with his friends and/or spend an entire issue waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant — yet.

The worlds of Spider-Man and Seinfeld randomly collided in the first issue of Marvel’s new Spidey reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man #1, albeit in an extremely subtle fashion. The comic finds Peter Parker attempting to track down The Rhino, the villainous Russian mobster with superhuman strength who dresses like a rhinoceros. Movie fans may recall that the objectively ridiculous character was once played by two-time Academy Award nominee Paul Giamatti. 

Per Bleeding Cool, when Spider-Man visits the New York City apartment owned by the Rhino, aka Alexei Sytsevich, it bears more than a striking similarity to Jerry Seinfeld’s spatially-impossible bachelor pad, minus the dining table and the bootleg porn tapes. And for some reason, Spider-Man doesn’t seem to notice that he’s randomly wandered into an iconic sitcom location. 

This isn’t the first time that a comic book has paid homage to Seinfeld. As Comic Book Resources once pointed out, a 1997 issue of Superman: The Man of Steel featured a low-key cameo from Seinfeld and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who are guests on a Metropolis talk show. Unfortunately, they’re both electrocuted, and Jerry is seemingly transformed into a strung-out Kramer. 

And the cover of a 2022 Batman and Superman comic featured Jerry grabbing coffee with the two superheroes while driving the Batmobile, despite the fact that neither one of them are comedians. It should also be noted that Seinfeld didn’t actually appear in the comic itself.

Seinfeld interacting with Superman makes a lot of sense considering that TV’s Jerry is canonically a massive fan of the iconic superhero. Plus, the show once revealed that the Bizarro universe rules from the pages of Superman comics totally exist in Seinfeld’s New York.

And the Seinfeld gang made loads of references to DC characters such as the Green Lantern, Two-Face and Wonder Woman, but they rarely brought up Marvel superheroes, with the exception of the time George mentioned the live-action Spider-Man TV show, and when he and Jerry debated whether or not Iron Man wore underwear “between his skin and his iron suit.”

The recent Spider-Man shout-out was either just a fun little Easter egg from artist Pepe Larraz, or in the world of Marvel Comics, the character Jerry Seinfeld exists, but he moved out of his Upper West Side apartment. And for all we know, The Rhino is Kramer’s new best friend.