CHAMELEON

The Chameleon's real name carries the whole story: Dmitri Smerdyakov was the illegitimate son of Nikolai Kravinoff and a servant in the Kravinoff household, which made him the half-brother of Sergei Kravinoff — the future Kraven the Hunter. Dmitri grew up inside the great house as staff rather than family, a boy who was denied the Kravinoff name and who taught himself impersonation partly to entertain the older half-brother he idolised, while Sergei treated him as a servant and a plaything.

That childhood arrangement wrote Spider-Man history. After the Chameleon's solo debut in The Amazing Spider-Man #1 (1963) ended in failure, it was Dmitri who summoned Sergei to America and pointed him at the wall-crawler in The Amazing Spider-Man #15 (1964), even posing as Kraven himself as a decoy during the hunt. Every Kraven hunt that followed — decades of them, up to the most famous Spider-Man story ever told — traces back to a younger brother trying to be useful to the sibling who would not claim him.

The comics only underlined the relationship years later, spelling out Dmitri's birth and upbringing long after readers had taken the two villains as unrelated colleagues. When Sergei eventually took his own life, Dmitri's grief curdled into obsession: he blamed Spider-Man for the death of the half-brother who had beaten and belittled him, and devoted himself to making the hero suffer for a loss the Kravinoff family itself had engineered.