Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or simply don’t read Marvel in which case this’ll be of no interest to you), you’ll know that one of the Skrull infiltrators (and the Empress herself) in Marvel’s Secret Invasion is none other than Spider-Woman. Apparently this is part of Bendis’ long term plan…
…and I’m calling bullshit if he’s saying that because it doesn’t really gel with a lot of what Marvel and Bendis did.
Back when New Avengers kicked off, Wolverine (skulking in the Savage Land because a more convenient plot device to drag him into the group wasn’t around, apparently) attacked Spider-Woman because he ‘didn’t recognize’ her scent – which would be pretty unlikely because he’d worked with her a lot before. Of course, that points towards Skrullishness – except for the fact that as we’ve heard ad infinitum, Wolverine can’t tell Skrulls apart from who they impersonate by their scent. A more obvious reason would be that Jessica’s scent has been altered by whatever it was Hydra did to give her her powers back.
Or that Wolverine’s an idiot.
In the ‘reveal’ issue of New Avengers, the Skrulls pointed out to their Empress that Spider-Woman was ideally suited to being replaced. Well, not if she wasn’t a member of the Avengers she wasn’t, because she was doing sod all for years before that. Yet apparently she’s the ideal sleeper. This was pretty much intimated to being early on in the infiltration as well.
In Giant Size Spider-Woman, not only was her ‘re-origin’ story narrated by her (and clearly, actually the ‘real’ her not a Skrull impersonator) but she was clearly without powers – they were returned to her by Hydra. This was followed pretty soon after by another New Avengers arc where her role as a Hydra-SHIELD double agent (or possibly triple, can’t remember) was outlined. It was also in this story where the team held a press conference to introduce themselves.
That scene was revisited in a recent Secret Invasion crossover where Jarvis-Skrull accessed files on the Sentry to see how they could take him off the playing field. This is followed by a meeting with a number of Skrulls including Spider-Woman…but it doesn’t make any sense that she was really planned as a Skrull at this point unless she was replaced between pages of these issues.
Then there’s the big push that Marvel gave Spider-Woman when New Avengers was a hit, with a Spider-Woman: Origins mini and an announced Bendis-Maleev ongoing series. That ongoing was delayed allegedly as a result of Civil War but it now appears that it was because it was decided that Spider-Woman was a Skrull. That doesn’t quite tie in with her CW tie-in spotlight issue of New Avengers either, though – unless she was replaced after that, which then doesn’t tie in with the infiltration timeline.
I just think that when you really think through this whole thing, it seems very unlikely that Spider-Woman was planned as a Skrull from the beginning…simply because the ‘clues’ don’t add up.
Unless…
…unless it was planned from the beginning that Spider-Woman would be targeted for replacement as a Skrull – and any Skrully aspects, claims or games that she’s laying claim to are actually because she beat the crap out of the Skrull princess and isn’t sure who else to trust. That could, in theory, explain why she was affected by Dr Strange’s ‘find the duplicitous’ one spell.
And then, when she realised that none of the other New Avengers were Skrulls, she hightailed it over to the Mighty team because she figured there had to be some Skrulls on the team over there.
Eh, it’s a theory and it’s probably wrong – but if it turns out that she really is a Skrull, and if she is I won’t believe it till I see her wrinkly green chin, all I’m saying is that this wasn’t planned all along.
