Posts Tagged ‘ Spider-Woman ’

Warning – random theorizing lies ahead, with no basis in fact other than my own mind adding together 2 and 2, and most probably making 7. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

This week’s Amazing Spider-Man #654.1 – according to BleedingCool – contains one of those teasers for the upcoming year. These aren’t always accurate (at least it seems to me) because occasionally plans change – but there’s a scene in it that caught my eye:

That certainly looks like Mary Jane doing a bit of wall-crawling to me, and it appears it’s as a result of something Peter’s done. For some reason I instantly thought of the I (heart) Marvel Spider-Man issue from five (yikes) years ago, by Tom Beland and Cory Walker.

It’s a great little story which as far as I know has never been reprinted, and it centers around Peter and Mary Jane (back when they were married) on Valentine’s Day. Now I know they were no longer ever married, but everything else – like the events that happened – stay in continuity, right, only they just weren’t married. So this story still happened (not that anyone ever referenced it even before One More Day).

Anyway, Peter gives Mary Jane her Valentine’s Day gift –

- and, well, she’s pretty damn happy about it.

Like I said, this story was never referenced again, sadly, but Dan Slott knows his stuff – which means you can bet he knows that Mary Jane has a set of web-shooters tucked away in her closet next to her Jimmy Choos.

And now she can wall-crawl too.

You know, it’s a damn shame that the Spider-Woman name is taken at the moment. And I’m not saying it’s likely to happen, I’m not saying it’s going to happen – but I sure as hell would like it to happen…

…I’m really enjoying Amazing Spider-Man these days, and I think it’s been pretty solid since Brand New Day first started. So when I mock a possible direction for the comic, I do it with affection. I’m sure no matter what happens, I’ll enjoy it as the creative team on the books is pretty damn strong.

Also, I realized that I was wrong about things ending badly the last time someone else took over the Spider-Man identity from Peter, because I posted an image of poor, dead Ben Reilly – but that wasn’t the last time someone took over the Spider-Man costume.

No, the last person to take over as Spider-Man when Peter retired temporarily was Mattie Franklin, who gained her spider-like powers during the Gathering storyline. Shortly after, she became the new Spider-Woman –

- and suffered through a number of increasingly bad costumes before her book was canceled.

She later showed up as a strung-out drug addict in Alias who was being used to manufacture a superhuman drug, and then showed up in The Loners.

And just a few weeks ago, she was sacrificed by the Kravens to bring Aloysha Kraven back to life as some kind of wolfy-lion type thing.

So…maybe it didn’t end so well, now that I think about it.

As with Captain America, no real surprise since Spider-Woman has been one of Bendis’ pet character since he started on New Avengers (and was originally meant to be the lead in Alias).

What this image does tell us is, firstly, that the Avengers roster isn’t necessarily limited to the number of letters in the word ‘Avengers’ (as some people thought yesterday with the large ‘A’ behind the Cap image) – probably a pretty good job given the plethora of characters running around currently claiming Avengerhood.

Secondly, it suggest that the Heroic Age teaser that was released a couple of weeks back -

- is just that, a teaser, and not a roster for the team. That in itself suggests that the Agents of Atlas will be around in some form or another, since Gorilla Man is so prominent in the image.

I’m also taking away from this that the Thing isn’t going to be an Avenger – which relieves me greatly as quite honestly, the Thing as an Avenger just doesn’t work.

West Coast Avengers excluded, natch.

I posted a few items earlier this week that I need to go back and comment on thanks to a couple of things that have come up in the last day or two…and here’s the first

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.