‘Mary Jane and Black Cat: Dark Web’ review

A book that I wish was good, but instead, just feels like a mismatch of theme, metaphor, and character.

August 1, 2023

Mary Jane Watson is one of my favorite characters in superhero media. She’s one of the few women in comics that has had the spotlight across decades of publication, and enough interest by creators and fans that she’s been able to have actual stories centered around her — for both good and bad. It’s also the reality that the vast majority of those stories have also centered on Peter Parker, and how MJ as a character is affected by his decisions and mistakes. This is, of course, frustrating, because MJ has existed for long enough, and has enough history and fans that she should be able to support stories centered on her (shouts to Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane).

Unfortunately, while Mary Jane and Black Cat: Dark Web pays lip service to the above being subverted, but ends up treading ground surrounding them that is both uninteresting and disappointing.

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Told from Black Cat’s perspective, one of the main conflicts here is that she feels bad about dating Peter when she had recently told MJ that she isn’t interested in him anymore. This leads to Black Cat’s bad luck powers negatively influencing MJ’s new powers which are partly based on her own luck. All the while, MJ continually espouses how much of a full person she is, and that she exists apart from Peter, which is obviously false, as she’s only regularly appearing in his book right now, and she’s not even with him.

Apart from generally being based in a lazy children’s sitcom trope (with lazier execution), this just generally couldn’t sell that core theme, that these are independent women who are their own individuals. So much time is spent on them explaining aloud that they don’t need Peter to be happy, and it just fails to land every time. Maybe if it were played as more of a commentary about how both these characters have a better chance of being in Amazing Spider-Man rather than their own titles — really, MJ needed Black Cat and superpowers to be half a title character — it would have worked.

Even all that aside, I found MJ to be as boring as I’ve read, coming off as any lady with newfound superpowers at most times. I think MacKay found a good voice for her in a couple places, but mostly I was disappointed.

I also took this opportunity to read MacKay’s larger Black Cat series, and I found this volume lacking in that realm as well. I found a lot of his run to be forgettable, but where it really shone was where it let itself just be a fun heist book. Short and punchy was the sweet spot, in my opinion, and worked as well as most any heist comics I’ve read.

This bears little of the strengths of that run, and hedges its bets on fun references (MJ saying “Peter B Parker” felt particularly key jangly, but the X-Men references leaned closer to fun) and the aforementioned silent conflict between the titular ladies. The dungeon crawl is a total snore, and nothing about the conclusion feels particularly meaningful.

That aside, it is disappointing for MacKay to have written this Black Cat “epic” for so many years, successfully showing that Felicia is her own person and doesn’t need no man, only for the status quo to revert her back to Peter’s girl yet again. It feels like a regression for a character that was able to have some freedom of movement, but is now caged in.

Mary Jane and Black Cat: Dark Web is a book that I wish was good, but instead, just feels like a mismatch of theme, metaphor, and character. I’ll go back to hoping for a Leah Williams Amazing Mary Jane revival, I guess.