The arrival of a new Spider-Woman book on stands is always cause for celebration – Jessica Drew is a fantastic and sometimes neglected character who has recently been utilized more as a Captain Marvel supporting character or Spider-Verse sufferer than a lead protagonist.
That propensity to make Jess support made me a bit worried when this series was announced as part of the Spider-Man-born Gang War event. Would she be relegated to cleaning up Spidey’s mess? Would multiverse shenanigans overburden the book?
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Sure, the latter sets a foundation for Jessica’s story. Her main drive spins out of multiversal weirdness; she was briefly erased from existence somewhere in End of the Spider-Verse, which had the effect of leaving her baby, Gerry, motherless and forgotten (how he didn’t get wiped from existence with her, Marty McFly-style, is a mystery) – but writer Steve Foxe and artist Carola Borelli avoid lingering in the narrative complications of other stories, preferring instead to dive into the action. Gang War, which spun out of the pages of Amazing Spider-Man and wrangled up five titles to go along with Jessica’s relaunch, smartly informs the book without over-encumbering it. Jess doesn’t spend too much of her issues worrying about the larger implications of organized crime turmoil; Diamondback, this book’s central antagonist, is allowed to get too big for his britches, giving Jess a target.
There’s a larger problem at hand: the Gerry Problem. Marvel tends to wipe away the children of their heroes to retain a timelessness, freedom, and flexibility (any parent can tell you that having children does not exactly allow for late nights skulking through alleyways or open afternoons for getting whisked off to alternate dimensions). Discounting Danielle Cage, Marvel kids are more likely to be transported to the future or abandoned in accelerated-time pocket dimensions than have a natural, happy childhood – it even happened, briefly, to Franklin Richards.
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The process might be different, but the result is the same: Gerry, whose disappearance lightly looms over the first few issues of the book, is revealed to not only be A Big Kid Now but also to be A Real Bad Guy. Sure, it’s tedious, but at least his transformation is tied to Jessica’s origins: ’twas Hydra that aged the child.
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The whole reveal is telegraphed early on: the introduction of a mysterious new bad guy with a Snake-Eyes mask and Jess’s ‘venom blast’ powers leaves very few possibilities besides the obvious. The reveal, when it comes, falters a bit in its delivery; for all the promise of the narrative, Jess’s distress at Gerry’s disappearance is never quite realized. What should be portrayed as a parent’s outright terror over their missing infant is instead reduced to a sort of “woe-is-me” brooding. Her immediate response might have been a panicked alert to literally every Avenger, particularly her star-fueled friend (or maybe — and this is just a suggestion — her friend who is famously a super-powered detective); instead, it’s an awkward secret she keeps, as if her son’s erasure from everyone’s memory is somehow a shameful burden.
This is the lone emotionally vulnerable moment we get.
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Luckily, the other moving parts of the narrative are distracting enough to cover for the lack of emotional honesty. Jess embraces her spy roots in bits of espionage and voices her wrath against her long-hated Hydra adversaries. The most effective distraction is Borelli’s slick artwork, which instills the characters with a good deal of their personality.
It’s exciting to have a new Jess book, and fans are lucky to have one that wants to invest in the character’s future without burdening her with outside woes. There’s care and promise in the book, even if it goes about solving unnecessary problems with little emotional tact.
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