What If…? Jessica Jones #1, written by Justina Ireland with art by David Messina and colors by Brian Reber, reworks history to show how things would have been different had Jessica Jones got bitten by a radioactive spider in high school instead of Peter Parker. The bulk of the story is set in modern day, with Jessica having set aside her Spider-Girl identity a long time ago to live a normal life as a bartender. The worst menace she’s facing these days are drunken jerks screaming at her when she yells “Last call!”. But when Green Goblin seemingly returns from the dead to rain terror down on New York, it forces her to make choices she hoped never to make again.
With this being a one-shot book, writer Justina Ireland had a lot of ground to cover in a short number of pages and she succeeds in making the book a genuine page turner, occasionally flashing back through Jessica’s life to show her relationship with Peter as well as her career as Spider-Girl before reaching the climax of the book and Jessica’s final showdown with the Green Goblin. It all moves at a lightning pace and the time hopping never gets confusing or stale.
I enjoyed the book, though Spider-Girl’s costume design is a bit crazy. When I turned to the splash page and saw her costume in all its glory, the first thing I thought of was Geena Davis in the film A League of Their Own saying “We’re supposed to play baseball in that thing?”. I suppose this costume was created to set her apart from Mayday Parker’s Spider-Girl and other female Spider incarnations of the past, but it struck me as being terribly impractical for swinging around the New York skyline.
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Aside from that, the art by David Messina and Brian Reber is lovely. It’s darker and more brooding in the modern scenes and has a bright, zesty, Silver Age feel in the flashbacks. I especially loved how the flashback art incorporated elements of Steve Ditko’s work. After all, when you’re showing a Spider hero’s backstory, you’ve got to include a dollop of Ditko.
The greatest joy of these What If…? tales is showing where certain paths divert from the original stories and how some characters are changed because of it. For example, here we have Misty Knight as a hard-edged cop, a far cry from the master hitwoman she is in the 616 Marvel Universe (though she still has that glorious afro). We also get Luke Cage, who owns the bar Jessica works at and seems closer to the Luke Cage of the Netflix/Disney+ shows than the classic Marvel Universe “Sweet Christmas!” version of Power Man.
Like all great What If…? stories, the book left me wanting to see more of Jessica’s Spider-Girl, but for now, this one-shot is a fun and unique take on one of Marvel’s most complex characters.
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