Alias Part 4: The Underneath

[cyberghostface]

In addition to the usual disclaimer about the language, this one features some brief gore and disturbing sexual situations, so be warned.

As I stated last time, I'm starting off with the tenth issue because, while it's a stand-alone issue, it ties in with the current arc. The trades did this as well.

#10...

So basically J. Jonah Jameson has employed Jessica Jones and her services to deduce who Spider-Man is. He will Have Ben Urich help her.





Jessica agrees to takes on the case.

Two months later, Jonah gets an update on her progress and isn't happy.






Ben tells Jonah to drop it because if he goes after her for helping out orphans he'll only end up looking bad.




#16...

Jessica discovers she has an unwanted visitor...












Jessica calls Clay Quartermain from S.H.I.E.L.D. and finds out that the intruder was Mattie Franklin, who had a brief stint as the third Spider-Woman.






#17...

Needless to say, Jonah's not happy...








Jessica leaves a message on Drew's answering machine and schedules a meeting with Madame Web.












#18...





Via the young kid that's always hanging around Jessica's office, Jessica meets someone who claims to have known Mattie.












Jessica finds out that the guy she's looking for practically lives at the back of the club.




#19...












Jessica wakes up outside the club. Ben Urich is there. Jonah had hired him to follow her. She explains the situation to him, and he asks her if they had protruded foreheads like cavemen.


Back at her apartment, Jessica is ambushed.






#20...













The two Jessicas do some investigating and track down Denny Haynes, the drug dealer who has Mattie, to a nearby hotel.








#21...











Six weeks later, Marla and Mattie pay Jessica a visit at her office.

Comments

[citygod]

Thanks for posting, it's a terrific read. A few questions: what exactly is Speedball's powers? I've seen him before, but I really don't know who he is or what he does; is the Spidergirl character in regular continuity or was she created for this?: (and this is really tangental) whenever I see a slang or casual verbal form of speech written, it always looks wrong. For example: in the scene where Jessica finds Spidergirl, she says " The fuck is this?" I know that it's an abbreviation of "WHAT the fuck is this?" (and that Tony Soprano made it popular - Bendis appreciation of that show is obvious) but shouldn't it be written to indicate the abbreviation? Perhaps " 'the fuck is this?" or "-the fuck is this?" (Dunno - neither seems right.) But do you know what I mean? Some slang just doesn't work as written speech.
Anyway: Alias is fab, perhaps Bendis best work. Thanks for taking the time to post it.

[cyberghostface]

Mattie was around before this, here's her Wiki article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Woman_(Mattie_Franklin)

[stolisomancer]

It's a colloquialism in spoken dialogue, so you can get away with writing it several different ways and still be technically correct. "...the fuck?" "The fuck?" "--the fuck?"

Speedball's power was, at one point, bouncing around. You hit him, he ricochets off the wall behind you and straight back at you. His powers have gradually expanded over time to the point where he can produce massive amounts of kinetic energy more or less on demand.

[cainofdreaming]

And, as seen here and elsewhere, being defecated on the head by Bendis.

[icon_uk]

Agreed.

[stolisomancer]

To be absolutely fair, there is a long history of people treating Speedball like a joke or a distraction that goes back well before Bendis came to work for Marvel. The earliest example I can think of is Jim Starlin having everyone in Infinity Wars acting like Speedball's getting in the way, and that's in 1995 or so.

[thehood]

Bendis is hardly the only person that has made fun of Speedball, in fact most writers do.

And this bit isn't that bad anyway, so frankly you are reaching here. Speedball was helping the cops catch a drug dealer. Not that bad really.

[filthysize]

Your "the fuck?" example is so commonly used even on message boards that nowadays it looks natural to me, but I know exactly what you mean. It is a bit ajar if you just take it as text. With conversation-heavy writers like Bendis, you're almost required to read his dialogue like an actor reads a screenplay. There aren't going to be instructions on how to read the lines (as those are always discouraged from scripts); you gotta find the tone yourself by getting immersed into the scene, with the art roughly serving as your director.

Garth Ennis does this the most, I think. His blokey characters like Billy Butcher would talk half the time in sarcasm, irony and colloquialism, and Ennis would present them completely dry, because other characters won't acknowledge it, presumably because they can hear Butcher's tone and intonation, whereas readers can't. Those lines can stop me cold sometimes, but after knowing what they're supposed to mean, re-reading the whole conversation then makes it flow all the better. I dunno, it's an interesting style.

[shadowpsykie]

god i love this series...

heh i chuckled when Jessica Drew checked her VM...

also, Madame Web... knowing the nature of Jessica's attack, she should have kept quiet.... she might not be able to control what she sees but she can control what she says....

[skalja]

And then Mattie was killed and Jonah didn't even notice, and now Marla's dead as well.

[cyberghostface]

I've asked Brevoort a number of times on Formspring how come Jonah hasn't shown any concern over Mattie's disappearance and subsequent death, and he's always given flippant answers like "How often do you check in on your niece?"

[skalja]

Even if we ignored the part where Jonah took her in and raised her, I find it difficult to imagine anyone could not know or care about their young niece disappearing and dying unless they were actively estranged from that side of the family. And even then!

Plus, how silly is it to suggest that an uncle-niece relationship is unimportant in the Spider-Man franchise? He's only one of the most famous adopted characters in fiction, and was taken in under much more realistic circumstances (even with the spy parents/plane accident, etc) than Clark Kent or Harry Potter, who are the only ones I can think of with that level or greater pop culture cachet.

[cyberghostface]

I know, right? I think he also said how Jonah was too busy being the mayor.

Least they could do was show a couple of panels of Jonah grieving. But it's pretty clear no one put any thought into this--she was just fodder for the Kraven family. It was probably "Hey, are there any c-list characters we're allowed to kill off?" "Um--Mattie's free." "'kay."

[skalja]

Grim Hunt was very obviously engineered to eliminate the "chaff" of the Spider-Characters, particularly those with a similar role to those currently or about to get a big editorial push. Hence Mattie and Madame Webb's deaths, Julia being shoved into the Madame Webb role, Ezekiel being brought back just to kill him off more definitively -- and meanwhile Kaine was brought back and Anya was given Julia's suit (i.e. the one they wanted to keep around more than Julia herself).

[thehood]

Especially when Jameson basically considered her a daughter.