Spider Woman battle of the origins: Pt. 1 Wundagore

[ozaline]

So while I still plan on sharing some of the spooky stories that appear in the first handful of Spider-Woman's apperances, some questions I got both on and off the site about my last post, have prompted me to do something else I've wanted to for a long time: Compare her original origin to the one crafted by Brian Micheal Bendis. This was a sore spot for me when Bendis re-introduced the character, though there is no denying we wouldn't even have Jessica Drew comics right now if it wasn't for Bendis. I've been wanting to make a show similar to Atop the Fourth Wall, and would love to delve into this in more detail, but right now I present with minimal commentary of part one of Bendis vs Wolfman, and Goodwin...

(7 pages of Spider Woman Origins #1, 4 Pages 1 Panel of Spider Woman vol 1 #1, 6 panels of Marvel Spotlight #32)


















So that was the original account, now in Spotlight it was said that Jessica was a hyper evolved Spider who only looked human, but Wolfman jettisoned that portion of the story. Now let's take a look at Bendis take. As before, Jonathan Drew is a research scientist working on Spider DNA atop Mt. Wundagore. But here instead of Uranium it is the funding of the British military that pays for the experiments, and the General in charge of the project is paying them a visit.














Watching the altercation become violent, Jessica lashes out for the first time with her Venom blast, knocking both of her parents to the ground before falling unconscious.



General Wyndom, along with several Hydra soldiers greet Jessica, and say while they're not her Daddy... they are some of Daddy's friends.

Comments

[arilou_skiff]

Yeah, lack of cow-women makes Bendis' origin inferior.

[ozaline]

Well there is a Cow Woman... later, but it's kinda weird what he does with the High Evolutionary aspect of the story.

[ladytimedramon]

It's been ages since I've read SpiderWoman's origins (heck, it's been ages since I read a comic book due to my self imposed comics ban). She was one of the first comic characters that I remember being a big fan of.

One thing that strikes me - how similar Spider Woman's origin is to Beast Boy's original origins. Though there are probably other heroes who got their powers the same way. Scientist father takes family to place where they shouldn't go. Young child gets sick. Dad uses highly experimental treatment to save child's life. Child develops superpowers.

I have scans of Beast Boy's original origins posted here (see the links on the right): http://ladytimedramon.joeyteel.com/garfieldlogan/features/garorigin.html

[donnblake]

If you don't mind me asking, why did you impose a comic ban on yourself?

[ladytimedramon]

I got so disgusted with what was happening in comic books (the endless reboots, the continuity issues, the stories themselves) that I just couldn't even look at more than 1 or 2 pages of a book at a time. There's no sense in reading, let alone buying, something that you don't enjoy any more.

I poke my head in here and at the comicbloc from time to time to catch up and see if things have gotten better. Usually I run away screaming :p

Last good thing I saw was that Gar was green again. Hopefully they brought him back to his original origins.

[shieldhill]

I'm unfamiliar with Jessica Drew, both in her classic incarnation and her current Bendis-influenced revival, and seeing these origins compared and contrasted is interesting.
Ah the old days, when the fragile wife died of "the strain." And Jonathan Drew was turned into quite the villain, wasn't he! And where's the High Evolutionary and his awesome animal people!?
I'm assuming there's no in-story justification for the changes, like false memories or something? Not a fan of that kind of writing, but I suppose with obscure characters writers can get away with it.
I'll check out the following posts for sure, thanks for sharing.

[miramira]

Yeah, I prefer that Miriam's actively trying to protect her daughter in Bendis's take. And what kind of scientists wouldn't immediately realize that high concentrations of radiation might pose a threat to a child? (Then again, what kind of scientists would be working around experimental equipment without protective gear, especially while pregnant?)

[halloweenjack]

The same kind who would let a high school group tour through their lab, which is also so ill-kept that spiders get irradiated by accident.

[miramira]

Good point. It's kind of a wonder Pete was the only one affected.

[skemono]

Well, now that you bring it up...

[miramira]

Yeah, I was kinda trying to forget that one. :(

[ozaline]

The original Spider Woman comic was written in the 70s, so the flashback was meant to be some 20 to 30 years earlier... so that's about right. The scientists working on the atomic bomb, handled raw samples of Uranium without any protective gear. In the 40s and 50s, scientists still didn't know too much about the dangers of different kinds of radiation from my understanding.

And yes the actions of the mother here are one of the things I do like about Bendis' origin.

[miramira]

Hmm. I've read some older sci-fi stories that seemed pretty clear on the dangers of radiation, but I can't quite remember whether they were '50s or '60s off the top of my head.

[raspberryrain]

If I remember right, it would have been even before 1940. Wasn't Jessica in suspended animation for so long that she was actually more than 40 calendar years old, but physically seemed young?

You know, I still have those comics somewhere, I should look it up myself.

A quick Google says she was poisoned in 1931. (Pre-Bendis)

[remial]

that's an awful large baby for being 6 pounds and change

[starwolf_oakley]

The back-up stories of the "Evolutionary War" Annual story had party of Spider-Woman's origin in the High Evolutionary's origin. I posted it a while back. NEW MUTANTS ANNUAL #4.

http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/2101315.html

It showed that Jessica Drew knew Phillip Masters as a child (thus that the Puppet Masters' clay is from Wundagore) and made it clear Mirriam Drew was dead and *not* the Viper.

[skemono]

"The geigercounter's clicking away like mad. This place must be terribly radioactive!"

Later...

"Jessie has radiation poisoning? Who could have foreseen this!?"

[drtechnobabel]

John Drew's kind of a shitty scientist with little to no regard for safety measures in both versions of the origin story, isn't he?

Version 1: "I never imagined that building our house on top of a huge stockpile of uranium would have any adverse affects on our children!"

Version 2: "The General wants to see our genetic compiler, which so far has done nothing but kill everything we shoot it at? Now is clearly the time for me to start pressing buttons on the console while my pregnant wife is standing directly in front of the firing mechanism. There's no reason for me to look at the console to see what mode it's in first, or warn anyone in the room about what I'm doing."

[donnblake]

"We built it on stilts! Everyone knew that radiation couldn't jump! This was never supposed to happen to us!"

[richardak]

I always liked the original version best. Making her an ordinary human girl who got spider powers from a spider bite or whatever seemed so derivative. It also meant that her alienation was ultimately a fairly minor problem: her powers made it difficult for her to make friends, but she never had to feel any sense of ontological alienation. She was not a freak of nature or an offense against G-d.

Making her a hyper-evolved spider meant that her problem was much deeper than having a hard time making friends because of her powers. She really didn't fit it anywhere. It would have meant that she was made not by nature of G-d, but was the product of a mad scientist's whims. Did she even have a soul? If you've ever played Promethean: The Created, Jessica Drew could easily have been the inspiration for the Galateids. Her pheremone powers could easily have been seen as a version of the Disquiet. She even had electrical powers!

I don't think the character ever really recovered from the retcon of her origin, almost immediately after the character was introduced. They sacrificed what made the character original and unique.

[ozaline]

Were her pheromone powers planed out by Goodwin? Because they don't seem to have had any affect on on Jared. What I liked about the series proper is that the reason people hated her was a direct result of her own insecurities. I also think the fact that she still questioned her own humanity after learning the truth was enough. She was still missing out on at least a decade of human socialization.

I do see your point, but there are other artificially created characters out there who explore those issues, and I guess because it's the story we got, I always enjoyed Jessica's attempt to regain her humanity, and the various set backs she faced along the way. Honestly the three issues, of "oh I'm just a spider, it'd be better if I was dead," we got from Marvel Two-in one were quite enough for me on that score.

[richardak]

Well, it's always tricky comparing the story that was told to the story that might have been told. The other mistake that I thought Marvel made is that Goodwin created the character to have Hydra as her primary enemy and to have superspy-type adventures. When Wolfman took over writing the character, he got rid of Hydra as a villain and completely changed the plot-concept. Every time a different writer took over after that, the whole plot changed yet again.

At one point, she worked as a bounty hunter teamed up with a computer hacker in a wheelchair, which was a completely new status quo for the character, but the story made it clear that they had already been working together for some time. A narrative caption promised that we would be shown how this new state of affairs had come to be in a future issue. Of course, eventually a new writer took over, completely changed the status quo again, and the promised explanation never happened.

[ozaline]

Which reminds me of Supergirl's title after her reintroduction in Superman/Batman... her Status quo changed almost every six issues, sometimes with very little explanation.

To be honest I haven't read this Hacker arc. I've been working on collecing the entire run of her classic comics, but when I was a kid I only had the one digest sized book that included the Spotlight and the first 8 or so issues of the book proper... (got to explaining how her father died so it was a satisfying book in that regard). I thought the super natural, and horror stories that Wolfman told were rather unique for a brightly clad superhero so that was a lot of the appeal.

I did have a few random later bits from the Claremont era.. like her run in with Dazzler, I thought it was kinda eye-rolling that she thought Dazzler's quest for a missing parent was ridiculous when that had been her quest before.

At any rate, Wolfman did open up with another run in with Hydra in Marvel Two-in-One.. So it's not like they were completely forgotten, but yeah... personally I was presented with a book that had the Goodwin story and then the Wolfman stories... and I never batted an eye at it as a kid.

In fact when she, actually the Skurll Queen, was reintroduced in the early issues of New Avengers I was perplexed why Hydra was suddenly such a huge aspect of her story... And even more perplexed that her loyalties were supposed to be unclear. "No way after her origin she'd ever work with those guys again," I thought. The heavy espionage angle was not what I was trained to expect.

I knew her as a former Hydra Agent, as a woman looking for her Dad, and as a private investigator... which did seem like a fairly natural progression not knowing the stuff in the middle.

[richardak]

Stuff like that happens with certain comic book characters from time to time, especially B or C-list characters. It happened with She-Hulk too on her previous series, when Dan Slott left and Peter David took over, all of a sudden She-Hulk had been disbarred and was working as a bounty hunter teamed up with a Skrull named Jazinda. All the plot threads left over from Dan Slott's run, like what was going on with Awesome Andy, Southpaw, and the Mad Thinker, plus the foreshadowing of the Reckoning War, and a bunch of other stuff, just got dropped. I have the impression that this is more common with female characters than with male characters, but I don't have the research to prove that; certainly, I can think of male characters to whom it has happened. Anyway, it really bothers me, because it seems disrespectful both to the readers and the previous writer.