In the first year of volume 7, Perez usually draws the first page as a series of images of Spider-Woman against an entirely black backdrop. Like we were catching glimpses when a flashbulb went off. The second year, he shifted to a splash page that usually summarized what was happening, with a sound effect or some other large lettering forming part of the background. It's not quite Adam West Batman sound effects, but there's a bit of that feel, given the lighter tone of many of the stories.
But Spider-Woman's symbol formed out of acidic vomit is a hard image to top, so here we are.
Karla Pacheco's run started in 2020 with Jessica Drew feeling like crap and making little effort to hide it. She's wearing a new, mostly black costume - which Jessica comments makes her butt look amazing, but I fail to see a difference in how Perez draws it; must be some "black is slimming" thing - because she needs money and doesn't want to wear her traditional costume for playing bodyguard to some rich guy's daughter. The jacket and goggles of the Hopeless/Rodriguez runs vanish into the aether, though the motorcycle is around some of the time.
As it turns out, the rich guy, Michael Marchand, is Jessica's brother. Her parents had another kid after escaping HYDRA, but when he used their experiments on infusing arachnid traits to save his daughter from cancer, he forgot about keeping her from dying of the radiation. So after dosing Jessica with a serum that removes the regenerative abilities that protect her from the radiation, convinces her to help search for a cure because this same problem could manifest in her son, Gerry.
This is as much as Gerry, or Porcupine for that matter, factor into Pacheco's run. She literally sends them to a farm upstate for the first year, then has Jess dispense with any of the trust she put in Roger to help her fight in year two, so that he leaves right when he was about to propose. Fine, you don't want to deal with the status quo Hopeless left you (except to use the baby as a lever to make the main character do what your plot requires.) I get that. But once Roger's out of the book, Jessica constantly foists care of her child onto other characters, who nonetheless all reassure Spider-Woman she's not a terrible parent.
Sure, compared to Magneto or Wolverine, she's awesome.
While the experimental drug Marchand's developed (but is unwilling to test on his daughter) boosts Drew's powers and restores the pheromone power (albeit to Bendis' version, where dudes fall for her, rather than the original version, where people instinctively don't like her), it also makes her increasingly angry and erratic. Jessica steadily alienates her friends by screaming at them, stealing their stuff, injuring them when they get in her way. She steals from Stark on behalf of her parents' old HYDRA colleague and attacks War Machine when he catches her. When Carol Danvers enlists her to help fight symbiote dragons in the obligatory King in Black tie-ins, because Danvers has to save her juice for the Final Boss (which ended up losing to an Enigma Force-using Eddie Brock anyway, and that might be the stupidest horseshit I've typed on this blog, thanks Donny Cates!), Jessica gets angry enough to break Danvers' arm.
Pacheco writing Spider-Woman as really angry all the time doesn't bug me. Hopeless wrote her with a temper - she wailed on an entire bar full of villains when she thought Roger was dead. So did Claremont if someone she cared about was hurt. And Danvers knew that Drew using her powers would kill her faster, and made her do it anyway, for one dragon. That's fine. I just have never cared about the strange muddle of HYDRA and the High Evolutionary that makes up Jessica Drew's origin. So the first year revolving heavily around that - Octavia Vermis being an old colleague of both Jess' parents and the H.E., there being homicidal clones of Jessica's mother in late-stage Clone Saga-level quantities, Marchand being her brother with ulterior motives - I ain't got time for that. Especially the High Evolutionary. If John Ostrander couldn't make me give a shit about that dude in Heroes for Hire, Pacheco had a less than zero chance. All his dialogue might as well be how the adults talk in Peanuts.
The storyline concludes with Jessica back to normal. Her friends forgive her for her behavior. She shelves the new costume, which was transmitting data to Vermis the whole time and goes back to the classic look for year 2. Which is much more about Jessica Drew fighting random enemies. Marchand does pop up again, having given himself powers at the urging of his new girlfriend, but otherwise it's enemies like Lady Bullseye or two brothers who share a pair of enchanted swords and claim to be from Toledo, so Jess can make a bunch of terrible jokes about the city in Ohio.
That becomes her "thing" in the second half of the book, making bad puns and jokes. OK, sure. As long as the High Evolutionary isn't involved. Pacheco brings back Claremont/Leialoha supporting cast member Lindsay McCabe, who I don't think had been used since the (I think) Spider-Man annual story in the '90s where she enlisted Julia Carpenter to retrieve Drew's soul from the limbo where it resided.
The stories are a bit more lighthearted. Even if Rebecca Marchand has to help Jessica fight her dad, she does so in her own super-suit and with the aid of a dinosaur that I think they and Vermis either created or bred with the High Evolutionary's work. She rides it like a big, jagged-tooth pony! No feathers, though. Comic artists still hewing to the scaly hide conception of dinos. McCabe's doing stunt work in a Western and gets attacked by ninjas because she's hasn't paid off a debt to some Madripoor gangster. Bit lower stakes, more chances for bad jokes by Drew.
Drew gets some upgrades to the classic costume, so now the web gliders under the arms can detach and be used like those fighting fans in kung-fu movies. Perez and Pacheco seem to have fun with the fight scenes, having Spider-Woman use a variety of styles, although characters really seem to like arm locks. Lots of people gets arms broken or dislocated, it felt like. They take advantage of the settings, bring in surprise or random interference when it's appropriate.
I don't like that Perez seems to de-age Night Nurse. I liked how Marcos Martin drew her in Dr. Strange: The Oath, where she was probably late '30s. The outfit was loose enough she could move, but not to where it might impede movement or get caught on instruments. Now she's wearing a form-fitting nurse outfit all the time.
The last story is a two-parter where a bunch of the villains from the run try to form essentially a "League of Spider-Woman Haters" to get revenge, but they're chumps, so it mostly ends in hilarious disaster. Vermis can't get Stegron the Dinosaur Man to stop flirting with her, the Brothers Grimm are arguing with the swordfighter brothers about stealing their bit. Of the two halves, I definitely prefer the second part, even with the Devil's Reign tie-in where we find out the Skrull Queen from Secret Invasion somehow survived Norman Osborn exploding her head. Yeah, I don't know.
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