Saturday, July 27, 2024

Saturday Splash Page #135

 
"Cowboys and Arachnids," in Spider-Woman (vol. 5) #9, by Dennis Hopeless (writer), Javier Rodriguez (penciler/colorist), Alvaro Lopez (inker), Travis Lanham (inker)

After Jessica Drew's series ended with her death, Marvel eventually introduced a new Spider-Woman during Secret Wars. While Julia Carpenter had a long stint on the West Coast Avengers, and even got tagged as Tony Stark's love interest on the '90s Iron Man cartoon, she never got more than a single 4-issue mini-series, back in 1993.

Spider-Woman volume 3 was Mattie Franklin's book, the character created by John Byrne and Howard Mackie after the Spider-Man books got rebooted in an attempt to wipe the Clone Saga stink off them. It lasted a year-and-a-half, and then Mattie largely vanished. Volume 4 was Bendis and Maleev writing Jessica Drew after Bendis used Drew in his Avengers run (and revamped her powers so her pheromones attracted people, rather than repulsing them as they did in the first year+ of volume 1.) That book only lasted 7 issues, and that was it for about 5 years, until Dennis Hopeless started volume 5.

The book actually started with 4 issues of some Spider-Verse tie-ins, drawn by Greg Land, which I skipped. They aren't relevant to anything that happens in the remainder of the volume, so feel free to skip them, too. Though that only leaves 6 issues until the book was canceled for Hickman's Secret Wars. Once the book actually gets down to business, Hopeless has Drew return to something like the private investigator era of the Claremont/Leialoha run, looking into odd stories for Ben Urich. The other member of the cast was Roger, the current Porcupine, who Jessica caught robbing a bank in what turned out to be an extortion scheme of a group of low-level super-villains by their exes and mothers of their children.

Javier Rodriguez drew and colored every issue except the final one, issue 10, when the Black Widow drags Jess back into the Avengers to perform the entirely pointless task of co-piloting one of those ships the Illuminati came up with to save a couple thousand people from the end of the universe. Would have made more sense for Jessica to tell the Widow to fuck off and enjoy hanging out with her friends until everything ended. That's what Deadpool did, and for once, he had the right idea!

Where was I? Oh yeah, Rodriguez. The book is gorgeous, as Rodriguez does a lot of interesting stuff with page layouts or perspectives within the panels themselves. Spider-Woman gets a new costume, one of the "practical" look redesigns that were popular at the time. I like the yellow glasses and the jacket is nifty. He uses the shadows to emphasize the logo, or her venom blast, making things pop off the page spectacularly.

It's not a deeply serious book, with Jessica seemingly just wanting to escape Avengers stuff, Urich try to save his paper and maybe help some people, and Porcupine trying to be a better guy. So a lot of the threats are high concept or just silly. Which does give Rodriguez fun stuff to draw, like Hulk cows or an exo-suit constructed from earth-moving equipment.

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