Saturday, August 03, 2024

Saturday Splash Page #136

 
"GUNK", in Spider-Woman (vol. 6) #3, by Dennis Hopeless (writer), Javier Rodriguez (penciler), Alvaro Lopez (inker), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer)

Spider-Woman volume 5 ended in the summer of 2015, as part of the mass cancelation of Marvel's line, due to Hickman's Secret Wars. Spider-Woman volume 6 started 3 months later, probably before Hickman's stupid event was even finished.

As with a lot of books around that time, the creative team of the new volume was the same as the prior volume (minus Rosenberg taking the color duties off Rodriguez's hands.) Most of the titles tried to make some status quo change as a result of the undefined timeskip. Deadpool was now rich, famous and beloved. Squirrel Girl was now an Avenger and a second-year computer science student. Ms. Marvel, actually, I don't remember what the difference was for Kamala.

Jessica Drew's big change was being pregnant. Hopeless played cagey with the identity of the father, but that was 8 years ago so I'm just going to spoil it: We don't know who the father is. Jess decided she wanted to have a kid, so she went to a sperm clinic. There, saved you some time.

The birth is out of the way in issue 4. From there, the book remains much the same as the previous volume, as Jess works with Roger (the Porcupine) and Ben Urich on various cases, when one or more of them isn't looking after her son, Gerry.

(Something I only remembered when going through my Spider-Girl comics for upcoming Saturday Splash Page entries is there was a whole storyline about a mysterious new Spider-Man, who turned out to be Jessica Drew's son, named Gerry. Did not expect Hopeless to actually play off that, although this version of Gerry has his mom's venom blasts and that version either didn't, or wasn't using them, to avoid giving away the secret.)

With Spider-Woman not trying so hard to avoid Avengers-type stuff, Rodriguez gets to draw much stranger things than in volume 1. The page above is part of Spider-Woman's journey across a space station set within a black hole that has been taken over by Skrulls. Later on, there's an issue of her fighting Tiger Shark with a lovely page of their battle through a series of flooded sewer tunnels. Rosenberg keeps the colors bright and sharp, making everything pop off the page.

The book does get derailed by events. First, two tie-in issues to another Spider-Verse thing (which I skipped when I hunted this down in back issues.) Then, three issues of Civil War II tie-ins, as Jess is skeptical of this Ulysses kid and his precognition, all the moreso when Hawkeye kills Bruce Banner because of it. The curious thing is that, while Jess seemingly really wants to talk to Hawkeye, that never happens. Instead she has a big fight with Carol Danvers (who was the one touting "Minority Report was a good idea, actually" and essentially tells Captain Marvel to lose her number. Which explains why Hopeless was playing up the friendship between the two so much for the first half-dozen issues.

(Tigra and Spider-Woman became friends at the tail end of volume 1, before Drew ever fished Danvers' comatose husk out of San Francisco Bay, but nobody ever has those two hang out.)

The back half of the book, where Veronica Fish takes over as artist, is focused more on Jess and Roger, as Roger's criminal past comes back to haunt him, and Spider-Woman realizes she has caught the dreaded feelings. The feelings manifest in her beating the crap out of a bunch of villains working for the Hobgoblin. The real deal, Roderick Kingsley version, accept no shitty substitutes. Fish's artwork isn't as fluid or detailed as Rodriguez's, but she's adept at interesting page layouts and knows how to draw action sequences, both exciting and humorous.

(Oddly, the one issue where she finishes over Rodriguez's art - the last of the Civil War II tie-ins - doesn't look great. It's rough and things just look awkward. Their styles apparently don't mesh.)

The book ends at 17 issues, with Jessica having decided she's going to date Roger, no matter how many snippy comments the Black Widow makes. I don't see how a woman who willingly dated Matt Murdock has a leg to stand on about taste in men, but oh well. Natasha gets humiliated by a super-powered infant, so nerts to her.

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