Spider-Who Part 9: Spider-Woman, Jessica Drew

It’s been a while since I talked about any women spiders, and I’ve also been going off into bizarre alternate realities for a number of entries. So how about going back to the regular Marvel 616 universe and talk about the original Spider-Woman? Sounds good to me. Also, I apologize in advance, as this is probably going to be a long one.

When Jessica was just a year old, her parents moved to live in the beautiful mountainous regions of a (fictional) country called Transia. On their property in the Wundagore Mountains, her father discovered there were deposits of uranium. He sold batches of it to fund his work and build a research lab so he and his wife could continue their experiments on genetics and evolution. It didn’t take long for the very young Jessica to become deathly ill from her exposure to the radioactive materials in the Earth around their home.

Being a crazy geneticist, Jessica’s father decided to mix up a concoction made of the blood of a bunch of super rare spiders and inject it into his daughter, as you do. I mean, of course. Who wouldn’t? After this didn’t seem to work (weird), he stuck her in a stasis tube/genetic accelerator, and left her in there for a few decades. She eventually woke up on her own, completely alone, her parents long disappeared, and discovered she had several super powers. Her aging had been slowed, but she was still now fully grown. Talk about a crappy childhood. She didn’t discover her powers all right away though. After living in the nearby town for a bit, there was an accident and she killed her first boyfriend. This resulted in the isolated town believing her to be a witch and sending out an angry mob after her. Not knowing where to go or what to do, she was taken in by a man named Otto Vermis.

It turns out Mr. Vermis was a high ranking member of HYDRA, the enemy organization to SHIELD, and they gave her extensive training to make her a world class spy and assassin. After rebelling against them during her very first mission, refusing to kill the leader of SHIELD, Nick Fury, she became a hero. Beyond this Jessica Drew has a long and complicated history of going between being a hero, a detective, a villain, losing and regaining her powers, and even being replaced by the Queen of the Skrulls (shape changing aliens).

In terms of abilities and powers, she has a LONG list of them. Jessica has all the usual super strength, durability, reflexes, and agility you’d expect of a superhero. She can also wall-crawl like Spider-Man, but that’s about where the similarities between the two stop. She can output a bio-electric blast from her hands she calls her “Venom Blast” though it has nothing to do with poison. Speaking of poisons, she’s completely immune to all forms of poisons and toxins, likely due to her father filling her full of weird spider blood and who knows what else. She’s also completely immune to radioactivity. Her body will also rapidly adapt and become immune to any new toxic substance she comes into contact with. Her body puts off extremely strong pheromones, which can attract or repel people, depending on… whatever the writer wants, that bit isn’t really clear. Also unclear is her ability to fly. Originally she could only glide with the little wings she has under her arms (simply part of her costume), but later she got a power upgrade, and then could fully fly, but then that was revealed to be the Skrull Queen, so now who knows?

In addition to bizarre superpowers, her spy training from both HYDRA and SHIELD have resulted in her knowing AT LEAST 8 languages, being highly trained in Karate, Boxing, Capoeira, Judo and swordfighting. She’s also an Olympic-level gymnast (though I bet her super agility helps with that) and an expert in all things espionage, covert operations and stealth.

So there you have it. I know this was a long post, but Jessica Drew has been around for a long damn time, and I even cut out a ton of stuff that I felt wasn’t necessary to go into. I’ll try to make my next entry shorter. 😉