Can we just talk about the crazy backstories of Madame Web’s Spider-Women?
Mrs. Web‘S poor initial performance at the box office suggests that few people want to see it in a theater, let alone talk about it sight unseen. But there’s one aspect we have to talk about because it’s so wild. Mrs. Web is a rarity in modern superhero cinema: a movie that your friends would think you were making up if you described it without embellishment. Ironically, this keeps it entirely true to the era of comic books it adapts. Not only does the comic book version of protagonist Cassandra Webb have a series of powers and stories behind her that are so confusing, I can’t fathom how anyone thought they would make a coherent movie, it Also features a trio of other Spider-Women with origins beyond belief.
All these women make the Peter Parker/Miles Morales origin of “bitten by a radioactive spider” seem mundane by comparison, the cartoon version of a baking soda volcano at a high school science fair. Here’s a look at where this trio came from, according to Marvel Comics canon.
Aña Corazon
The early 2000s was a rich period of white comics writers and artists inventing marginalized characters, and Aña Corazón (initially called “Araña,” the Spanish word for “spider”) was one of them. The origin of Aña is some real body horror wizard shit. The story is about a war between two secret magical clans between which she is trapped. Ultimately, she is imbued with a magical tattoo that gives her a crude blue shield that she can summon at will. They’re kind of like rules, to be honest.
But without a steady creative champion writing her stories, Aña bounced around the Spider-Man family of comic books, with her powers and backstory slightly reworked each time. (You won’t notice any shield in the Mrs. Web version, in which she is played by Isabela Merced. But you can see it in her very brief appearance Spider-Man: About the Spider-Verse, above: Standing among a group of other shocked Spider-People, she responds to Miles’ escape attempt by summoning her armor.) For a while, Aña even remained a superhero without powers. Nowadays she goes by Spider-Girl (she is one of many who do) and has a much more traditional set of spin-related powers.
Mattie Franklin
Image: John Byrne, Rafael Kayanan/Marvel Comics
Mattie Franklin (played in Mrs. Web by Celeste O’Connor) may have the wildest origin of the three women here, stemming from one of the latest in a very long list of terrible decisions Marvel made in the ’90s Spider-Man comics. climactic story that precedes a soft reboot, Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, performs an elaborate occult ritual that is supposed to give him the powers of Spider-Man. Mattie gets them insteadas readers discovered in a big twist showing Peter Parker not as Spider-Man for the big relaunch of his comic in 1999.
Like all big, shocking changes in superhero comics, this one was undone pretty quickly, and so was Mattie yet another Spider-Woman it comes and goes as writers and artists reinvent it. Lately she’s been acquiring a set of those robotic spider arms, the same kind that baffling villain Ezekiel Sims sees in Mrs. Web through a muddy vision of the future. They’re pretty neat.
Julia Timmerman
Image: Roy Thomas, Dann Thomas, John Czop/Marvel Comics
What you need to understand about the Julia Carpenter version of Spider-Woman is that she barely makes sense as a Spider-person. Her most famous adaptation ever Mrs. Web (where her name is Julia Cornwall, and played by Sydney Sweeney) was in the 90’s Iron Man animated series, where she almost never crawled on a single wall. Also whether she could spin webs (and how) varied from episode to episode.
Her comic book origins has more in common with a ’70s spy thriller than anything Peter Parker has been up to: she is unwittingly given powers by a government think tank and then recruited into a group of superhuman G-Men called the Freedom Force. Despite having the coolest costume (perhaps a direct inspiration for Spider-Man’s famous black symbiote suit), no one ever knew what to do with Julia Carpenter, which probably explains why the “powers and abilities” section of her wiki is so damn confusing.
Why is Madame Web so bad?
Image: Fiona Avery, Mark Brooks/Marvel Comics
So given all this strange, convoluted backstory, given so much colorful and exciting nonsense to draw from, why? Mrs. Web defang (or in this case de-chelicerae?) its young heroines by limiting their hero identity to a single recurring nightmare scene? Although most of this backstory wouldn’t have fit into the larger one Spider-Man universe Sony builds, Mrs. Web is intended more as a standalone film, with minimal connections to the SSU. That could have given director SJ Clarkson and the four credited screenwriters a lot of freedom to include at least a hint of some of the stories that stand out from the film. Mrs. Web‘s Spider-Women from each other.
But since we don’t get any origin stories for these three in the movie at all – they don’t gain their powers or costumes in this story, they never become heroes, and the entire story plays out half-like a Madame Web. origin story, half as a prequel to a film we can’t imagine will ever get made – there’s no room for that kind of color or detail.
It’s hard to imagine some of this material being played out on screen: the magical ritual to strengthen the spider, the backstory of the big team of even more superheroes that this movie has absolutely nothing to do with, and so on. And the small origins we encounter in the film – a child whose father was deported, a neglected “poor little rich girl” type, a literal red-headed stepchild – fit much better with the modern trend toward “realistic” superhero stories.
It’s just a bit of a shame when you think about how similar these realistic stories look, compared to the much more diverse and dazzling stories that the print versions of these heroines came from. Oh yeah; we’ll always have Marvel back issues to go back to when we want the body-horror-and-magic version of the story.