User blog:Nausiated/Spider-Woman, Spider-Woman, does whatever a Spider uh... Well that doesn't really have the same ring to it now does it?

And lo, there shall be an ending! Sheesh, it seems like piling through both volumes of Essential Spider-Woman took forever! But I'm done! Done done done! In going over the old Spider-Woman series, it's interesting to note just how many weird characters were created for the series whom you hardly see anymore. Which I suppose is just as well, characters like the Needle, and Daddy Longlegs were just fringing on the ridiculous. They were interesting characters for one-off stories, but if they made regular appearances.. Well.. Could you see these characters as being a driving force in an epic series like Secret Invasion or Civil War? Nah, me either. The other interesting thing is how much they've retconned Spider-Woman's past, present, and future going forward. Starting right from the last issue of the series, Spider-Woman #50, where they effectively killed her and erased her memory from everyone in the Marvel Universe, they almost instantly reversed it all... And for what? To de-power her and have her hang out as an X-Men back-up character. That's something that I find interesting with a lot of the early Chris Claremont stories, all the books that he touched in the 70's and 80's had kind of a family thing going on (with the exception of I guess Man-Thing.) While he was writing Uncanny X-Men he had the group regularly interact with Power Man & Iron Fist and their supporting cast, same thing with Spider-Woman and Ms. Marvel. No surprise then when both Ms. Marvel and Spider-Woman ended up canned, their supporting casts kept on appearing in X-Men. Some may remember Carol Danver's brief stint with the X-Men after Rogue mind wiped her, she tackled the Brood, became Binary and joined up with the Starjammers. When the X-Men where tramping around San Francisco (The first time around anyway...) they holed up with Jessica Drew and the Spider-Woman supporting cast, and when they gave Wolverine his first on-going solo series, Jessica and Lindsay McCabe were one of the major supporting characters in Madripor. I always thought Spider-Woman got a raw deal, mostly because writers had different interpretations of what she was supposed to do, who she was and so on. The fact that they took her from being one of the New Men, and then retconning her into being a human mutate, and then tieing in Chthon in there of all things (Damn you Wundagore Mountain and your convoluted continuity! -- No seriously, all in the same time frame you had the High Evolutionary frigging around with his New Men, the Russell clan was being cursed by werewolves, the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were born there, the Whizzer and Miss America popped by and go THEIR continuity all buggered with the aforementioned mutant siblings, and the whole time Chthon is trying to get free AND the Puppet Master was getting radioactive clay Sweet !@#$.) Now I never read the Spider-Woman: Origin series that Bendis did, but didn't they revamp her history AGAIN? Ah well... Actually, I enjoyed how Bendis brought her back and made her a relevant and cool character, starting by bringing her back in Alias and then putting her in with the New Avengers. My final comments about Spider-Woman though... You have to admit, weird powers.... I don't know about the rest of you, but I find they aren't -- spidery -- enough. But I think that's the pitfall of all the Spider-Woman out there (Julie Carpenter, Mattie Franklin et al.) their powers are just not very spider-enough. But I stop and consider the alternative, if they were well they'd just be Spider-Man with *ahem ahems* and really, that would be kind of like a certain Man of Steel and his family of characters.... And with that segway, I go onto my next endeavor, piling through a good sum of Silver Age Pre-Crisis Superman and related titles... Which I'm sure will be a hair pulling experience. Excelsior!