Spider-Woman shown heavily pregnant in new comic
This article is more than 8 years old‘Parent by day. Hero by night,’ Jessica Drew is set to combine superheroics with child-rearing
Marvel Comics’ Spider-Woman has put up with a lot since her creation in 1977 – but nothing beats having to go out and fight crime while eight months pregnant.
That seems to be the case for Jessica Drew, who appears on the cover of a forthcoming edition of her comic with a very third-trimester-looking bump beneath her red costume.
The new issue of the comics industry’s forthcoming attractions journal, Preview, shows Spider-Woman flexing her muscles and displaying her stomach with the tagline “Parent by day. Hero by night.”
How can Marvel suddenly present a character in an advanced stage of pregnancy? Well, there’s a storyline going across all Marvel titles called Secret Wars, which is attempting to declutter the myriad Marvel Universes – there are several “lines”, each featuring many of the same characters, but in distinct worlds that have nothing to do with each other.
Confused? So are a lot of people, including potential new readers brought in by the success of the Marvel movies, which is possibly why the publisher is folding all its multiple worlds into one single Marvel Universe.
This is the reason the “official” Spider-Man in the new, simplified Marvel Universe will be mixed-race Miles Morales and not Peter Parker: Marvel is cherry-picking the best bits from its different lines and setting them in one coherent world.
The Secret Wars storyline runs over the summer with the brave new world introduced in titles selling in October, set eight months after the events of the crossover storyline.
Which, perhaps, explains why Jessica Drew is not far from giving birth. Her pregnancy will, undoubtedly, result from some event towards the climax of Secret Wars; but whether the father of the upcoming Spider-Baby is also a secret, and will form part of the storyline, is in the hands of the writer Dennis Hopeless and artist Javier Rodríguez.
Quite how Spider-Woman will juggle the demands of motherhood with her superhero obligations – especially given the US’s practically non-existent maternity pay system – remains to be seen.
It’s an interesting turn of events for the comics world in general and Spider-Woman in particular. Her crime-fighting career began in 1977 because Marvel wanted to copyright the name in case some rival tried to use it to cash in on the success of Spider-Man.
She acquired her own title in 1978. It ran for 50 monthly issues, at which point she was killed off. However, this being the world of comics, her death didn’t last too long – especially as there was outrage from fans, who possibly surprised Marvel with the strength of positive feeling for the character.
In the comics, Spider-Woman was created when desperately ill child Jessica Drew was injected with an experimental spider serum back in the 1930s, and put into suspended animation until she reached adulthood - with a full complement of spider-powers, including a bio-electrical venom “bite” - in the 70s.
Her least dignified moment came last year when there was a flap over a cover drawn by Italian artist Milo Manera which depicted Spider-Woman in a ligament-snapping porno pose while wearing a costume that clung to her backside like no fabric known to man.
Since Hopeless and Rodriguez revamped her with her latest comic, though, Jessica Drew has become something of a fan favourite and now has a more practical and less body-hugging costume.
Comics haven’t dealt very extensively with heroes as parents, which is hardly surprising. They were for a long time considered fodder for teenage boys (or juvenile men), so the adventures of a pregnant woman would not have been thought right for their demographic. With a drive to make comics more inclusive for a female audience, however, this appears to be simultaneously a brave and an inevitable development.
Presumably we won’t have long to wait before the launch of Spider-Kids.
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