MYTHCOMICS: "SINS OF THE FLESH" (SPIDER-WOMAN #18, 1979)

As I said in the previous essay, Jessica/Spider-Woman breaks up with her boyfriend Jerry in issue #16. Issue #17 in part concerns the "Dark Angel" trying to get back into the dating scene by attending a disco. She meets a guy named Eric and allows him to drive her home, though he ends up parking with her on a lonely knoll. The issue ends with Eric hiding his face from Jessica as his very flesh starts to dissolve. At the beginning of "Sins," he bolts from the car into a nearby forest. Jessica, concerned that her pheromones might be having a bad influence on an innocent man, follows. When she overtakes him, he seems totally fine again. He leans for a friendly kiss, and...

 "I can't hold it anymore," indeed! I'm rather surprised that in the early 2000s, when snarky comics fans entertained themselves trying to find panels that put pop-fiction characters in compromising positions, none of them apparently came across this oddball gem.

Of course, my interest isn't mere snark, but the ongoing psychology underlying the War Between Men and Women. Instead of acting like an imperturbable superhero, Jessica is quite naturally freaked out by having "worms of flesh" crawl over her after coming off the face of a melting man. She copes somewhat through her ability to zap away the flesh-threads with her venom-powers.

In her Spider-Woman guise, the heroine tails Eric to another disco, but fails to see him leave his car, considering the likelihood that the strange man may be "able to mold his face like putty and change his appearance." She stakes out the disco and sees a different-looking man drive away in the car, accompanied by a pickup. Spider-Woman surveils the house where the suspect takes the young woman, but when nothing happens for a bit, the heroine flies away, wondering if she could have hallucinated the episode. But she gets no surcease of trepidation when she goes home, haunted by the experience of "having flesh crawl on me that is not my own."

To no reader's surprise, the young woman Spider-Woman watched the previous night is a corpse in the morning. Angry at her own negligence, the Dark Angel begins hitting the discos again, trying to look for anyone who behaves analogously to the mysterious Eric. She finally meets a likely candidate, but instead of taking the man to her own domicile, she conducts the fellow to the unoccupied house of her former landlord Mrs. Dolly. Jessica leaves the man alone, steals out of the house and changes into her super-identity. As she confronts the man whom the captions call "The Waxman," he has a flashback as to how he mutated to his melting-man form. Then he hits the heroine with a gob of loose flesh and flees upstairs.

The final two pages, while not a "fight" in the usual Marvel sense, plays merry hob with the nature of identity. Waxman alters his appearance to that of Jessica herself, poleaxing her long enough to unleash a flesh-trap. But this time Spider-Woman zaps the killer and his flesh-worms with her venom, and all of his "sinful flesh" apparently collapses from his denuded skeleton.

The ambiguous ending allowed a later writer to revive the Waxman further down the road, but thankfully Gruenwald "lets the dead lie," so to speak. Despite the presence of a superhero, "Sins of the Flesh" is a better example of "body horror" than most comparable stories from later comics-generations.

ADDENDUM: Carmine Infantino only penciled one more issue of SPIDER-WOMAN after #18, while Gruenwald finished up his run the issue after that. I will probably reread the other thirty issues, but I doubt there will be much worth commenting on, since Wolfman and Gruenwald had provided the groundwork for the Jessica Drew/Spider-Woman mythos. As noted earlier, Roger Stern would weave that mythos and several other loose ends into an overarching continuity. But in the SPIDER-WOMAN title, I don't believe there were any major developments, particularly eliminating the "weirdie" vibe seen in the first twenty issues. Michael Fleischer wrote some rather pedestrian tales, Chris Claremont rendered various strong formula-stories (most often with artist Steve Leialoha), and Ann Nocenti finished up the last four issues with a controversial narrative in which Spider-Woman was erased from Marvel history. Naturally, this was soon reversed, for the essence of Marvel Comics was the potential interfusion of every element with every other element. It's my loose impression, though, that even though the SPIDER-WOMAN series was not a great sales success, few if any later iterations have eclipsed its accomplishments.

SPIDER-FEMME, SPIDER-FEMME PART 2

 As I said earlier, I'm working my way to my second mythcomic, which happens to be the eighteenth issue of SPIDER-WOMAN. I don't propose to go over each of the seventeen previous issues, but to give some flavor of the feature's early history, I want to touch on the high points.

#1-- I don't want to overstate the importance of Marv Wolfman having the insight to recycle Goodwin's idea that the starring heroine seemed to repel people, though not for Goodwin's original reason. It was typical for all Marvel heroes to have some sort of trauma or character flaw that would make them sympathetic to the audience. Yet Wolfman's treatment of his costumed champion was far more interesting than his uninventive treatment of his superhero "Nova" around the same time, and in some ways she's one of Marvel's first truly "feminine" superheroines. On the fifth page of the first issue, she's still in London, trying to make a living, but frozen out by many citizens, *especially* other women. She gets a new costume, new name Jessica Drew, a fuller origin and a potential new boyfriend, SHIELD agent Jerry Hunt.

#2-- Though I said elsewhere that Jessica's only connection with knights-in-armor were the demi-human Knights of Wundagore, here she has a Close Encounter of the Medieval Kind. While visiting a museum she finds she has a strange intuitive knowledge of Matters Arthurian. At the same time, the sorceress Morgan Le Fay-- only seen in a non-magical iteration back in the BLACK KNIGHT comic book of 1955-- projects her spirit to 1978. She uses a magic sword that's on display to take control of a petty thief, changing him into a super-knight to achieve her ends. The false knight seeks out an old, Merlin-like sorcerer, Charles Magnus, because Morgan wants Magnus's copy of the Book of the Darkhold. Spider-Woman befriends Magnus, defeats the pawn and banishes Morgan for the time being.

#3-6-- In a smorgasbord of storylines, Magnus accompanies Jessica to Los Angeles. In swift succession she meets a new villain called Brother Grimm (later revealed to be two villains in one, the Brothers Grimm), the Hangman (a WEREWOLF BY NIGHT foe created by Wolfman), the Werewolf himself, and Morgan LeFay again. The Morgan plotline links her desire for the Darkhold to the past history of the Werewolf, which is a more mainstream exposure for the evil tome than its appearances in the monster-books. Agent Jerry Hunt tracks Jessica to L.A. and the two become lovers.

#9-- After two more Wolfman issues, he departed the book. (A podcast quoted him as saying he didn't know what he was doing on the feature.) Mark Gruenwald assumed writing duties, and he, in tandem with artist Carmine Infantino, amped up the eerie qualities of the book. Infantino had been on the title since issue #1 but his arabesque artwork seemed pent-up in his work with Wolfman. Gruenwald's weird menaces gave Infantino lots of weirdness to illustrate-- the Needle, the Gypsy Moth, Madame Doll (admittedly set up for her role by Wolfman), the Cult of Kali and the albino mutant Nekra (originally from the short-lived SHANNA THE SHE-DEVIL title). I felt during this period that Gruenwald showed a strong predilection for sussing out the feminine nature of Jessica Drew-- particularly when she learns that her inability to make friends is the result of her giving off "allure or alarm" pheromones as a result of the spider-serum that mutated Jessica as a child.  

Not that the title was foreign to the sort of hard-hitting action that male readers tend to prefer. Even allowing for the fact that Marvel Comics almost never showed bloodshed, the battle between Spider-Woman and the near-invulnerable Nekra is one of the most brutal fights seen in Marvel Comics up to 1978. Curiously, it's also at this point that Gruenwald, who had slowly built up tensions between Jessica and Jerry, has Jerry take his leave, so that Jessica must deal with being the odd woman out again. That leads Jessica to the world of the L.A. dating scene-- and by the end of #17, she makes her first contact with the perfidious Waxman, the subject of my review in the forthcoming essay.

Parenthetically, the main reason Infantino was available to draw SPIDER-WOMAN was because he had been ousted from his position of editorial director at DC Comics. Since he's been responsible for the "Gothicization" of DC Comics beginning in the mid-sixties-- as I described here-- it's appropriate that one of Infantino's first assignments at Marvel was one of its few "Gothic" serials.

 ADDENDUM 7-13-2024: Since I commented above on Wolfman's rewriting of Goodwin, I may as well follow up with quick comments on Chris Claremont's rewriting of both previous SPIDER-WOMAN writers during his run, particularly in issue #41 (December 1981). This story has the heroine tilt once more with the sorceress Morgan LeFay, whom Wolfman introduced into the feature-- and into mainstream Marvel-- in issue #2 (1978). Claremont has LeFay put Jessica Drew through an Arthurian illusion, which is part of a complicated plot to make Spider-Woman serve her. Wolfman had Jessica experience some unusual psychic knowledge of Matters Arthurian in his issue #2 story, but Claremont does not follow up on this never developed plot-thread. 

Whereas Wolfman's Morgan simply tried to use the heroine to acquire the book of the Darkhold, in issue #41 Claremont's Morgan believes Spider-Woman to be an embodiment of the Darkhold powers. This concept was unquestionably a response to the 1979 "Yesterday Quest" story in AVENGERS #185-187, which tied together the story-threads of Morgan, the Darkhold, Wundagore and Modred the Mystic far more intimately. Claremont also brought up the Darkhold again in SPIDER-WOMAN #42-44 (1982). Yet Claremont made the odd statement that Spider-Woman remained in stasis at Wundagore for thirty years. Since Little Jessica looks to be about five before she succumbs to radiation poisoning, that would make her thirty-five as soon as she finally emerges from stasis, feels rejected by the New Men, leaves Wundagore, finds love in some European village, and then gets recruited by Hydra. All very well, but no artist ever rendered Jessica Drew as anything but a young woman in her twenties.

These minor ruminations on the AVENGERS retcon, some of which were reversed by later Marvel raconteurs, sum up Claremont's only significant additions to the "Spider-Woman myth." I will also note, though, that Claremont largely dropped the idea that the heroine had to regularly cope with repelling certain humans with her pheromones, which was one of the more interesting tropes of the character.