Parenting 101: Spider-Woman #5

Adding a baby/child to a superhero comic book series is always problematic.  Superhero stories are meant to be timeless, in a sense, as the heroes don't age, or they age very slowly.  But throw a child into the mix and suddenly you have a benchmark against which events happen.  Invariably a child ages (because babies tend to offer limited storytelling possibilities) thus so too does the hero.  The drama in child rearing is largely one of the progression of parenting.  As a baby develops into a proper little person, they develop personality, quirks and ticks, mannerisms sometimes adopted from the parent and sometimes manifesting on their own.  As entertainment, watching a child grow, and how a parent responds to its growth is a natural source of drama and comedy, sometimes even terror and suspense, stories that TV and movies, novels and plays have been utilizing for years.  Comic books, particularly mainstream superhero ones, largely avoid it for the reasons above, but Spider-Woman is braving these waters, and issue 5 is perhaps the most on-the-nose tribute to being a new parent.  The first three pages find Jessica Drew spouting off about the challenges, emotional fatigue and trauma that come with being a new parent.  Dennis Hopeless nails it so completely and concisely... and brilliantly I might add. Javier Rodriguez nails the details, the way Jess holds the baby, the mess, the spit-up on her shirt, the unkempt, bleary-eyed appearance...picking things up with your toes....  Yup.  Parenthood.  It kind of sucks.  But it gets better.

But I absolutely connected with what Jess says in the first panel of the third page:

My wife can surely tell you about how often I would wake her up in the middle of the night in a cold panic rifling through the sheets looking for our daughter.  We never once even co-slept with her and yet this was a recurring panic dream of mine.  The fact that Hopeless (via Jess) is mentioning it makes me wonder if this is a common phenomenon.  I look forward to the letter column in a couple issues to see if there are others who had similar experiences.

Just brilliant stuff.

Catching up on Comics with CGraig: Spider-Woman #2-3

(Marvel, 2016)

I find it interesting that Spider-Woman is now more affiliated with Captain Marvel than Spider-Man these days (note the good Captain's positioning on the covers of 2 & 3... particularly in the logo of #3), but then again Jessica has been fairly independent from Peter's affairs almost from day one.  In fact, it usually seems weird when the Spiders Man and Woman collide.  Unlike Supergirl or She-Hulk who are gender analogues to a certain extent of their male counterparts, Spider-Woman has a very broad breadth of distance to be her own thing.  It was more in the Ultimates universe where the quasi- transgendered Spider-Woman worked as an Agent of Shield and mentor to Miles Morales (didn't read any of the Ultimate Peter Parker run, so I'm  not sure how much she factored into his life... though I suppose she'd be fairly closely tied being a genetically manipulated clone of Parker).  

I get the feeling that with the post-Secret Wars relaunch of the title Marvel is taking the opportunity to kind of make Jessica Drew more like Jessica Jones, given the popularity of the Netflix series and the otherwise nominal cache Jones has in the comic book world).  Though strangely,  they're making Jessica Drew more like the comics JJ than the TV one.  Then again, Jessica Jones was originally intended to be Jessica Drew before Marvel brass had second thoughts about putting a Spider-character in as the lead of an adult-themed book.

Just like JJ, Drew is a private investigator, she's best friends with Carol Danvers, and now she's pregnant, which is a notable comparison because not many people get pregnant in comics (can we get a run-down of all the knocked-up superheroes in comics history please?).

We've skipped past conception and the first nine months to find a bursting-at-the-seams Jessica in an intergalactic birthing hospital (at Carol's insistence)... which just so happened to fall under siege of some Skrulls just after she arrived.  Jessica has history with the Skrulls so no matter how pregnant she is, she's not just going to sit by and let the dimple-chinned freaks get away with...whatever they're doing (she doesn't really care all that much). 

She has to make her way through the hospital at one point,  which finds her intruding on some other patients unintentionally...and Javier Rodriguez really gets to let loose creatively here, with a trio of pages that would make Kirby and Ditko pause fro a moment.  I could go for a whole issue of pin-up pages of Rodriguez's vision of this alien hospital.