Stylish but frazzled, overworked yet cheerful, our hero Gwen Stacy from Earth-65 (Spider-Gwen) must travel the timeline and the multiverse to find five alternate Gwens before the apocalyptic baddie Finale can invade, or erase, or rewrite, or something, Earth-65’s New York! What will she find when she dares to visit…. the late 1980s? Spider-Gwen: Gwen-Verse #3, writing by Tim Seeley, art by Jodi Nishijima, colors by Juan Fernandez, letters by Ariana Maher.
Save the Gwens– Collect the Whole Set
Some comics– indeed, some Spider-Gwen comics: check out Seanan McGuire’s!– are written for newbies, or for voracious readers who read things other than super-comics: they build protagonist, antagonists, supporting casts, and out of a handful of characters construct a story. They also borrow slowly and deliberately from the shared universe in which they grow, so that every guest shot, every callback, serves a central narrative.
Other superhero comics aim, by and large, for people who have already read a ton of superhero comics: the callbacks and the guest shots and the knowing glimpses of previous stories, refracted through alternate universes, new perspectives, or olden times, are the point. That’s not a bad thing, any more than poets who write poems for poets, or painters who paint for painters! And it’s not necessarily bad for storytelling: look at Kurt Busiek’s original Marvels. But it is a thing.
And it seems to be Tim Seeley’s thing, so far, in this delightful but limited limited series. We open in a kind of Spider-space, “four women… assembled in a pocket dimension” from the last two timeline-hopping issues. There’s Spider-Gwen, Ghost Spider (original flavor). There’s helmeted, wide-eyed Thorgwen from the distant Asgardian past, who says things like “I am still owed proper worship!” (she says them in Asgardian-font, which helps). There’s Wolvergwen, who looks like Gwen but also like Logan (Wolverine), a homicide-prone meanie with the usual trio of claws. And there’s a Gwen who is also Captain America: idealistic, retro, throws a fine shield. A fifth women is Spider Zero, who looks like Kamala Khan cosplaying Spider-Woman and who knows a lot about travel between dimensions. She doesn’t go anywhere, but sends others where they need to go: in this case Las Vegas, 1988.
What Happens in Vegas
Who’s the most famous Marvel hero not yet represented by a Gwen? If you said “Illyana Rasputina, Magik, sometime Darkchilde, Queen of Limbo” I would love you till the end of time but we’d both know you didn’t mean it: the answer is Iron Man, and of course the fifth time-displaced Gwen is “Toni” Stacy, girl genius, beta tester, and convention model for the suit of red-and-yellow armor developed by OSSTech, unveiled at (wait for it) the Transmode Convention. OSS, of course, stands for the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II precursor to today’s CIA, and the Transmode Convention examines new ways to treat or cure Warlock’s transmode virus, the techno-organic OSS, the acronym’s heritage notwithstanding, stands (as Gwen discovers) for “Osborn, Stark…. and Stacy.”
Because it’s a tech event with a gaming track, our Gwen-heroes have no trouble getting in: “did we just invent cosplay?” one asks. Toni herself makes manga and anime references: she’s a top-flight late-80s Girl Nerd, with a capital G and N, and her Iron Gwen suit fascinates Thor-Gwen, appalls Wolvergwen (who would love to cut it open), and confuses Gwentain America (Captain Amerigwen?), who doesn’t know an exoskeleton from a mecha from an otaku.
But there’s hardly time to sort things out: Finale’s hired baddies– the Glam Goblin, who’s like a glam Green Goblin, and Dirty 13, who projects bad luck– show up to kill one or more Gwens. Norman Osborn turns out to be, not the Green Goblin (there’s already a Glam Goblin), but something like a green Hulk, easily manipulated into attacking Gwen. Tony Stark turns out to be pretty useless, and Toni lets the Gwen-team take her away.
It’s a fun fight, but a confusing one too, with a Osborn who grows, a Glam Goblin whose glam hair is a wig and whose real face sports a Starkish goatee, and a Tony who shrinks (from heroism) and looks, with his black overhanging curls, a bit like the Beyonder. Jodi Nishijima excels at the changing angles and goofy chaos involved in a semi-serious costumed-hero battle, organizing (or disorganizing) page after page.
Juan Fernandez’s colors fit the almost Silver Age battle’s mood, with purples and greens for the baddies, red, white, black and blue for the heroes. As for Ariana Maher’s lettering, that often-overlooked art, it stands out in a lovely way for the mid-combat baddie exclamations– “SOLO SONIC ASSAULT!”– and in an odd way thanks to the speech balloons’ tails: they’re white and do not taper to a point and they look like noodles. Are these balloons the future? They’re not like the past.
Perchance to Meme
Nor does our band of Gwens’ future look much like their past, or pasts, or whatever the word should be: the five of them end where four of them began, in a time outside time and a space outside space, but very close to comic book continuity, “pulled from lives they thought were theirs.” Ghost Spider’s tour of alternate-history Gwens has retconned everything: “Threads we lay back in the ‘50s ran right through this era” (meaning the 1980s) “and there’s no way what happened today doesn’t weave into tomorrow.”
It’s all a tangled web (see what she did there?), and a way for characters inside the Marvel multiverse to think about what it means to be comic book characters, constantly subject to callbacks and retcons and crossover events where nothing will ever be the same, and this is as good a place as any to point out that the wonderful podcast about comic book events, Chrises on Infinite Earths is ending real soon, and, you know, nothing will ever be the same.
Back to our Gwen-story, though: Seeley, or someone, wants to do for Gwen’s connection to the whole ding-dang Marvel Comics multiverse what the film Into the Spider-Verse did for the Spider-People, Gwen included. But the movie spent an hour establishing movie Miles’s life: this series doesn’t and can’t. It just builds on previous teams’ work with the character, and I’m not sure Seeley’s scenes of alternate Gwens have risen above fan service yet.
They’re pretty good fan service, though. I’m having fun. I’m gonna reread to see if I can find more jokes like Captain Amerigwen’s reference: “I got more than just my moves from the comics. Ms. Wilson gave all kinds of advice too.” A gender-swapped Captain Sam Wilson, the onetime Falcon? Ms. Marvel writer (and writer of many other awesome things) G. Willow Wilson? Both?
And I’m gonna reread– and quote and send out panels– from the digression that makes the best part of this issue, the origin story for the Big Bad, Finale, who makes memes at the end of space and time: her mom, you see, was a moderately successful, and therefore badly paid, poet whose daughter learned to “navigate time…. There wasn’t one single future where anyone remembered my mom and her work… But you know what showed up in every timeline?…. Superheroes.” Why not give up poetry and work on superheroes instead, and try to be famous that way, or at least attract a parasocial following by manipulating the Web and finding allies who can make hot memes? I’ll have to look into that. Maybe next issue will show me the way.
Chris Eddleman is a biologist and co-host of Chrises On Infinite Earths.
