SPIDER-WOMAN

Jessica Drew exists because of a race. In 1977, Marvel heard that Filmation was developing a cartoon heroine named Spider-Woman for Tarzan and the Super 7. If the cartoon aired first, the name might be lost — so Stan Lee had Archie Goodwin and Marie Severin invent a Spider-Woman of Marvel’s own, fast. She debuted in Marvel Spotlight #32 (February 1977), beat the cartoon to the public, and Filmation’s character had to be renamed Web Woman. The name was saved. The heroine, almost an afterthought, turned out to be worth keeping.

Her first origin was the wildest one she would ever get: Jessica was not human at all, but an actual spider, hyper-evolved into a woman by the High Evolutionary on Wundagore Mountain, then recruited by Hydra as their agent Arachne. It lasted about a year. When Marv Wolfman launched Spider-Woman #1 in 1978, he scrapped it: the spider story was a fabrication — false memories. Jessica was a human child, poisoned by the uranium in her father’s Wundagore laboratory, saved by an experimental serum of irradiated spider blood and years inside a genetic accelerator, which left her powered, slow to age, and missing pieces of her own life.

And then Marvel rewrote it again. Spider-Woman: Origin (2006), by Brian Michael Bendis and Brian Reed, moved the moment earlier still: Jessica’s mother, pregnant and working alongside her father on gene-splicing research at Wundagore, was struck by a laser carrying spider DNA — rewriting her unborn daughter in the womb. Three origins across three decades: evolved spider, serum-cured child, laser-touched infant. The constants never change — Wundagore, the High Evolutionary’s shadow, Hydra’s lies — and Jessica Drew, private detective and Avenger, has outlived every version of her own beginning.