SPIDER-WOMAN

Jessica Drew did not enter the Marvel Universe as a heroine. In her first appearance, Marvel Spotlight #32 (1977), she is Arachne, a field agent of Hydra, dispatched on an assassination: kill Nick Fury, the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. Hydra's European chief, Count Otto Vermis, had rescued the lost young woman, trained her in espionage and combat, and fitted her with a gliding uniform for the job.

The control ran deeper than orders. Vermis had Jessica's memories suppressed and her sense of self rewritten until she believed the lie Hydra needed her to believe: that she was not a woman at all, but a spider evolved into human shape by the High Evolutionary. Hydra even stage-managed her heart, assigning agent Jared Kurtz to become her lover so her loyalty had a face. An assassin who doubts she is human asks very few questions about a kill order.

Fury himself broke the spell. Face to face with her target, Jessica learned from him what Hydra and Kurtz really were — and walked away from the organisation mid-mission, abandoning the Arachne identity with it. The heroine who would become a detective, an Avenger, and one of Marvel's most dogged survivors began her career by refusing, at the last possible moment, to pull the trigger she had been built for.