Fifty years of Jessica Drew means mystery, monsters, bad decisions… and one very judgmental bird
Fifty years is a long time to be Spider-Woman.
It is also apparently long enough to learn that your life can involve graffiti influencers, Flying Tiger, giant spider monsters, the Jackal’s old experiments and a symbiote with serious boundary issues.
Happy anniversary, Jessica Drew!
Spider-Woman 50th Anniversary Special #1 celebrates Jessica through two stories deliberately split between “Then” and “Now.” “High Tag Wins” comes from writer Ann Nocenti, artist Stefano Raffaele and color artist Neeraj Menon, while “The Mysterious Spider-Woman” is by Dan Watters, Andrea Broccardo and Mattia Iacono.
And rather than producing one giant continuity lecture, the special remembers something important:
Jessica Drew is really fun when her life gets weird.
PROS
“High Tag Wins” is definitely the lighter half, dropping Jessica into sunny Los Angeles where she is attempting something bordering on impossible:
Having a social life.
Jessica hangs out poolside with Molly and Carlo, but even here she’s wrestling with her pheromone powers and wondering how much they affect the people around her. Meanwhile Molly is competing in an increasingly dangerous graffiti-tagging contest, covering skyscrapers with elaborate bird designs and chasing viral fame.
Then Flying Tiger crashes the party.
Because obviously.
The whole thing has a wonderfully chaotic rhythm. Jessica fights Flying Tiger underwater among inflatable pool toys, worries about Molly dangling from a skyscraper, discovers a suspiciously clever bird fluttering around the entire mess, and somehow finds herself solving a stolen-sapphire mystery while trying to keep everyone alive.
My favorite gag is the eventual discovery that Flying Tiger didn’t steal the sapphire at all.
A bird did.
Imagine having your supervillain reputation tarnished by grand-theft-avian.
The story also finds a sweet character beat beneath all the silliness. Jessica spends much of it worrying that her powers make normal relationships difficult, yet Molly genuinely likes having her around. Jessica even finishes Molly’s enormous building-spanning bird artwork after Molly gets injured.
Illegal graffiti?
Yes.
Heartwarming friendship?
Also yes.
Spider-Woman contains multitudes.
The second story, “The Mysterious Spider-Woman,” shifts gears nicely into superhero-noir territory.
Jessica teams with longtime Daily Bugle reporter Ben Urich to investigate six missing construction workers, eventually tracing the mystery to one of Miles Warren’s journals and an abandoned building.
That can only mean good things.
Inside, Jessica discovers cocooned victims and Francis Nero, one of the Jackal’s former research assistants, who has transformed himself into a deeply unpleasant human-spider hybrid.
Nero is wonderfully gross.
Multiple eyes. Giant abdomen. Too many legs. Lab coat somehow still hanging on.
Marvel villain fashion commitment deserves respect.
What I especially enjoyed is how he confidently explains Jessica’s own abilities to her—her venom blasts, her gliding, her spider biology—while acting like he has completely solved her.
Jessica’s response is essentially:
You know the manual. You don’t know me.
She beats him not by suddenly unlocking a new power but by exploiting his arrogance and inexperience. For an anniversary story, that feels fitting. Jessica has survived for fifty years partly because people keep underestimating just how stubborn and adaptable she is.
And then comes the nastier surprise.
Jessica’s symbiote suddenly erupts into full nightmare mode, terrifying him before she regains control. Back at her private-eye office, we learn exactly who she’s arguing with:
Carnage.
Jessica insists she is the one in control.
Carnage appears to have opinions about that arrangement.
Uh-oh.
CONS
The downside of the two-story format is that “High Tag Wins” occasionally feels like three different sitcom episodes fighting over one parking space.
Flying Tiger, Molly’s contest, Jessica’s pheromone worries, the sapphire and the kleptomaniac bird are all fun individually, but together they make the first half intentionally scattershot.
And Francis Nero?
Fantastic monster design.
Absolutely terrible long-term career planning.
For someone who claims to know everything about Jessica Drew, his master strategy eventually becomes “be a bigger spider and yell about it.”
Maybe Miles Warren fired him for a reason.
FINAL THOUGHTS: SUPERB!!!
This special works because it doesn’t try to summarize fifty years of Spider-Woman through exposition.
Instead, it gives us two flavors of Jessica Drew.
The first is adventurous, funny, socially awkward and unexpectedly warm.
The second is investigative, battle-tested, suspicious and carrying around considerably darker baggage.
Both feel like Jessica.
And the ending makes the anniversary feel less like a victory lap and more like a starting gun. Marvel confirms in the issue that a new Spider-Woman series launches in November.
Considering Jessica is now a private investigator sharing headspace with Carnage…
I suspect business is about to be very good.
Therapy bills too. 🕷️🕵️♀️
