A Spider-Woman issue. Jessica, already in bad shape due to her deal with Nick Fury after he bailed on everyone, is probably not in a good place now. Art this month is handled by Olivier Coipel, Mark Morales and Jose Villarubia. I really forgot the speed at which Coipel could work back then. He did House of M, that whole Annual, this, and still found time for that silly Stan Lee thing. Oh, right. Well, it’s the 2000s, so Jessicae is in her underwear and going to stay that way for much of the issue as she spirals out of control somewhere.
Bendis’ weird need to constantly reference the Kree/Skrull War reaches its most absurd height, as some news guy says a war that mostly happened on another planet generated a ton of news stories on Earth, where no one knew it was happening.
“Sybil Dvorak” is apparently the real name of 70s Spider-Woman villain Gypsy Moth, now called Skein. I certainly didn’t know that.
If you’re going to do a gratuitous butt shot it could at least not look like a teenage boy’s butt. Across a 2-page layout, JEssica blows up the robot, then the goon squad attacks her, and also Coipel manages to do no less than 4 camera angles right up her crotch in those little undies. It’s embarrassing, honestly. But even constantly flashing her crotch can’t stop her from being captured, and she wakes up in a SHIELD interrogation room with Hill, and then Iron Man, who’s told Maria all about Jessica’s weird triple agent situation.
The helicarrier begins to tumble out of the sky as Hydra agents on what appear to be flying jet skis attack to rescue Jessica. After a buncha shootin’, Hydra kidnaps Jess and leaves the helicarrier to make a giant crater in the state of Rhode Island. Coipel does some really impressive work with the scale of it all:
I mean, look at that! Wow. Jessica wakes up in a strange place for the 2nd time in a couple hours, now in the clutches of her handler from New Avengers 14–15 on Hydra Island. Connelly, the guy, says that EMP trick was a one-timer, they’ll be ready for it in the future, and Jessica wants to know why he came for her.
Jess smashes her mug in that guy’s face while choking him with his tie before beating on him a little, then some goons rush in and she has to zap em.
Like she said she would.
And so she joins the resistance. Bendis really put Jessica through the wringer. This issue and others like it have a full page remembrance of Mark Gruenwald on the 19th anniversary of his death by Tom Brevoort, which is very cool. These New Avengers issues are a nice distraction from the main story. However brief.