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The 616 Spider-Woman was famously created specifically to secure the name rights, but that was in late 1976 - the original Spider-Woman had already appeared more than a year prior!
Jessica Drew is a modern Spider-Woman who juggles
crimefighting and impending motherhood with an arachnid's ease.
Off the success of Sesame Street, the Children's Television Workshop created The Electric Company in 1971, a series aimed at school-age children, to help them learn grammar. In 1974, they partnered with Marvel to have Spider-Man appear on the show, and in return, Marvel published Spidey Super Stories, a simple comic aimed at very young readers (this is the book where the Thanoscopter story came from, for instance). In issue #11, sleepy Peter Parker took a nap on a roof, and his costume ended up falling to the street below. It was found by Valerie the Librarian, a recurring character from the show, who took the suit home and altered it to fit her, then figured out how to duplicate Spidey's powers and taught herself how to be good with them, all before Peter woke up from his nap. Anyway, Val dubbed herself Spider-Woman in May of 1975, beating Jessica Drew to the name by a year and a half.
Any visual connection Spider-Verse Jess has to Valerie is mainly a coincidence, though: the character and her role in the story were locked way before the design was; they didn't even know for sure she was going to be black! A lot of the different designs had to do with hair, but there are also sketches where she's Asian. Still wore the glasses, though. These are separate, but glued on, and clear plastic will never be as yellow as the animation could be.
After a brief respite, Hasbro is back to heavy hairdos that unbalance the bearer. Yes, Jess's massive bundle of curls needs to be large and exaggerated to match the animation, but did it have to be such a hefty chunk of plastic? Couldn't they have done a rotocast plastic for the hair, the way Ronan's hammer got a lighter head? Maybe they were afraid all that intricate detail in the sculpt would get lost? Either way, it'll make it tough to keep the figure standing.
The movie look was originally based
on the Kris Anka costume, which makes sense, since he was also a designer for Across the Spider-Verse. It eventually evolved into its own thing, obviously, but kept a lot of the same ideas: the red and black colorscheme, the yellow geometry on the chest, stuff like that. This one has a large, folded collar, big graphic stripes on the side, and traditional Spider-webbing on the flared sleeves, which makes her feel more connected to the "Spidey-ness" of it all than 616 Jessica Drew ever did.
Like we said, "a pregnant Spider-Woman" was part of the story way before anything was specified about who that Spider-Woman would be. With that in mind, you'd think the toy would manage to look pregnant. Like, yes, her stomach is a little larger than usual, but not to an extent that it sticks out as anything other than the art style chosen for her. Is Spider-Punk really eight feet tall and two inches wide? No, it's art. Spider-Woman is thicc, so all her shapes feed into that. I got this figure before the movie opened, and was still surprised when she showed up and it was revealed she was pregnant. The sculpt should have made that more obvious.
Like we said, the toy's hair make it hard to balance the figure. She's got all the usual articulation - head, shoulders, biceps, elbows, wrists, waist, hips, thighs, knees, and ankles - but the hair means you really can't do much with her other than carefully stand her straight up. Her joints aren't soft, like Hobie's were, but the head and waist both
are way stiffer than they should be (which may be an intentional choice on Hasbro's part, to hold that dang hair up).
The figure has no accessories and no Build-A-Figure pieces, just alternate hands, either open or fists. Once upon a time, there would have been a basic figure like this, then a more expensive set that gave us both Jess and her Amazing Spider-Bike, the one accessory she should have. They could have done a pricepoint of Jess and her bike and Web-Slinger and his horse Widow! But when Hasbro is already expecting us to pay $25 for just this, that's not going to happen. No store is going to be willing to carry it. Even making these $15 would open up a lot of wiggle room for fancier sets that the lines don't currently have. If you're constantly running at your maximum, you have nowhere to increase to. But hey: that's Capitalism, baby! Smart choices take a back seat to blind money-grabbing!
Spider-Woman has a cool design, but hopefully she wakes up and gets some redemption in the third movie, because (other than with Gwen at the beginning) every time she was given the opportunity, Jessica Drew kept siding with the authorities instead of actually helping anyone. You're about to be a mother, girl, you gotta figure out how to be a good person if you're gonna raise that baby right. And speaking of baby, it'd be great if this toy actually looked pregnant, to match the movie design better. Her role in the story (other than caping for the status quo) is to show that "being a Spidey" and "having a relationship" are not mutually exclusive conditions, but this figure overlooks half that equation.
-- 08/14/23
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