In Drawing Crazy Patterns, I spotlight at least five scenes/moments from within comic book stories that fit under a specific theme (basically, stuff that happens frequently in comics). Note that these lists are inherently not exhaustive. They are a list of five examples (occasionally I'll be nice and toss in a sixth or more). So no instance is "missing" if it is not listed. It's just not one of the five examples that I chose. Today, we look at the inordinate amount of times Spider-Woman was tied up in the first twelve issues of her ongoing series!
Spider-Woman, as you may or may not know, was introduced in an issue of Marvel Spotlight as an attempt by Marvel to secure the trademark on the character to keep Filmation from doing a Spider-Woman cartoon (Filmation had to change their proposed Spider-Woman cartoon to a cartoon called Web-Woman). Archie Goodwin wrote the one-shot, which included Spider-Woman being a mutated spider. Marv Wolfman quickly dropped the mutated spider idea ahead of her getting a new ongoing series that Wolfman was going to write. He also gave her her new origin (her father was a scientist and when she got deathly ill as a child, her father saved her life through some experimental genetic experiments involving spiders). While initially based in London, by issue #3, she had set up shop in Los Angeles, which had just recently lost their first superhero team, the Champions.
Her first Los Angeles villains were the supervillain duo, the Brothers Grimm. She fought them again in the fourth issue (art by Carmine Infantino and Tony DeZuniga), but suddenly, at the end of the issue, she is attacked by a new threat - a man calling himself the Hangman who wants to "protect" Spider-Woman by keeping her locked up in a cell for the rest of her life...
Here he is on the Dave Cockrum cover for the issue...
The next issue opens with something that looks like it came out of an old Golden Age Wonder Woman story, with how much they seem to emphasize her being bound...
Amusingly enough, ropes aren't enough to tie her down, so she quickly breaks free...
The cover for issue #6 also evokes the classic Wonder Woman stories of William Marston, as it seems to intentionally spotlight her bound form...
You better believe these covers are on some "special" websites somewhere.
What's especially weird is that Spider-Woman isn't actually tied up at all in the actual issue itself. Just the cover. Weird, right?
In the next issue, the cover is right back to hitting that same sort of approach, as she is chained up on the cover...
The issue (art by Infantino and inker Al Gordon) is a weird one, where there is this guy who is essentially immortal, as he has been cursed so that he can only die if he dies with someone else, so he chains himself to Jessica and tries to kill them both. The problem is that Jessica can break these chains...
However, she goes along with the charade and jumps off of a cliff with him and then breaks off in mid-air and he then successfully kills himself...
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In issue #10 (by new writer Mark Gruenwald and Infantino and Gordon), Spider-Woman faces off against another new villain, Gypsy-Moth.
Gypsy-Moth can unravel people's clothing and use the fabric to attack them, like here, where she unravels a bunch of women's dresses to tie Spider-Woman up in a cocoon-like deal...
There has now been enough instances of Spider-Woman being bound that new writer Mark Gruenwald even works in a joke about it in the next issue.
The Brothers Grimm succeed in knocking Spider-Woman out and when she wakes up to find herself in chains, she bemoans how often this happens to her...
Pretty darn funny bit by Gruenwald. I guess he knew what he was walking into on this series!
That's it for this installment! Feel free to write me at brianc@cbr.com with suggestions for future Drawing Crazy Patterns!