Artists: Pere Perez (3-24) & Paulo Siqueira (25-32)

Colorist: Frank D’Armata

Letterer: Travis Lanham

Inker: Oren Junior (25-32)

Cover Artist: Junggeun Yoon

Spider-Woman Suit Redesign: Dave Johnson

I Kinda Hate All These Kids: Jessica Drew is having an off day. Something isn’t quite right and she’s got a strong aversion to noise. Worst time to be watching a party of spoiled kids on a yacht, right? And when that party comes under attack, Jessica Drew embraces her rage to take out the attackers in a show of strength, agility, and grace. This feat of heroism takes a toll on her body and she’s left in desperate need of medical aid.

I’ll Pay You Back… Eventually: Two weeks earlier, we learn funds are tight. Jessica decides she will protect the daughter of Michael Marchand, a father trying to cure his disabled daughter. She decides to get a new suit from designer Big Ronnie, who is working for a secret third party who wanted Jessica Drew to get the exact suit she leaves with. A suit made from black material, that enhances physical prowess, feeds on rage, and takes a physical toll on the user.

Thoughts: The first of the Spider-Women is back! In the time between volumes, Jessica appeared a couple other places (Venom, Strikeforce) but I imagined most of the time off panel consisted of  family time. If I have any misgivings with this issue, it’s that Jessica Drew neglects her son on panel for the brief time he is there. A parent of Jessica’s emotional maturity does not neglect their child, exhaustion or not. Mother is my favorite of Jessica’s many roles, so not a great first step but it would seem parenthood still has a role in the story Karla Pacheco is telling. 

And the first issue of that story delivers an action-packed ride that doesn’t advance much story-wise, but establishes so much plot wise. There is a lot of fun to be found in Pacheco’s costume party antics. Teenagers dressed as Hawkeye and Spider-Woman make out beside Jessica. The birthday girl, Rebecca Marchand, is dressed as Carol Danvers. Many of the things Jessica ends up using in her battle sequences are set-up in those first couple pages, easily missed because of Jessica’s entertaining narration and dialogue. Pacheco knows that Jessica Drew is a master of turning her own pain into the pain of others, which is always delightful to read.

Before moving on, we should address Jessica’s new suit, designed by Dave Johnson. I don’t care for the chest emblem, but outside of that, I think it’s pretty great. The mask has expressive eyes that shift in size. The bits of red spread out to the extremities of the costume give it a visual flair when miniaturized. My favorite touch is the swatches of yellow on the hands and feet; they add a yellow blur effect in with the red and black when Jessica is fighting.

It feels weird to say this about an issue where Jessica Drew drives a car off a yacht and into another boat, but believability is the artistic goal in the first story. When you have an artist of Pere Perez’s talent, you make him do costume parties for teens. The costumes hang awkwardly around most kids, making Jessica’s stand out on the page. His smooth faces are perfect at the fore or background of the panel.

But the reasons Perez is a master of believability is his sequencing. There are two separate explosive sequences in the issue, but each land differently because of whether they occurred at the foreground or background of the sequence. Perez breaks panel constraints often, with objects crossing from one panel into another, but this guides the eye through a sequence. There is one chaotic page where Jessica is using all her strength to pull a moving helicopter into turbulent waters and you feel every beat of that. Every strain of muscle, churn of the water, and rotation of the helicopter blade. That’s remarkable.

My favorite Spider-Woman fight sequences are the ones where a silhouette of Jessica Drew lays waste to her enemies across the page; Perez adds his own addition to the collection. There is a lot of motion lines, because the action sequences move quickly. Perez puts effects like blood or impact markers over top of the art where attacks land. Travis Lanham’s lettering already enhances the art a significant amount, guiding the eye along the natural path, so that adding these impact effects overcrowds the panel.

Frank D’Armata’s colors go a long way. He makes motion vibrant and colorful, using a lot of darker colors for Jessica’s rage fueled fights. When environments change, D’Armata switches palettes and that works to strong effect. The red and yellow on Jessica’s suit reflects these palette changes, but the black remains a consistent prominent part of the suit’s design. The final panel of the first story is so disturbing, it’s a shame it wasn’t actually the issue’s end.

In the backup, D’Armata’s constant blues and purples become too much. It’s used in fight sequences, sunsets that are weeks apart, the night time, and the interior of Jessica’s apartment. Paulo Siqueira draws the back up and while I am a fan of the artist, I did not think this was his strongest work. His art has an overly polished quality to it, and way back when he did Venom 154 I thought his artwork was superb despite some stylistically off faces. I would take those faces over these new faces, which resemble Greg Land art. 

It’s Pacheco’s script that makes this story come alive. This is some amazing background storytelling being done. Why would Jessica Drew just go to a random costume designer, who then just so happened to be working for a sinister third party? Because her email is spammed with discount offers for Big Ronnie’s. These coupons don’t jive with the dialogue at Big Ronnie’s, so it throws into question the credibility of all of Jessica’s emails. Including one from Michael Marchand, who is asking her to protect his disabled daughter. The same daughter he said he would fix in the first story, drawing tense connections to Jessica’s own father.

So much depth is added to the story by these additional eight pages, that it makes up for how little the story moves in the first action packed story. It seems it is Jessica’s turn to have an evil third party meddle in her life; Cindy has had one, Gwen a couple. Will this also be the time Jessica gets a symbiote? 

Verdict: This is a strong first issue, but not without flaws. It left me with theories and hopes about where things are about to go. It seems the team wants to pay heritage to Jessica Drew’s history, but just how much of it? There is significant talent attached to this project and I think they can deliver something special. We still have a bit to go, but this was a great debut.