The trailer for Sony’s latest attempt at a Spider-Man movie without Spider-Man showed us quite a lot, including four new Spider-Heroes.
The internet is very much still in the process of analyzing every frame of the Madame Web trailer and there is a lot of information to digest, with lesser-known heroes and villains finally being given a chance on the big screen.
But, to a more casual audience, it may not be clear who some of these people are, like who is that guy hunting Cassandra and the others? And who are those other characters anyway? To answer that question we’ll have to dive into decades of comics and Spider-Man lore.
Madame Web
Let’s start with the protagonist of the film, Dakota Johnson’s Cassandra Webb. Her powers aren’t directly related to spiders unless you think of it in the more metaphysical sense of everything being connected, like a web. Madame Web’s powers include precognition, telepathy, and clairvoyance, essentially anything to do with the mind is her forte.
She first appeared in an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man in November 1980, Peter was initially skeptical of her abilities but soon discovered she was the real deal. In the comics the character is a lot older, she was also born blind and suffered from a neurological condition effectively making her paralyzed. This has clearly been changed in the movie, and it’s likely that’s not all that’s changed about Madame Web in her big-screen debut.
Julia Carpenter/Spider-Woman
It seems we will also see Spider-Woman, played by Sydney Sweeney, the second character in the comics to take that title. She has similar powers to Spider-Man including super strength, speed and agility due to being injected with spider venom and exotic plant extracts.
Julia’s powers differ in many ways from her male counterpart; for example, she has psionic powers, allowing her to manipulate molecules to do things such as form her webs. The webs can be controlled and moved mentally and it’s her psionic abilities also allow her to wall crawl by manipulating the binding forces of atoms.
Mattie Franklin/Spider-Woman
The third iteration of Spider-Woman in the comics, (there are quite a few) Franklin is played by Celeste O’Connor. She was given her powers during a ceremony in the comics known as the gathering of the five. This ritual is supposed to grant unknown powers to those involved, there’s a lot of complicated lore in the comics and it’s unclear whether the film will touch on any of the mythological spider magic that the source material gave us.
Regardless, Franklin has powers similar to Peter Parker and Julia Carpenter, she can also perform “venom blasts” a power originally belonging to Jessica Drew, as well as manifest psychic spider legs which grow out of her back. Probably her most unique power is her ability to fly, something none of the other Spider-Heroes can do.
Anya Corazon/Spider-Girl
Anya Corazon first appeared in Marvel comics in 2004, taking the moniker of Araña before changing her superhero name to Spider-Girl in a 2010 issue of Young Allies. Her backstory is even more convoluted and even weirder than Mattie Franklins. It involves sorcerers and spider societies and something called the Sisterhood of the Wasp. Anyways, Corazon’s powers originally came from a man named Miguel Legar who transferred some of his life energy into her.
She has powers similar to her spider-peers with super strength, speed, agility, though she can also turn invisible, and her webbing is organic, like the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man.
It’s likely Sony is hoping to kick its Spider-Verse into full motion with these characters, setting Anya and the rest of them up in Madame Web before giving them their own solo movies down the line. Of course, that’s entirely dependent on the movie being received well by fans.
We’ll find out whether that’ll happen when Madame Web swings into theaters on Feb. 14 2024.
