Spider-Man: Far From Home Secretly Introduced Another Marvel Villain

The villains of both Spider-Man: Homecoming and Spider-Man: Far From Home mirror each other in key ways. Both Vulture (Michael Keaton) and Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) have a deep-seated grudge against Iron Man that’s driven them to crime and they each operate with a team of like-minded individuals. In Homecoming, Adrian Toomes’ squad was made up of some familiar names from the comics. Less obviously, so were Mysterio’s in Far From Home.

Quentin Beck’s brigade of crooks get less screentime than Vulture’s but the most prominent is a woman played by Claire Rushbrook. In the credits, she’s listed as Janice Lincoln, and while not the most recognizable of the wall-crawler’s enemies, Lincoln has a history in the comics as one of the criminals to take on the supervillain identity of The Beetle.

The daughter of Lonnie Lincoln AKA crime boss Tombstone, Janice was given the Beetle’s suit by Baron Zemo and briefly joined the Sinister Six before forming her own all-female version of the team, the Sinister Syndicate. She was later redeemed when she fell for Peter Parker’s pal Randy Robertson and abandoned her criminal life.

Of course, the MCU version is much different from the comics. Apart from being Caucasian and somewhat older, this Janice was a bitter former Stark Industries employee who’s notable for being the one to originally discover E.D.I.T.H. was being given to the high school hero. This must mean that she found out Spider-Man’s secret identity by hacking Stark’s files. The comics Janice didn’t have a direct connection to Iron Man, but other Beetles have incorporated Stark tech into their armor.

It’s also worth mentioning that another of Mysterio’s cohorts in Spider-Man: Far From Home is named Victoria Snow. In the comics, Snow’s a former Stark employee who dated Whiplash. Could something similar have happened in the MCU and Snow had a romantic tryst with Mickey Rourke’s Ivan Vanko during the events of Iron Man 2, and so she hates her former boss because he defeated him? Perhaps, and with any luck, Peter Parker’s next solo outing may pick up on some of these dangling plot threads.