Jessica Drew ain’t letting a little thing like an emergency C-section in a space station hospital slow her down.
Shown as being well into her third trimester after the series’ post-hiatus reboot, last week’s Spider-Woman #4 finally saw the lead character become a mom. It was a pretty dramatic childbirth, coming in the middle of being chased by squads of alien Skrull soldiers determined to kill Spider-Woman.
The tense chase-scene backdrop made the page where Jessica meets her newborn especially beautiful. Gone are all the sound effects and crazy angles of the preceding pages.
Artists Javier Rodriguez, Alvaro Lopez and Rachelle Rosenberg pare everything down to a quiet moment of introduction.
The tonal switch-up is a sharp metaphor for how things change when you become a parent: one day, life is all funny/dramatic hijinx, and the next you’re responsible for a tiny human being that you would die for, as seen in the image at the very top. Throughout all of its first storyline, Spider-Woman feels like a book that’s not just presenting a wooden Strong Female Character archetype. This issue feels like the apotheosis of the charms that make this series such a standout.
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