With the futuristic year
2020 ushering in a new comic event
commemorating the characters of
Earth-8410 aka
2020 A.D. - most
notably
Iron Man 2020- I figured now would be a perfect time to
acknowledge the overlooked superheroine in the room:
May Parker of
Earth-8410
aka
Spider-Girl 2020.
While I may have briefly touched on the
2020 in the distant
past, this will be a more focused look at the character. To begin with, the character
is not a comic book native, making her first (and to date, only) appearance in
a novel. Written by
Tom Defalco and
eluki bes shakar (now legally
known as
Rosemary Edghill) with interior chapter art by penciller
Tom
Grummett and inker
Doug Hazlewood,
X-Men & Spider-Man: Time’s
Arrow Book 3: The Future was first published in
1998 with a September
release date listed on its interior pages. This third and final book in the
Time’s
Arrow trilogy of novels by
Defalco (paired with a different
co-writer for each book) marks the debut of
Spider-Girl 2020 in its
fifth chapter which takes place in -you guessed it- the year
2020 A.D.!
The story sees
Spider-Man (the
Main Marvel Universe
or
Earth-616 version, according to the
Official Handbook of the
Marvel Universe: Alternate Universes 2005) on a mission with
Cable
of the
X-Men and
Aliya of
Earth-9870 to prevent
Kang’s
destruction of various alternate worlds.
Having been hired by
Kang to stop the
heroes,
Earth-8410’s Arno Stark aka
Iron Man of the year
2020
recruits his reality’s
Spider-Girl under the pretext of protecting her
territory
Queens, New York.
It’s here we learn that this world’s
May Parker had
lost her own father, and had followed in his heroic footsteps during her
freshman year of high school, aged only 14 years old.
May notes she can’t
remember a time when she didn’t know her father was
Spider-Man, and
recalls how he died with his secret identity intact, leaving some people mere
years later to believe the web-swinger was still alive.
May, now ‘
twentysomething’
still lived with her mother
Mary Jane Watson-Parker due to the housing
crunch.
Mary Jane was initially not pleased when
May announced
her intentions to suit up as
Spider-Girl at such a young age.
May
works as a ‘
page designer’ for
Cadence Communications Corporation…
which I guess makes her a web designer, right?
Operating as one of
2020’s last lone vigilantes or ‘
Independents’,
Spider-Girl protects her territory of
Queens, New York from ‘incursions
of
Wreckers,
Illegals, rioting
Vidiots or worse’. As for
powers and abilities, this
Spider-Girl has inherited her father’s spider-like
ability to stick to walls, strength, speed and agility, which are described as
being equal to the original web-head’s own.
May also utilizes ‘gold bracelets
of cylinders’ on both wrists that fire explosive ‘
venom blasts’ that produce
a poisoning effect in their targets. Presumably these are dual-purpose
web-shooters, as
Spider-Girl is also seen spinning webs. It’s not clear
if this
May Parker possesses a spider-sense, though she does appear to detect people rather quickly.
As for her costume, I think it’s worth using some direct quotes
to demonstrate how the chapter illustrations by
Tom Grummett (though
absolutely beautiful) do perhaps differ from the books text descriptions.
Spider-Girl
is first described as wearing a ‘
tight scarlet-and-blue combat suit’
with a ‘
spill of red hair down [her] back’ beneath which ‘
her eyes
were invisible behind the white shields of her mask’. For the most part,
Spider-Girl
is referred to while in action as a ‘
red-and-blue figure’ and angrily notes
when seeing
Spider-Man that his costume is an echo of her own. When
Spider-Man
catches clear sight of
Spider-Girl we get a more detailed portrait
spelled out: ‘
Her costume was red and blue, just like his, with a black
pattern of webbing against the red. Around each wrist she wore a gold bracelet
of cylinders-possibly the source of the blasts she’d bracketed him with-and a
half-mask above which her long red hair whipped around her face like Medusa’s
snakes.’
This combined with
the mentions of the costume being red and blue (rather than blue and red) and
Peter
noting it’s ‘
so like his own’ make it seem as the design is meant to more
closely resemble the original Spider-Man design. That said there is this one
quote that might balance out the artwork somewhat; ‘
May Parker had always
known that she’d grow up to wear the webbed mask and the famous blue and
scarlet garb.’ When added to a brief mention of the first two Spider-Women,
it might help explain the potential discrepancy. Either way, I’ve grown to like
the
Tom Grummett's Spider-Girl 2020 design, even if it does seem to be
missing the gold web-shooters.
As for the actual story, accompanying
Arno Stark’s Iron
Man and his
Iron-Bots into the sewers beneath
Queens, where
they encountered
Spider-Man,
Cable and
Aliya,
Spider-Girl
is shocked and angered to encounter an apparent imposter posing as her deceased
father. When the trio of dimension-hopping heroes briefly escape,
Arno brings
a subway stop’s ceiling down on them, against the heroic
Spider-Girl’s
protests. However,
Spider-Man and company are rescued from the rubble by
Machine Man and his friends, the
Midnight Wreckers. When
Arno
returns to finish the job,
Spider-Girl again battles
Spider-Man
until he unmasks and convinces her of his good intentions. With Iron Man
knocked out of commission,
Spider-Girl orders his
Iron-Bots to retreat,
allowing
Spider-Man,
Cable and
Aliya to complete their
mission.
Unfortunately, that’s it for this
Spider-Girl, except
to say her appearance in the
Time’s Arrow novel was later confirmed as
taking place in the same
2020 A.D. as various other characters in
The
Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Alternate Universes 2005. That is,
Spider-Girl 2020 shares the same universe as not just
Arno
Stark’s version of
Iron Man but also
Machine Man,
Death’s
Head and
Wild Thing (no, not
that one! This one’s name is
Nikki
Doyle). The coloured image of
Spider-Girl 2020 originates from
the aforementioned handbook as part of a composite image of various denizens of
that reality by various artists. The composition, colouring and art
reconstruction were (I believe) the work of
Scott Elmer under the pseudonym
Pond Scum. I mention this as there only exist two official images of the
Spider-Girl 2020 character, and this is, to date, the only one reproduced
in colour.
Notably, writer
Tom Defalco is the co-creator of the
world and various characters of
Earth-8410’s 2020 including
Arno
Stark, the
Machine Man of
2020 and the
Midnight Wreckers
and afterwards would frequently reference them in his other work. Or at least
he used to, before he conceived the
MC2 Universe with frequent
collaborator and handsome devil
Ron Frenz. I’d absolutely love to see a
small crossover with these two
Tom Defalco-created
Spider-Girl’s,
especially because they have such varied stories, ages and costumes and present
very different iterations of
May Parker.
Until I stop living in the far-flung year of…erm…. the present,
I remain
frogoat
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