Spider-Girl
Spider-Girl was the comic book and the character that not only captured my childhood mind and held my interest but also, I feel, the reason I am the person I am. I realize that sounds over the top, and it is, but hear me out. I picked up my first ever comic in 1998. My mother had to run into the newsagent in town and being, I think, 8 or 9 at the time, I instantly followed her in the hopes of scoring some free swag. I looked at the magazine section, not much to draw my eyes until, oh! Spider-man! MUM! And so I grabbed my first comic and looked at the cover, featuring a villain (I'd later find out this was the bowl-headed illusionist Mysterio) trapping Spidey in his giant head. Great cover. It was Spider-man: Chapter One #7 or #8 and, cover aside, it was crap, utter rubbish, rushed and confusing with only a mild attempt at following a coherent plot. But, hey, Spider-man! So, the next week, having read and re-read it numerous times, I found myself back in the local news agency ready and raring to find a new one. I'll admit, I was a little disappointed when I could only find other comics without Spidey until--hey, is that Spider-ma--no! The titles wrong. Spider-Girl. Hmmm...and the Fantastic --what? Five?! What the heck is this?! MUM!
It was Spider-Girl issue #3, 'Fun 'n' Games with the Fantastic Five. I won't pretend I paid much attention at the time to who wrote it or who provided the great art work, all I knew was this story was awesome. In one issue, without me having the slightest clue about who May 'Mayday' Parker was, why Peter Parker was a forensic's guy for the NYPD or anything about this strange world I found myself in, it didn't seem to matter. I picked up all the information I needed from the issue: Peter is receiving a commendation for his work, May has promised to attend, things happen and May isn't just late, but misses the whole thing. I'm simplifying, so let me add that in one issue Tom Defalco, our esteemed writer managed to tell me so much about the way this book works, it's premise, the tone, the balance of action and drama. Peter is still the same geeky guy we know, but he's a bit more mature, not world-weary, but certainly a changed man. He's grown up. May is something of an exception among teenagers, and I don't mean her wall-crawling. She is friends or at least on speaking terms with the 'cool' kids, the popular girl, the football player and the big bully while also hanging with the nerdy girl and the geeky guy. Yet, somehow, May just seems normal, she fits in. She is Mary Jane's daughter as well as Peter's. Whereas Peter was socially inept, May finds making friends easy (something that will become a big part of defining her as a character, apart from her fathers looming web-covered shadow)
Anyways...where was I? Right, so May is supposed to attend a ceremony for her dad late that afternoon. At school, May's friends convince her to come with them after school to the Baxter Building-home of the Fantastic Five, now a kind of exhibition/ science center. We get some conflict amongst May's friends, who don't get along as a group. The exhibition is disrupted by a villain who battles the entire Fantastic Five and eventually Spider-Girl who, being new at this hero-biz, screws up. Eventually, they catch him, but not before May is trapped for hours in another dimension. May arrives at the ceremony only to be greeted by Mary Jane, who tells her 'It was a very nice ceremony. To bad you missed it'. The issue ends with May realizing the tension and strain of trying to live this life. She's going to have to make some tough calls and it's never going to be easy. I hope that somehow I've relayed what it is I fell in love with about this book to you. I've never been very good with getting things from my brain and out there to be mewled over by humanity. It was a simple enough plot, but the care and attention that went into every panel was so clear to me. I could feel the love and thought every time I turned the page.
Needless to say, I got the next issue. Sadly, after that I couldn't find the series for about a year until Spider-Girl #17 rocked my world. It promised a double-sized story extravaganza and boy, did it ever deliver. But that's another story...