'Spider-Gwen' puts female spin on an icon

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

The Spider-Gwen can do whatever a Spider-Man can — with a hoodie and a legion of online fans in tow.

After having died in 1973 in a battle between Spidey and Green Goblin — and staying dead for more than 40 years — Gwen Stacy has found new life with superpowers as a parallel-universe Spider-Woman in Spider-Gwen, a Marvel Comics series premiering today by writer Jason Latour and artists Robbi Rodriguez and Rico Renzi.

While Peter Parker has been the signature Spidey since the 1960s of the regular Marvel Universe — aka Earth-616 — the radioactive spider that gave him his powers instead bit Peter's teenage girlfriend Gwen on Earth-65. She played a big role in the recent Spider-Verse crossover story line, and actually was a hit before she even hit the comic page: Last September's Edge of Spider-Verse No. 2 that introduced Spider-Gwen was an immediate sellout, causing multiple printings and price hikes for the issue on eBay.

Coming at a time when DC Comics was also giving Batgirl a modern, social media-ready makeover only helped make the new Gwen a comic-book phenom, according to Latour.

"We were pretty active about plastering it all over the Internet," he says with a laugh. "The response just seemed to balloon. People really liked the costume and they were really into the idea, and if you had your finger on the pulse of Tumblr — not that I do but if you just took a peek at it — it was insane before the book even came out with how much fan art and speculation there was about it."

Her debut story showcased Gwen drumming for the all-girl band The Mary Janes, watching Peter die in her arms after experimenting to become the Lizard and be special like her, and confessing to her cop dad, Capt. George Stacy, about her secret superheroine identity.

Latour admits he was a lot more nervous about that book than he is with this week's first Spider-Gwen issue. "Even though there's much more expectation now and it's snowballed into this giant thing, now people know what they're getting on board for more or less."

The new chapter finds Gwen newly returned from crisscrossing the universe with various other Spider-peeps during Spider-Verse, and she has to find time to spend with her bandmates, avoid bad publicity from Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson after he blames her for Peter's death, and also tussle with the Vulture.

Tackling a returned Gwen Stacy in such a significant way initially scared Latour, he says. "I really didn't know what about it I was drawn to other than the fact that it could have gone really badly because you weren't supposed to touch her."

When Spider-Man group editor Nick Lowe offered her further adventures to him, Latour took a night to sleep on it and asked himself what he really knew about Gwen Stacy and not just as a "fridged" character who was killed for the sake of the hero as a plot progression.

The answer was not a whole lot, and that was a problem.

"There was a catharsis to, well, if this character could come back and escape death because of what superhero comics are best at doing, then the sky's the limit," says Latour.

The writer also saw Gwen as a potentially important heroine in the current climate of getting characters in superhero comics that better represent women.

Latour grew up eating and breathing white male superheroes, "but we've looked through that same dusty window a lot," he says. "The fact that it's a woman does change the meaning and subtext of everything that's going on. As a creator, that's really enjoyable and it opens up the story to go in a lot of directions it wouldn't have gone before."

Gwen is definitely not Peter, and not just because she uses smartphones and, instead of verbalizing her banter mocking villains, spray-paints it all over the city.

Peter's Aunt May and late Uncle Ben were more of a liberal, "it takes a village to raIse a child" kind of parents, according to Latour. Conversely, Gwen is the daughter of a police captain who stands up for the weak and is a shield keeping New Yorkers safe from criminals.

"As much as she wants to be an artist," the writer says, "that will come into conflict with that, and it's interesting to explore those old 'great power, great responsibility' themes in a modern context."

The alternate world of Spider-Gwen also allows Latour some freedom in creating a group of lively supporting characters, including those who are both familiar to and different from Peter Parker's well-known cast.

Latour's Vulture is very similar to the original-recipe winged villain, but in Spider-Gwen Matt Murdock isn't that good a guy and Frank Castle is a tough cop instead of a vigilante who wears a Punisher skull on his chest. Plus, just because Peter Parker's gone doesn't mean his aunt and uncle are, too — Latour plans on showing May and Ben Parker's reaction to Spider-Woman being held responsible for their nephew's death.

While it's tempting to toss in his own versions of Thor and M.O.D.O.K. in the series, Latour instead chooses his players by thinking about what Gwen is going through as a character and then having villains and antagonists standing in the way of that.

There's a whole laundry list of classic Spider-baddies to choose from, but the writer also wants to create a few, too.

"It always sounds a little funny when I say we have three potential villains in the first arc because I think it sounds like we are doing a bad superhero movie," Latour says, "but we really do take our time, and some of the threats you'd consider in a superhero sort of way don't play out that way.

"When you boil it down, all superhero stores are 'what if?' stories so I try not to get too hung up on that," he adds. "I just feel if we approach it earnestly, it'll make it something a little bit more than a cover song."