Why Have Cotton?

Our school has a Friday lunchtime library slot for talks and presentations, called Speakers Corner.

Having looked at the Companions of Dr. Who last term,  I have an idea about presenting a talk on "Cool Girls in Comics" in the near future. The Big Two have a number of titles that would be suitable  to introduce to a school audience, such as Moon Girl, Ms. Marvel, Hellcat, Black Canary and Batgirl. (But not Harley Quinn, despite her huge popularity- too violent and vulgar, in my opinion. Her joke about pubic lice, in the latest Titan Flash UK reprint, isn't appropriate for our students.)

To that end, I recently read Silk: the Life and Times of Cindy Moon, which collects the first seven issues of a "Spider-verse" spin-off .

Bitten by the selfsame spider as Peter Parker and imbued with the same powers, Cindy is an intern for J. Jonah Jameson and the Fact Channel while searching for her missing family. Cindy has also been incarcerated in a "panic room" bunker for ten years to protect her from a predatory villain: in this regard, she reminds me of the late-70s Spider-Woman, who had also been cut off from society.

While she receives some mentoring from a rather adorable iteration of the FF and their VR version of Galactus, Silk also earns the enmity of the Black Cat. However, she makes a friend in the wannabe super-villain Dragonclaw. Rescued by Spidey from the gruesome Repairman, who creates enhanced goons, Cindy gets a lead to her parents whereabouts, She begins to meet with a therapist to deal with her bunker issues and in the final issue, Silk is reunited with her brother, now a gang member.

There is a cute Manga flavour to the art by Stacey Lee, despite the dark, modern-horror- movie imagery.  It's a different voice for a Spider-Girl title; very different, in fact, from the MC2 all-ages adventures of May Parker- often an homage to Lee/Kirby and Lee/Ditko.  I'm afraid I don't really know anything much about the Hispanic Arana/Spider-Girl at all but Silk is an engaging character whose Korean ethnicity adds diversity to the MCU.

However, given the popularity of the Miles Morales Spider-Man and the Spider-Gwen phenomenon, aren't there now rather too many spider-people? And is there really room for one so dependent on Peter Parker's mythos? Time will tell; it always does.

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