We need to talk about the bonkers backstories of Madame Web’s Spider-Women

polygon.com:

Madame Web’s poor initial performance at the box office suggests that few people want to see it in a theater, let alone talk about it sight unseen. But there’s one aspect of it we should talk about anyway, because it’s so wild. Madame Web is a rarity in modern superhero cinema: a movie your friends might think you were making up if you described it to them without embellishment. Ironically, this makes it entirely faithful to the era of comic books it’s adapting. Not only does the comic book version of protagonist Cassandra Webb have a suite of powers and stories behind her that’s so confounding, I cannot fathom how anyone thought they’d make for a coherent movie, it also features a trio of other Spider-Women with origins that beggar belief.

All these women make the Peter Parker/Miles Morales origin of “bitten by a radioactive spider” appear mundane by comparison, the comic book version of a baking-soda volcano at a middle school science fair. Here’s the rundown on where this trio came from, according to Marvel Comics canon.

The early 2000s was a rich period in white comics writers and artists concocting marginalized characters, and Aña Corazón (initially named “Araña,” the Spanish word for “spider”) was one of them. Aña’s origin is some real body-horror magician shit. The story involves a war between two secret magical clans that she’s caught between. Eventually, she’s imbued with a magic tattoo that gives her a gross blue carapace she can summon at will. It honestly kind of rules.

But with no steady creative champion writing her stories, Aña bounced throughout the Spider-Man family of comic books, her powers and backstory getting slightly reworked each time. (You will not notice a carapace in the Madame Web version, where she’s played by Isabela Merced. But you can see it in her very brief appearance in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, above: Standing in a group of other shocked Spider-People, she responds to Miles’ attempted escape by summoning her armor.)