Spider-Woman (vol. 4) #1
Spider-Woman: Agent of S.W.OR.D., Part One
Spider-Woman flies to her apartment thinking how screwed up her life has been. It reminds her of her teammate Wolverine and how screwed up his life has been and wonders how he deals with it every day.[1] She thinks about how she was recently replaced by a Skrull impostor,[2] then about her messed up childhood.[3] For a brief moment she considers blasting herself with a venom blast to the brain but can’t bring herself to do it. That’s when an envelope is slid under her front door. It contains an unsigned note that welcomes her back to the world and that her presence is requested when she’s ready.
Jessica Drew goes to a nearby bus stop despite her reservations and gets aboard a mostly empty bus. There she is greeted by Abigale Brand, the director of SWORD. She tells Jessica that she wasn’t the only one screwed over by the the Skrull invasion as her organization was supposed to prevent something like that from happening. She then gets down to business, telling Drew that there are 32 different alien races operating on Earth and none of them are welcome on the planet. However, her primary concern are any Skrulls that might still be on the planet and wants to hire Jessica as an agent of SWORD so she can track down and eliminate them. Abigale has come to Jessica because she figures she has a lot of anger she needs to vent.
She then hands Jessica a biometric scanning device that can tell her if the people around her are not reading as normal human and tells her that she has the job as long as she wants to do it, and that as long as she continues to perform, Brand will keep making deposits into her bank account. However, she tells Jessica that she does tell any of this to her fellow Avengers. Jessica reluctantly accepts the job beause of Abigale’s sales pitch and is told that the device she has been given has instructions on her first target. Soon, Jessica is heading to one of the seediest places in the world, the island of Madripoor.
As she arrives on the island, Jessica knows why SWORD sent her here first, because if she does end up killing someone, nobody is apt to really care on this godforsaken island. As she heads to a hotel to get a room, she feels eyes on her at all time and thinks everyone in the city is wearing some kind of disguise. However, her scanning device doesn’t register any non-humans. After spending some time getting the stink eye from prostitutes in the hotel bar, Jessica goes up to her bedroom to lay down. There she tries to sleep while she waits for new intel from SWORD but can’t sleep because every time she closes her eyes she keeps on seeing memories from her life. She recalls how her DNA was altered while she was in the womb giving Jessica her powers. She then was brainwashed into working for Hydra, the same terrorist organization that her parents worked for. Luckily, she was saved by Nick Fury, and she moved to San Francisco where she became a private eye and superhero. Her life then got turned upside down when the Skrull queen Veranke took her place and used her face to stage an invasion on Earth. Although the impostor was discovered and destroyed, Jessica can’t help but think that everyone hates her because it was her face that was the face of the invasion.
That’s when intel finally comes in on her first target, Koru Kaviti, a Skrull operative that was fourth in command under Queen Veranke, who fled before the final battle against the Skrulls in Central Park. As she reads more about him, suddenly her bioscanner is picking up someone non-human approaching. This appears to be Spider-Man who comes crashing through the widow of her hotel room telling her that she is in danger and needs to leave Madripoor immediately. He tells her that SWORD has been compromised and that the rest of the Avengers are here to extract her.
She sees right through this obvious deception and attacks the Skrull impersonating Spider-Man. Their fight sends them out the window and falling twelve stories. Jessica makes sure that the Spider-Man impostor take the brunt of the fall when they land on a parked car. Jessica then starts beating the impostor until he starts shifting back into Skrull form. She stops short of killing the Skrull since she needs him alive to question but takes some joy in beating him senseless since he really hurt her in the fight.
Recurring Characters
Spider-Woman, SWORD (Abigale Brand), Skrulls
Continuity Notes
Wolverine’s life was mostly screwed up by the Weapon X program that experimented and brainwashed him. See Marvel Comics Presents #72-84.
Spider-Woman was replaced by a Skrull circa Giant-Size Spider-Woman #1. She was later rescued by the Avengers in Secret Invasion #1-8, the Skrull impostor was later killed by Norman Osborn.
The flashbacks of Jessica’s past are taken from Spider-Woman: Origin #1-5. This origin contradicts the original one told in Marvel Spotlight #32/Spider-Woman #1. An in-universe explanation has yet to be provided. I provide my interpretation of these conflicts here.
