The secret origin of Spider-Girl (part... er, 0)

After I wrote my last post delving into the origins of my current, most active writing project (which would be the continuing adventures of Spider-Girl, or Project SG) I realised that if I was going to talk about Spider-Girl's origins, then I had to go a lot deeper than just the first two issues I wrote.

So I thought I'd take a waffly, self-indulgent nostalgia trip and tell you where Spider-Girl originally came from, because brother, I sure didn't invent her. Warning: excessive verbiage ahead.

The Spider-Girl I now (sort of) write about originally debuted in Marvel Comics' What If series* - volume 1, Issue #7 to be precise, which turned up in 1977, when ol' Ghostly Writer would have been four, going on five years old.

In a story called 'What If Someone Else Besides Spider-Man Had Been Bitten By The Radioactive Spider' (always did have catchy titles, those What Ifs...) the issue features three alternate takes on the Spider-Man origin. (Don Glut wrote all three stories, with Rick Hoberg doing an excellent job on pencils.)

In the first, Flash Thompson (perennial bully of Peter Parker) ends up getting bitten instead of Peter, and uses his powers to become Captain Spider - with a variation on the classic Spidey costume that I actually still think kinda works. Unfortunately Flash being Flash, he manages to screw everything up, and ends up lying dead in an alley because he didn't invent webshooters.


The last story in the book saw J Jonah Jameson's astronaut son, John, get bitten, but as he's (a) an astronaut and (b) a Jameson, instead of turning into your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, he becomes (ahem) Spider-Jameson, the super-astronaut, complete with jetpack. Unfortunately John being John, he manages to... er... run out of fuel while trying to guide an out-of-control space capsule to Earth, and gets crushed on impact. (Weirdly, Spider-Man managed to solve this problem in Amazing Spider-Man #1 with nothing except his webbing. Oh yeah, and Peter's brains.)


But of course it was the meat in this idiocy sandwich - story no. 2 - which caught my young eye. And I was young when I first read this story. It was reprinted in a British black-and-white Spider-Man Christmas special, possibly that same year, and it burned onto my brain... possibly because it was a Spider-Man comic which barely featured Spider-Man, possibly because it blew my mind that such small story elements being changed could lead to such different endings... and possibly... I like to think... because Betty Brant turned me on as Spider-Girl.

I think most of us with a healthy (or utterly deviant - your priest can tell you which) sex drive like to think we had our first sexual stirrings early, even though nature might have restricted us to just thoughts, and not being able to do anything about it. I can tell you that even at five years old, I remember having strange feelings about Spider-Girl. Why? I have no idea. I think I already identified with Spider-Man in a deep, weirdly primal way. So to see a girl as prettily drawn as Betty (thank you, Rick Hoberg) parading around in a skimpy Spider-Girl costume... yeah, that did it for me.


However, it wasn't until probably ten or fifteen years later that Spider-Girl really entered my consciousness, and of course by then I could - ahem - do something about it. I returned to my parent's house during one college vacation and discovered an old, faded comic in the depths of my wardrobe; the very same Spider-Man comic, which had survived several house moves and many years of neglect. The pages were falling apart, it was yellowing all over, but the story was still readable... and now had quite an effect on me.

Fast forward a few years, and I started writing down some of my more elaborate fantasies; my love of Mission: Impossible led to writing Beneath the Veil**, and after that was done I looked around for something else major to sink my teeth into. That's when that vision, buried deep in my youth, re-surfaced. A vision of Betty Brant, that pretty little secretary of J Jonah Jameson's, standing in a deserted house, her body barely covered by her Spider-Girl costume, holding an empty Spider-Man style mask in front of her. And that dialogue, about her feeling 'free' and 'non-restricted', only when she was Spider-Girl.

Everything came into focus at once, and I started writing. All thanks to a little black and white British reprint. And about twenty years to think on it.

* Incidentally, if you'd like to read the story today it's in trade paperback form - as part of What If? Classic Vol 2. Buy it on Amazon.co.uk here or from Amazon.com here. Or do what I did, and find it in a comics shop in the back issue bins.

** Do you know what Beneath the Veil is? Seriously, if you've never heard of it, I'd really like to know. (In short, it's the first mask fiction I ever 'published'.) Leave a comment if that's the case.