10 Things Only Marvel Comic Book Fans Know About Madame Web
Dakota Johnson is set to play Madame Web in an upcoming movie in the Sony Marvel Universe. She joins the ranks of other Spider-Man-related characters like Venom and Morbius in live-action. She's significantly less well-known than either of them, but comic book fans know that Madame Web is a major factor in Marvel Comics for a number of key characters.
Madame Web is a powerful clairvoyant who often helps Spider-Man. She's also strongly connected to other major characters including several versions of Spider-Woman, making her a logical character to include in the movies, as Spider-Woman is sure to appear in live-action soon. She also has an intriguing connection to Kraven The Hunter which may be set up in his upcoming solo movie.
Madame Web might outwardly seem like a typical supervillain from Marvel Comics who got their powers from scientific means, in the vein of Doctor Octopus. She's actually a mutant, and her incredible powers of perception are borne of her natural genetic mutation.
They were heightened somewhat by her medical condition. She lost much of her senses, including her eyesight, to a rare disease. But this heightened her other senses, particularly her mutant ability of precognition, to the point she could see beyond herself into the future.
Madame Web is one of the most powerful mutants in Marvel Comics. Her primary abilities are precognition, which allows her to see the future with remarkable clarity, and clairvoyance, which allows her to perceive beyond herself to see other people and events.
This gives her a remarkable insight into situations like missing persons, which she has leveraged as a medium. Her powers extended even beyond that though, as she is able to read the minds of others, giving her even more awareness.
Though later comic book stories have discarded or minimized Madame Web's health, her unique visual look is a direct result of a life-threatening illness. She suffers from a neurological disorder called myasthenia gravis which left her paralyzed.
Madame Web couldn't even breathe as a result, but her husband created an advanced wheelchair that kept her alive. The wheelchair served as a mobile respirator for all intents and purposes and it continues to evolve in power and ability as the years go on.
Madame Web is one of the most powerful mutants alive by virtue of her natural abilities. She became even more powerful when she took part in a ritual called the Gathering of the Five. Through this process, she effectively became immortal.
The Gathering of the Five involved five people, including Norman Osborn, coming together with five ancient artifacts to achieve even greater power. Osborn wanted to make himself even more of a threat than he already was, but the process caused horrific mental side effects.
Madame Web first appears in The Amazing Spider-Man #210 in an unusual way. Though some might consider her a villain from her appearances in other media, she actually begins her comic book story by helping Spider-Man stop an assassination plot.
An ad in a newspaper actually leads him to Madame Web and she convinces him of her psychic power by revealing that she knows his true identity. She would eventually forget he is Peter Parker though, after a violent encounter with the Juggernaut.
Spider-Man fights the unstoppable Juggernaut in The Amazing Spider-Man #229 and #230, some of the best Spider-Man issues of the 1980s, and it's all due to Madame Web. The Juggernaut wants to get his hands on Web to use her psychic powers to stop the X-Men.
Spider-Man tries to stop him, but despite Spider-Man's strength and ability, he's no real match for the brute force of the Juggernaut. Madame Web very nearly died in this story after Juggernaut ripped her out of her life-support system.
As a mutant, Madame Web faces the same persecution as all others in the Marvel Universe. One horrible event she escaped is the decimation of all but a handful of mutants at the hands of the Scarlet Witch in the seminal House Of M storyline.
Wanda Maximoff is one of the most powerful magicians in the Marvel Universe and her culling of mutants left their numbers frighteningly low for decades. Madame Web was one of the two hundred or so survivors of the event, perhaps due to her immortality or clairvoyance.
Comic book fans know Sasha Kravinoff is one of the children of Kraven The Hunter, but they may not know that she killed Madame Web. Sasha brutally attacked Madame Web at the end of the Grim Hunt storyline out of a belief Madame Web had not told her the truth about the future.
The elaborate plan of the Kravinoffs to take down Spider-Man once and for all had collapsed into chaos and Sasha retaliated in a fit of rage. She would end up paying for her violence, killed by her own father after she confronts him over his failures.
Madame Web has achieved immortality in the comics, but she isn't beyond dying. When she died in the Grim Hunt storyline, she passed her powers on to Julia Carpenter, one of the best alternative versions of Spider-Woman in Marvel Comics.
This could be a preview of the Sony Marvel Universe version of the character. Madame Web is traditionally older in the comics and Dakota Johnson could be playing Julia Carpenter, who inherits her powers after a run-in with the live-action Kraven The Hunter.
In what may be a preview of either an MCU storyline, a Sony Marvel Universe one, or both, Madame Web has a dramatic encounter with Jessica Jones in Alias #17 from the early 2000s. In this issue, Madame Web uses her powers to see into Jessica's past.
Jessica is dealing with the trauma of her experiences in this acclaimed series by writer Brian Michael Bendis, leading to a huge blowup from Jones. It's only made worse by Madam Web's prediction that Jessica will eventually fight one of her friends to the death.