Mizzelle's Menagerie

Let’s Discuss Comics: More Spider Widow!

revsoncorp:

Today’s Spider Widow adventure comes from Feature Comics #58. It’s the second SW story, and it repeats many of the same beats from the first story: it opens with Dianne and Bob Ableson, Dianne discovers a gang that she ambushes at night as the Widow, and the day is ultimately saved by Dianne’s deployment of her spider pets.

That said, it’s also something of an improvement over the previous story. The art is light and cleaner, and since the origin was portrayed last issue, the pacing is much tighter here. Some variety is attempted by adding a maritime setting and a memorable female gang boss as the villain.  All told, this is as close as The Spider Widow will get to a standard hero-fights-the-Axis adventure.

SIDEBAR: Spider Widow is, according to the introduction, “The Most Horrible Dispenser of Justice of All Times!” I’d like that on my tombstone.

OTHER SIDEBAR: The close-up on Spider Widow’s face on the penultimate page of the story is my favorite panel here: the more the strip highlights the Spider Widow’s unique image (compared to other heroes of the era), the more effective it is.

NOTE: As happens in many WWII-era materials, Italians and Japanese characters are depicted in this story as racist caricatures, and derogatory racial epithets are used. I make no attempt to excuse these depictions, but I hope you are able to look beyond them for the fun of the story.

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