Marvel Comics will celebrate a half-century since Jessica Drew’s first appearance in 1976’s Marvel Spotlight #32, with a Spider-Woman 50th Anniversary Special this fall. The main event will be a story by Dan Watters (2023’s Loki) and Andrea Broccardo (2025’s Spider-Man Noir) that picks up from the currently running Amazing Spider-Man: Spider-Versity, where after “a terrible twist of fate,” Jessica returns “to her roots as a private investigator,” and teams up with journalist Ben Urich to uncover a “tangled web of lies and mystery.”
Watters comments, “Mysterious and dangerous, Jessica Drew has always been one of my very favorite Marvel heroes. I’m so pleased to be bringing Spider-Woman venom-blasting into a new chapter of her story!” The comic marks only the writer’s second at Marvel, and the first headlined by Jessica since the end of her last series in 2024, which saw HYDRA age up and transform her son Gerry into the villainous Green Mamba.
Also included in the book will be a comic by Ann Nocenti and Stefano Raffaele (Alien vs. Captain America), where Jessica will battle her old enemy Flying Tiger in Los Angeles. Nocenti recalls, “In the 1980s, editor Mark Gruenwald gave me the assignment to ‘retire’ Spider-Woman, ending the book’s run with issue #50, so returning to write a story about how Jess’s friendships and battles are hard won feels redemptive. Added bonus — with art by the spectacular Stefano Raffaele, the story will be gorgeous!”
She also comments the story is thematically about how “everyone has flaws, and [how] it’s heroic to overcome them. When editor Kaeden McGahey asked me to spin a tale for Spider-Woman’s 50th anniversary, I thought of how Jessica Drew’s spider pheromone scent can be isolating. It’s a great test of her detective skills to sleuth out clues despite her creepy vibe and also hits a universal chord — we all have occasional ‘everyone hates me’ moments in life.”
Jessica Drew, the original Spider-Woman, was created by Archie Goodwin and Marie Severin, and her first appearance, where she went by the name Arachne, was realized by Goodwin, Sal Buscema, Jim Mooney, and Janice Cohen. The character’s first series ran from 1978 to 1983, and she starred in subsequent ones in 2006, 2009, 2015, 2016, 2020, and 2024. Other characters who’ve used the title of Spider-Woman, namely Julia Carpenter, the late Mattie Franklin, and Earth-65’s Gwen Stacy, have starred in their own series, although the last typically goes by Spider-Gwen or Ghost-Spider.
The special will be released on September 2, with covers by Olivier Coipel, Greg Land, and Rose Besch (whose variant will be released with and without text). In the meantime, issue #3 of Spider-Versity will arrive on June 24, and the book will conclude with issue #5 on August 12. Marvel will also celebrate the 60th anniversary of another woman of the Spider-Verse in Mary Jane Watson: Face It Tiger on August 5, and mark 1000 issues of Amazing Spider-Man on September 16.
