Spider-Woman
name of several fictional characters in the Marvel Comics universe
Spider-Woman is the code name of several fictional characters in comic books published by Marvel Comics. The first major version is Jessica Drew (and later impersonated by Veranke), the second major version is Julia Carpenter, and the third major version is Mattie Franklin. Several alternate reality incarnations of the character have additionally received attention, including the Ultimate Spider-Woman, Ashley Barton, and Gwen Stacy.
Publication history
Marvel Comics' then-publisher Stan Lee said in 1978, shortly after Spider-Woman's debut in Marvel Spotlight #32 (Feb. 1977) and the start of the character's 50-issue self-titled series (cover-dated April 1978 – June 1983), the character originated because,
I suddenly realized that some other company may quickly put out a book like that and claim they have the right to use the name, and I thought we'd better do it real fast to copyright the name. So we just batted one quickly, and that's exactly what happened. I wanted to protect the name, because it's the type of thing [where] someone else might say, "Hey, why don't we put out a Spider-Woman; they can't stop us." ... You know, years ago we brought out Wonder Man, and [DC Comics] sued us because they had Wonder Woman, and ... I said okay, I'll discontinue Wonder Man. And all of a sudden they've got Power Girl [after Marvel had introduced Power Man].
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2922722. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1978, 1977 and 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spider-Woman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.