Silk is a 2015 comic book series from Marvel Comics. It's the second of several series starring Cindy Moon, the titular superhero Silk. It's written by Robbie Thompson.
Set in the shared Marvel Universe, the series is part of the wider Spider-Man franchise. Teenager Cindy Moon, like Spider-Man, was bitten by a radioactive spider and gained spider-related superpowers. But whereas Peter became a superhero, Cindy was confined to a bunker for a decade, warned that her powers would attract mystic predators to the world.
When she finally emerged, Cindy's family had vanished and she struggled to rebuild her life. At the end of her previous series, she finally located her brother - just in time for the events of Secret Wars, Marvel's world-destroying Crisis Crossover, to seemingly destroy the Earth.
This second series begins after a short Time Skip - the world was saved, but it seems that Silk is now a supervillain. Or, rather, she's an undercover agent pretending to be a supervillain, helping Mockingbird to bring down the Black Cat's villainous organisation. But there is plenty of scope for all of that to go wrong...
As two different Silk series launched in 2015, Marvel have sometimes referred to this one as "(2015B)" for disambiguation purposes.
Silk contains examples of the following tropes:
- Bat Family Crossover: The Spider-Women crossover runs through Silk, Spider-Gwen and Spider-Woman, as well as its own Alpha and Omega issues.
- Becoming the Mask: Mockingbird worried that Silk's infiltration of Black Cat's organization would put her in serious risk of this, as did a few others, and not without reason. She almost killed a person under Black Cat's orders, and when asked about it, she stated she felt good after beating the man and throwing him off a roof (but claims that she knew he'd survive). The main thing that seemed to be pushing her into this trope is that she genuinely likes Cat and sees her as a friend, a feeling that Cat would mutually return. She ultimately doesn't go rogue, and Mockingbird apologizes for thinking she would.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Cindy finally finds and rescues her parents, who were trapped in the Negative Zone. As thanks for everything Cindy did in dealing with the Black Cat, Mockingbird sets her family up with a new house/safehouse.
- Evil Mentor: Black Cat becomes this for Silk. It doesn't help that Cat is the only person besides Silk's therapist that isn't convinced Silk is a failure of some kind.
- Face–Heel Turn: The First-Episode Twist is that Silk has gone rogue and is working for Black Cat under the moniker of "Sinister Silk", lamenting that her brief stint as a hero has made it difficult for her to accrue any Villain Cred... but it's revealed she's actually The Mole for S.H.I.E.L.D. But, then, after the events of Spider-Women, Cindy decides to back Black Cat full-time after S.H.I.E.L.D. refuses to listen to the fact that her Earth-65 counterpart was causing trouble, not her. Then it turns out she went back to S.H.I.E.L.D. to continue busting Black Cat after they finally believed her story.
- Morality Pet: Silk appointed herself as Black Cat's, and the two end up having a heart-to-heart where Silk tells her that she clearly isn't the full-fledged villain that everyone is making her out to be. Knowing that her sidekick earnestly views her in this way leads to Black Cat sparing Silk's life when she learns Silk is working for S.H.I.E.L.D.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: After finding out Silk has betrayed her by working with S.H.I.E.L.D., Black Cat teleports the two of them to an abandoned warehouse and proceeds to beat Cindy to a bloody pulp in front of her goons, to show them what happens to people who double-cross her. The beatdown is interrupted by S.H.I.E.L.D. agents storming the building, and Cindy uses the last of her strength to leap through a skylight after being aided by an uppercut, landing on the roof. Black Cat simply teleports to the roof and continues beating her up. She stops when Silk reaffirms her faith in Black Cat not being a true villain, though.
- Not Quite Back to Normal: The Goblin King (Phil Urich) infects Silk with his knock-off Goblin Serum in an attempt to get her on his side, but she's saved by Black Cat, who had cooked up a cure. However, Silk's eyes briefly turn yellow when she gets angry for a while after, implying that Felicia's vaccine wasn't perfect or took time to work fully.
- Recycled Title: The series uses exactly the same title - simply Silk - as Cindy's first solo series. Collected editions of the first series eventually added a subtitle to help differentiate them.
- So What Do We Do Now?: In the penultimate issue, Cindy finds herself at a lost of what do after rescuing her parents, as reuniting her family was her only goal after leaving the bunker. The idea of continuing to be Silk doesn't even seem enticing for a while. It's only after talking with Jameson, her brother, and her therapist, as well as helping a kid get their kite out of a tree, that she decides to take Mockingbird's offer to join S.H.I.E.L.D. as a full-time hero.
