Spider-Gwen: Gwenverse is a 2022 limited series published by Marvel Comics, starring the eponymous Spider-Gwen. It's written by Tim Seeley, with art by Jodi Nishijima and color by Federico Blee.
Once again, we find Gwendolyn Stacy musing on the state of her life. Naturally, since she's a Spider, it's not going great: namely her relationship with Mary Jane is continuing to fray and she's burdened by the knowledge that she's disappointing her father again. At least Gwen is able to take some joy in that she can escape into the multiverse to briefly take her mind off those problems, right? Right?
In the far, far future, a Mad Artist named Finale is planning to escape the collapse of space-time by injecting her essence into the timestream and recreating herself as beloved superheroes of the past. Unfortunately for her, just as she begins her ritual, Gwen decided to take that aforementioned multiverse jump to clear her mind and ends up being the beneficiary instead, with various versions of her spread out across Earth-65's past.
Returning to a present-day Earth-65 that has gone from a "low super" universe into a bizarre police state where MJ is actually happy that Gwen is Ghost-Spider and her father is actively hunting her down in a giant mech suit, Gwen needs to put all her plans on hold and take a journey through time, gather her alternate selves, and fix history. But this is easier said than done when all these Gwens can barely get along and a murderously unhappy content creator has ordered her goons to kill every Gwen Stacy they can find in revenge for stealing her spotlight.
Spider-Gwen: Gwenverse provides examples of:
- Aborted Arc:
- Ghost-Spider (2019) ended with Gwen being forced out of her home dimension to Earth-616 for the safety of her loved ones, after being blackmailed by the Storm twins. This is never followed up on, with the first issue of Gwenverse showing that Gwen is back to living in Earth-65 and openly performing heroics without any worry.
- King in Black: Gwenom vs Carnage added onto the Ghost Spider plotline by ending with Mary Jane also stranded on Earth-616, and still having a piece of the Carnage symbiote inside her. Here, Mary Jane is shown to be completely normal and back to nagging Gwen about her chronic lateness to their band's performances. The second issue does briefly name-drop Knull, but doesn't exposit any further details.
- Alternate Universe: As with many of Gwen's other stories, it's set in her home dimension of Earth-65, though now with the added twist of her having to navigate an alternate timeline of said reality. After defeating Finale, Gwen uses her temporarily amplified connection to the Web of Life to create new universes for each of her offshoots.
- Attention Whore:
- Gwen is stated to be this on some level. Mary Jane outright accuses Gwen of being this, while Gwen privately admits that while she does desperately crave attention, the "shy recluse" half of her personality keeps for from fully acting on it most of the time.
- Thorgwen very much is this, having started out as a meek farm girl that no one ever noticed before getting the hammer. She loathes the idea of giving up her newfound power and fame, and has even developed a bit of an ego in the process, constantly praising her own beauty and complaining when a painted offering doesn't catch her "princely charisma and shapely posterior."
- Bad Influencer: The Big Bad is a celebrity living in the far future at the end of the universe named Finale, whose content seems to mainly consist of debuting new image macros. The plot is kickstarted when it's revealed she intended to use multiple cosmic artifacts to splice herself into the timeline and live forever throughout history as a recurring meme, in a process that drained the life out of all her followers as fuel, only for Gwen to "steal" the honor instead.
- Bad Present: Copies of Gwen getting spliced throughout Earth-65's timestream as different heroes has drastically altered its history so that the present is a dystopian police state where all superhumans are arrested by power armor wearing cops.
- Blood Knight: Wolver-Gwen, a mashup of Gwen Stacy and Wolverine, actively picks a fight with Gwen Rogers due to seeing her as a foil for herself. Ghost-Spider notes that Wolver-Gwen embodies the fiery-tempered part of herself, but completely lacks restraint, demonstrated when she outright kills one of Finale's mooks for pissing her off.
- The Bus Came Back:
- Spider-Zero, the current overseer of the restored Web of Life who debuted in the Miles Morales-led Spider-Verse mini-series in 2019, reappears to assist Gwen in restoring her timeline back to normal after Finale's tampering with reality throws it out of wack.
- Nightbird, the Gwen Stacy created by the Heroes Reborn event as Nighthawk's sidekick, is recruited by Finale to help her hunt down Spider-Gwen.
- Call-Back: Finale's power sources include some familiar items from Marvel history: namely Doctor Doom's Time Platform, Kang's Time Ship, The Sphinx's Ka Stone, and The Tallus. She had also hoped to acquire Cable's chronoputer for the ritual, but Kid Carcass was killed while trying to steal it.
- Cannibalism Superpower: The forehead wound that Wolver-Gwen gave Norman Osborn acts as a Third Eye, complete with True Sight. It allowed him to see through a Skrull's shapeshifting, and he captured and experimented on it, eventually eating it, which gave him the ability to shapeshift into the Green Goblin.
- Continuity Nod:
- Gwen exclaims that Gwen Howllet is a composite of herself and "Mr. Murderhands", the codename Earth-65's Logan uses.
- Cap Gwen's backstory mentions both Samantha Wilson, Earth-65's Captain America, as well as Earth-65's Steve Rogers, whose comic book stories about Sam Wilson inspired a young Gwen to become the new Captain America.
- Composite Character:
- Gwen Janus — aka Thorgwen — is Gwen Stacy spliced with Thor Odinson.
- Gwen Rogers — aka Captain America — is Gwen Stacy spliced with Captain America (Steve Rogers).
- Gwen Howlett — aka Wolver-Gwen — is Gwen Stacy spliced with Wolverine (James Howlett).
- Gwen Jones— aka Captain Marvel— is Gwen Stacy spliced with Rick Jones and Captain Mar-Vell.
- Black 13, aka Calypso Hardy, is composite of Black Cat and Kraven ally Calypso.
- Creepy Cockroach: One of Finale's henchmen is Roach Man, a man in cockroach-themed armor which he claims was built by Alchemax to exterminate "pests" like protestors and homeless people.
- Cthulhumanoid: Professor Cephalopod is pretty much a human-sized Cthulhu in a lab-coat.
- Cuteness Proximity: Professor Cephalopod's reaction to Erma. He even Squees.
- Dem Bones: The version of Stegron the Dinosaur Man that Finale recruits is a skeleton named Fossil, as the formula he used to become a dinosaur somehow caused his soft tissue to fall away over time.
- Disproportionate Retribution: A single act of defiance caused the Supreme Intelligence to overload Captain Marvel's Nega-Bands, causing her to explode and potentially endangering the entire Earth.
- Dirty Coward: As opposed to her bad-tempered but loyal original personality, in the rewritten timeline Mary Jane is very affectionate towards Gwen... but immediately sells her out when the cops show up.
- Distaff Counterpart:
- There is now a She-Bodega Bandit. The whereabouts of the original Bodega Bandit are currently unknown.
- All of the other Gwens are based on male characters, specifically Thor, Captain America, Wolverine, Iron Man, and Captain Marvel.
- Distracted by My Own Sexy: Thorgwen's obsession with her "shapely posterior" extends to the other iterations of Gwen, with her admiring Wolver-Gwen's ass when she poses in a pinup magazine to get a rise out of the prudish Captain America Gwen.
- Eldritch Transformation: Professor Cephalopod's transformation into a Cthulhumanoid is revealed to have come about through his study of eldritch magic.
- Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Finale is an unrepentant mass murderer whose narcissistic plan to imprint herself on reality endangered the entire Multiverse. But she did love her mom.
- Eyes Always Shut: Finale's eyes are for some reason always closed. It turns out to be because her "face" is actually a mask hiding her actual, age-withered visage.
- Fallen Hero: Nightbird, previously a compassionate hero, is now working for a complete lunatic like Finale, and does not bat an eye when Professor Cephalopod devours an innocent woman while the two of them are searching for Ghost-Spider and Thorgwen in Norway. Becomes a hero again after Spider-Gwen's symbiote remove the Goblin serum from her body.
- Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: After Finale reveals her origin to Erma, Erma tearfully points out all of Finale's victims while making it clear that she still sees Finale as nothing but a petulant Narcissist.Finale: I'm not going to be like my mom, Erma. I'm gonna be remembered. I'm gonna be eternal. When time restarts, the survivors of the new universe will be the living memes. Super heroes. Me.
Erma: Meh. Meh! What about the people you drained dry?! What would they have been if you'd tried to fix this instead of take advantage of it for your own selfish ego?! What if people were more to you than just eyes and clicks?!
Finale: Nothing is real until someone sees it. No one saw them... but not even the universe itself can ignore me. - Hairy Girl: Gwen Howlett was one until she shaved her legs to pose in a pinup calendar in order to mortify Gwen Rogers into an encounter, later complaining that doing so was the worst part about the plan.
- Imperfect Ritual: Finale intended to use multiple time manipulating artifacts to splice her essence across all time as a recurring meme. However, because she's decided to forego Cable's Chronoputer to complete the necessary calculations, it misfires and splices Gwen into the roles of various other heroic icons instead.
- Informed Flaw: Mary Jane and Gwen herself accuse the latter of being an Attention Whore. Outside of brief allusions made to her using her powers for entertainment and profit before becoming a superhero in prior runs, this was never a character trait that Gwen has really shown; especially here, with the first issue even opening on her being dismayed at someone noticing who she is and asking her to take out a Harmless Villain. It's at least acknowledged and hand-waved by it being tempered by a near equal amount of aversion to attention.
- Lamprey Mouth: In the second issue, Professor Cephalopod reveals a glowing red ring-shaped maw of full of fangs hidden under his tentacles when devouring one of Thorgwen's followers.
- Literal Split Personality: Due to how they were formed, Gwen notes that her various alternates are essentially distilled versions of her major traits:
- Thorgwen is her hidden attention-seeking desires and her confidence, unburdened by her usual self-consciousness and guilt.
- Gwen Rogers (Captain America) is her sense of justice, bolstered by her deep idolization of the heroes she grew up learning about.
- Gwen Howlett (Wolverine) is her Hair-Trigger Temper, lacking the usual patience to think before acting when enraged.
- Living Battery: In the future, Finale's audience are wearing devices called "emoters" as they watch the last performance. It turns out that Finale was able to repurpose them to act as fuel cells, draining their wearers to power her leap into history.
- Mad Artist: Finale. Her final work of art was to kill her audience and use them as fuel to inject herself into history.
- Mission Control: Spider-Zero loosely plays this role to Gwen, monitoring Ghost-Spider's actions from afar to prevent further damage to that section of the multiverse.
- Mythology Gag:
- The different versions of Gwen featured on the cover of the first issue are taken from the numerous Gwen Stacy variant covers Marvel released in 2015 — the same ones that inspired the creation of The Unbelievable Gwenpool.
- The company that made the pinup calendar Gwen Howlett posed for is called The Vision Design Agency, run by a man named Markham Aaarkus. Not only is he dressed like the Golden Age version of Vision at a fancy Halloween party, but his name also references the character: Aarkus being the name of that incarnation of the character, who was an alien, and Markham being the name of the scientist that brought him to Earth.
- Plot-Triggering Death: Kid Carcass. Finale's plan goes wrong, with Gwen duplicated throughout history instead, because he's killed offscreen by Cable when attempting to steal the chronoputer before the story even starts, .
- Proud Beauty: Thorgwen likes to brag about her good looks, being especially proud of her "shapely posterior". In fact, Gwen manages to quickly gain her as an ally by letting her know about photography and promising that they can find someone willing to lovingly photograph her perfect behind.
- Quirky Mini Boss Squad: Finale's Terminal Six, consisting of alternate and composite versions of past Marvel villains.
- Retcon: Previous comic runs indicated that Mary Jane is a bit self-centered and attention seeking, with Gwenom vs. Carnage even indicating that Gwen only halfheartedly followed along with MJ's band idea at first. The first issue has Mary Jane claim that it was Gwen's idea to make the band in order to bolster her own ego and gain attention, which Gwen confirms in the second issue.
- Series Continuity Error:
- As previously noted, the comic disregards the lingering plot threads of Ghost-Spider and Gwenom vs. Carnage. The latter at least gets a brief nod through Gwen mentioning Knull as an enemy she's faced, but nothing from the former outside her now commuting to Earth-616 for her college education is acknowledged.
- Prior Spider-Gwen series stated that Mary Jane Watson and Glory Grant were the one who started the Mary Janes, with MJ having come up with the idea for a garage band (hence why its named after her), though Gwenom vs. Carnage would throw in the added detail of MJ first pitching the idea to an apathetic Gwen in middle school. Here, it's stated that Gwen was the one who started the band, with Gwen pushing MJ into becoming the name and face of the group when she found she didn't have the confidence to take that role herself.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The storyline has Gwen go on a time travel journey instead of a multiverse trip this time around, as her temporal duplicates have altered Earth-65's present, requiring Gwen to go back in time and prevent them from altering history.
- Ship Tease: Mary Jane's unrequited crush on Gwen is hinted at once again, when a frustrated MJ tearfully demands to know what hope she has for Gwen's attention when Gwen can't even spare a moment of her time to care about their band. In the rewritten Earth-65, MJ's personality is flipped — making her more openly affectionate towards Gwen, but she is also a Dirty Coward who sells her out to the cops.
- Taken for Granite: Finale's audience become petrified and crumbling statues after she drains them of their life energy.
- Two Girls to a Team: The Terminal Six has only two female members, Black 13 and Nightbird, and the latter was brought on at the last minute to replace the presumably male Kid Carcass.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Norman assumed that the green man that his Third Eye allowed him to see was a supernatural creature, specifically a goblin that disguised itself using "faerie glamour." In reality, it was a Skrull.
- You Have Failed Me: Knowingly invoked when Finale talks to Dr. Cephalopod.Finale: Doc. I like you n' all, but I'm getting annoyed. Don't make me do that trope where I choke out a henchman for failin' me.
- Voodoo Doll: Black 13 makes one out of a wristwatch in order to take control of Iron Gwen.
