Jess is going to prison. It’s okay; she’s been invited, not convicted. She’s also being attacked...so y’know...there’s THAT. And things aren’t going too well in her personal life either as Spider-Woman reaches its 12th issue. Writer Karla Pacheco continues to animate a very endearingly funny and emotionally appealing hero/mother next-door as she navigates through another adventure deftly brought to life by artist Pere Pérez. Much of the issue takes place in prison, but Pacheco’s writing has the kind of balance to make the adventure feel quite free and open from cover to cover. 

Jess is dealing with a group calling themselves Los Espadas Gemelas De Toledo. (That’s Spain. Not Ohio like she was thinking.) One of them wound up in prison. He wants to speak with her. She’s still on such a high from getting back into the swing of things that she does not exactly think that many moves ahead. So when the prisoner’s brother-in-arms shows up at the prison with a score to settle, things are going to get kind of complicated. Luckily enough, her new costume has a nifty little surprise that’s going to help her out.

Pacheco has kind of a lot of backstory to deliver on the villains in this chapter. There’s kind of a complicated history that the antagonists are a part of, and the writer feels it really, really necessary to run through the whole thing. Typically this sort of thing can come across as a tedious lead-in to the action. Still, Pacheco makes it an enjoyable character study that shows the complicated historical motivations for the “villains.” As always, Pacheco makes Jess a lot of fun to hang out with as she is now on familiar ground dealing with weirdly obsessed supervillains. 

Pérez does as good a job as ever hitting the dramatic marks in the story, which is pretty impressive given the fact that Pacheco made the emotional target for that drama minimal. A significant dramatic moment lands quite suddenly in only two pages at the end of the issue, but Pérez makes it feel overwhelming. The actual action hits the page quite well, considering it all takes place in a perfectly ordinary prison. The sharp angles and explosive aggression shoot across the page with brisk percussion. Wit the villains being sword-wielding anti-heroes, it might have been a bit more fun to see the action delivered with swashbuckling flair, but balletic action would have dampened the impact of the violence. 

Pacheco has been doing a brilliant job of bringing a hero to the page who has clearly been through a HELL of a lot already. She’s still got a passion for doing what she’s doing without being bogged down in darkness and cynicism. It’s a job; she loves doing it; she gets a bit tired. Never enough time with her kid. Pacheco is carved out a really specific niche for Jess throughout the first twelve issues of the series.

Grade: A