MADAME WEB

 

MADAME WEB

Real Name: Cassandra Webb

First Appearance: The Amazing Spider-Man (Vol. 1) #210, November 1980

Powers: Madame Web’s was born with a debilitating neurological disease that had the side-effect of leaving her with an array of limited psionic powers, including telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychometry. She can read the minds of other people in close quarters and project her thoughts long distance in order to communicate with someone mentally from miles away. She can plant strong compulsions in the minds of others to influence their behavior to a small degree, such as getting someone to travel in a certain direction or to a specific location without them even realizing it. By focusing on people or objects, she can pinpoint their locations to a certain degree. This power works best with targets she is personally familiar with. She also can receive visual images in her mind that represent future events and probabilities, the intensity and clarity of the vision often determines how likely it is to actually occur. Her power works best through psychometric activity, meaning she reads the psychic residue left on people or objects. Therefore, she can most easily predict the events of someone's future when they are in her presence or touching her, will pick up on the most psychically intense thoughts or memories of others, and can receive thoughts or empathic impressions off of solid objects, detecting what another person was thinking or feeling when they were in contact with that object in the past.

Madame Web was stricken with myasthenia gravis, a baffling disease that gradually erodes the central nervous system which left her physically blind and partially paralyzed from birth. She was cybernetically linked to a spider web-like life-support system designed by her husband which attends to all of her bodily needs by augmenting her weakened autonomic nervous system. By simple cybernetic command, she could shift her chair to an upright or reclining position for sleeping. The system was equipped with robot arms that take the place of her now useless arms.