ARACHNE

 

ARACHNE

Real Name: Julia Cornwall Carpenter

First Appearance: Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #6, October 1984 (as Spider-Woman); Ms. Marvel (Vol. 2) #6, October 2006 (as Arachne); The Amazing Spider-Man (Vol. 1) #637, July 2010 (as Madame Web)

Powers: Julia Carpenter was injected with an experimental serum derived from spiders. As a result, she gained many of the same powers as Spider-Man. As Spider-Woman II, her powers included superhuman strength, speed, agility, endurance, reflexes, and the inter-atomic bonding power responsible for their wall-crawling abilities. Julia is also capable of materializing psionic webbing, formed out of her own mental energy. These psi-webs are woven by her mind and can take the form of simple strands and lines or shaped into more elaborate web designs. They have an elastic physical quality, allowing them to bend and flex without breaking. She can use her webbing to swing on like a rope, to surround and bind an opponent, to block off hallways and paths, etc. The psi-webbing conducts her own inter-atomic bonding power, allowing her to make anything that touches the webs to cling to them. Because they are composed of energy, they can also interact with pure energy forms, such as lassoing the normally insubstantial electrical form of the Living Lightning. She can dissolve her psi-webs with a thought. Later on, a secondary exposure to her original serum boosted her strength and stamina.

Julia lost her powers for a time and was crippled after a fight with the third Spider-Woman (Charlotte Witter). After regaining her powers and mobility, she renamed herself "Arachne". She has learned how to use her psi-webs to increase her natural sensitivity as well as for physical grappling. Like a spider can sense vibrations from the center of their web, Arachne can sense thought patterns passing through the aether and psionically reverberating off of her webs. She cannot read minds, but she can sense the presence of other sentient beings within a given radius, and pinpoint their location with some degree of accuracy when they are in range. The "death" of Madame Web connected Julia to the Web of Life, giving her clairvoyance, precognition, and teleporting abilities.