Madame Web — the future and our responsibility
Seeing the future might appear to a useful super power, but Madame Web illustrates the difficulties and dilemmas raised by prophesy while also directing us towards issues of responsibility.
Madame Web is a telepath, clairvoyant and precognitive mutant. In addition to helping superheroes like Spider-Man, she also works as a professional medium. Which seems fair enough. Lean into your skills and earn a little cash.
Cassandra Web, the first Madame Web (who appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #210) is also blind and paralyzed, limiting her options as a superhero herself and meaning having an income is important, especially when her life support system is a complex (and expensive looking) web.
Being able to see the future raises a number of issues for storytelling and out concept of cause, effect and consequence.
The problems of Madame Web’s precognitive abilities is apparent in her first appearance in The Amazing Spider-Man #210. After a kidnapper drops a flyer for Madame Web, Spider-Man visits Madame Web hoping for a clue. What he finds is a little more intimidating (imagine being Spider-Man and entering a room filled with a futuristic web) and more helpful.
Madame Web has a vision of the location of the kidnappers and directs Spider-Man towards a jumble of trains. The exact location of the kidnappers is a toy-store filled with toy trains. Madame Web can see the future, but communicating the exact nature is more challenging.
If interpreting the visions is problematic enough, there is also the challenge of how Madame Web delivers the information which raises questions about fate and consequence.
In the first instance, exactly whether Madame Web’s visions are inevitable or just a possible future remains ambiguous. In the upcoming Madame Web film, the visions appear to be a possible future that can be changed. The concept of being able to change the timeline exists in tandem with branching realities (have you seen Season Two of Loki?).
In a super helpful conversation between Bruce Banner and the Ancient One in Avengers: Endgame, the Ancient one tells Bruce that removing an infinity stone changes the timeline and creates a branching reality. Does that make the vision inevitable for one reality, but changeable for all other realities?
In Spider-Man comics, Madame Web appears to be able to manage the inevitability of an event occurring based on how she communicates her visions (and what she leaves out).
In the Grim Hunt storyline, Madame Web is kidnapped by Sasha Kravinoff (the wife of Kraven the Hunter). Sasha uses Madame Web to predict the movement of several Spider-Man related heroes in order to resurrect Kraven the Hunter by sacrificing Spider-Man. As you can imagine, Spider-Man is not scarified, but Kraven is resurrected. Is this an event that Madame Web foresees? If so, she does not accurately relate events of Sasha. Because if Sasha knew what would happen, she certainly would have changed her actions.
An ability to see the future would sound like a lifesaving ability. However, Madame Web has died on more than one occasion (Destiny, another precognitive mutant in the Marvel comic book universe, also has trouble with predicting the future and staying alive).
In different stories, Madame Web has died three times, which is pretty impressive. At the end of Grim Hunt, Cassandra Web paves the way for a new Madame Web. In Dead No More: The Clone Conspiracy, Madame Web is a clone who is unwilling to continue her subservient existence. In both instances, Madame Web accepts the tragedy as a consequence of her actions earlier in the stories.
In the Gathering of the Five, the combination of Madame Web’s precognitive abilities and her death provide a good example of delayed gratification alongside an argument for the end justifying the means.
Madame Web is convinced by Harry Osborne to join four others in a ritual that provides one of five gifts. Three of those gifts are knowledge, power and immortality. The other two gifts are madness and death. Madame Web betrays Spider-Man and the reader is led to believe that she foolishly accept the bargain because she appears to die in the process.
Initially this might lead to questions of her inability to predict her own death. In actually, as a later Spider-Woman comic illustrates, Madame Web receives immortality and serves as a mentor to a new generation of Spider-Woman heroes. Madame Web anticipated her own resurrection and immortality, allowing her to accept the pain and suffering associated with her death.
Not merely stories about predicting the future, the Madame Web stories provide an insight into the tensions between cause and effect while also suggesting the importance of taking responsibility of our actions. What we do today impacts our future.
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