Nerding Day: Web Woman (Patreon)

Web Woman was, without a doubt, the worst superhero to ever do it. She was one of the Super Seven in the show Tarzan And The Super 7. Since she wasn't the title character, she had to be worse at saving people than a man whose superpower was jungle. The pitch for her powers was "Aquaman but with bugs," a power that's only good for mildly inconveniencing people so she almost never uses it in the show.

Kelly Webster did not get her powers by being rich, magical, or even a little smart. She got her powers by rescuing an alien bug man from drowning. He had access to all of the power in the universe, but no one taught him the magic of swimming. Kelly is a regular Earth woman who can swim. That's all she contributes to the team, but to be fair, they desperately needed that power at one time. The alien gave Kelly a ring that bestowed the useless bug powers on her. Is that Green Lantern's exact origin story but with a problem that could have been solved by a single class at the YMCA? Shhhh it's fine. We're moving on.

Kelly is supposedly a former NASA scientist turned farmer, and let me tell you, she did not quit NASA. That woman was fired. They made Kelly Webster so dumb it is literally offensive to my entire gender. My greatest hope is that they were going to one day reveal this was a Dr. Manhattan situation where she's slowly being exposed to insect radiation that's poisoning her and lowering her IQ, but the show was canceled before the big reveal.

There's an episode called "Send In The Clones" where her NASA contact, General McMahon, calls her and says, "I just saw a carbon copy of myself near the old Frankenstein place."

Kelly replies, "Do you think Jack Frankenstein is involved?" Not off to a great start, Kelly. Yes, yes, he does think that the man with the last name Frankenstein, who was recently fired from NASA for doing terrible experiments, might be doing terrible experiments. It seems to shock her that normal Scientist Dr. Frankenstein, canonically the ancestor of Dr. Frankenstein of Frankenstein's monster fame, would ever do anything wrong.

Kelly goes to Dr. Frankenstein's spooky mansion, looks in the window, and sees General McMahon. Having completely forgotten the entire reason for her visit to this spooky castle, she crawls in the window, walks up to General McMahon, and says, "General McMahon, what are you doing here?" You'll be shocked to learn it's not General McMahon at all! She ends up getting captured and cloned by Dr. Frankenstein! Not a single second of that plot works if Kelly has a brain.

Another time, Scarab, her alien boss who communicates with her from an enormous glowing orb in her basement, summons her and explains there is a threat from the past on Earth. He shows her a picture of a ten-foot-tall woman named Ashta and explains how she tried to take over the galaxy ten thousand years ago.

"What does that have to do with us?" Web Woman asks.

Use context clues, Kelly! At least let the orb finish his story before you break in. Does she have someplace else to be?

"Ten thousand years ago, I trapped Ashta here on Earth and sealed her in a neutron bottle. Tonight, Ashta was set free." The orb man continues, so patient, so kind. And so wasted on our stupid, stupid Kelly.

"I still don't get what that has to do with us!" Web Woman replies. There's a ten-thousand-year-old galaxy-conquering alien free on Earth, and she doesn't get what that has to do with her, the superhero Web Woman. Why could this orb possibly be telling her this story? Is he trying to get a threesome going? So annoying.

Ashta immediately attacks the orb cave, and Web Woman is finally like, "So, that's what he was yammering about." I'm glad she eventually figured out what was going on. I'm proud of her. It probably doesn't help that she isn't hanging out with NASA scientists all day. She's cooped up in a barn with Spinner, her bat/mouse/alien/monkey sidekick, and Spinner sucks.

Spinner has one job, and it's getting kidnapped. He's fabulous at it. His ability to do anything fluctuates wildly from episode to episode. He can fly Webb Woman's jet, but he can't run away from any bad guy that wants to huck him over their shoulder. They pick him up, and he hangs in the air like a confused toddler, foiled once again! What I'm getting at is the orb man isn't getting off his ass, and Spinner is useless, so there's no help for poor Kelly.

Sometimes he's worse than useless and will leap into the arms of villains and start to make love to them.

You're probably thinking, but Lydia, is the show disconcertingly horny in other ways? Of course, it is! It's a cartoon from 1977. Do you think they did a hero transformation sequence on a woman that didn't include zapping her pants to the phantom zone? Sensible slacks! Begone!!!

There are also a lot of sexually coded villainesses who all look a lot like Web Woman. I don't know if this is a money-saving tactic for the production or if every comic creator has a redhead fetish. All the female villains look like Web Woman with bigger hair. In this universe, volumizing spray is Satan.

"Madame Macabre's Calamity Circus" is an especially horny episode. Web Woman wanders into a clearly haunted circus while searching for two escaped convicts, and the woman who runs it assures her the creatures there are "mostly harmless" in the most ominous way ever. Sweet Kelly does not realize this big-haired, obviously evil woman is a villain and starts wandering around the circus joyfully as Madame Macabre monologues directly to one of her creature's eight pack abs for so long you might have mistaken the gif below for a still image of a chained up hunk.

Web Woman is able to defeat Madame Macabre and her hunky monster with her powers, which she does have. Not the bug thing; mostly, her powers are a flying bug-shaped spaceship, nets, and a grappling hook. You would be shocked how many problems can be solved with a grappling hook. Many of the jams Web Woman finds herself in require a distant button to be pressed, or a lever to be pulled. Something that summoning a lot of bugs would actually be great for, but also drawing a lot of bugs is more time consuming and expensive than one rope. The rope also comes out of her belt and is mildly sentient. She can toss and tell it what to do and where to go, and it will obey her. She's more Rope Girl than Web Woman.

There's even an episode where she traps a villain named Dr. Despair with one of her webs and declares, "Give up Despair. You cannot break free of web trap." That's a direct quote, and when Dr. Despair tugs on his foot a little bit, the web just breaks, and he runs away. Sad Kelly shrugs and says, "Well, I've been wrong before." She's a low self-esteem queen who can't even capture a man that wanted either a deep V or a high collar and decided on both.

The one thing Web Woman accomplished in her short, ten episode career was encouraging the creation of Spider Woman. She was initially supposed to be Spider Woman, but Marvel got wind of the show during production and rushed out Jessica Drew's introduction to make sure they had the Spider Woman copyright. Supposedly, almost everything about Web Woman, including her superhero name, origin story, abilities, and equipment had to be quickly changed during production to avoid copyright infringement.

Maybe that's why the show's creators seemed to openly hate her so much. She was supposed to be a sneaky way to steal the IP of Spider Woman from Marvel, and when that was taken from them, they were left with a woman with swimming certification and a bat monkey. Aquaman, but with bugs, also we can't afford bugs, was actually not a bad end result under those circumstances.

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