ISSUE #16: Two Spider Self-Portraits, Ten Thousand Miles Apart

“He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.”

Spiders, specifically Amazonian ones, have been on my mind lately, ever since the trailer for Sony’s latest not-Spider-Man Spider-movie Madame Web dropped online earlier this week. In the movie, Dakota Johnson plays a clairvoyant woman with latent spider-powers who uses her ability to see the future to find a bunch of other Spider-people and solve a mystery involving the identity of some other Spider-guy. The trailer includes her clunky, methodically intoned ADR line “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.” It’s the kind of blatant, wordy exposition dump that’s probably only there to give the promotional material some background, but I hope, now that everyone is obsessed with the line, they keep it in the actual movie. 

Madame Web aside, it did get me thinking about the Amazon, and spiders, and spiders you’d find in the Amazon. There’s the Goliath birdeater, the biggest spider in the world by mass, an enormous brown tree-dwelling tarantula that got its name from an alleged sighting of one eating a hummingbird. There’s the Brazilian wandering spider, a dangerous, venomous spider also nicknamed the “banana spider” due to its tendency to hide in exported fruits only to be discovered a long way away from home.