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Warning: Major Spoilers for Marvel’s The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21!
The Captain Marvel villain Star has taken the reins from experienced sorceress Wanda Maximoff a.k.a. the Scarlet Witch to become Marvel Comics‘ villainous reality warper.
Introduced during 2019’s Captain Marvel Re-Entry event, social reject Ripley Ryan began as a tortured soul thrust into the role of a supervillain. Before attaining a stable career as a reporter for Ms. Magazine, Ripley suffered extensive childhood bullying at the hands of both her abusive mother and fellow classmates. After a brazen rescue from Carol Danvers, Ripley is genetically enhanced by one of Carol’s oldest enemies, the Kree scientist Doctor Minerva. Shortly following her enhancements, the newly christened Star comes into contact with the Reality Stone, one of the six Infinity Stones. Writer Karla Pacheco (Spider-Woman) and artist Eleonora Carlini (Women of Marvel)’s The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #2 finds the Infinity Stone powered villain, inflicting her abilities of warping reality, on the superhero epicenter of New York City and its wall-crawling defender.
Taking a temporary break from super-heroics, Peter Parker encounters the disrupting results of Star’s powers. Using her reality-warping abilities to retrieve a series of canines, Star quickly upgrades from jewelry robbing to unrestrained revenge on her former High School tormentors. After brutally murdering a former bully and attempting to harm another, Star catches the attention of Spider-Man. While extremely agile, Spider-Man faces difficulty in contending with Star’s tendency to alter her size, replicate his web-slinging, and modify the surrounding areas to her advantage. It’s ultimately Ripley’s faltering powerset and a plea toward her humanity that allows Spider-Man the winning edge, before losing to his own ambitions.
As Star continues her reality-enhanced crime spree, Peter Parker’s initial investigation into the crimes quickly rules out the Scarlet Witch and other powerful Marvel beings from the satanic-like figure Mephisto to the ancient cosmic entity The Beyonder as likely culprits. Suffering a mental break built from years of emotional trauma, Scarlet Witch infamously laid the full extent of her reality-warping potential upon the superhuman community in 2005’s Avengers / X-Men crossover House of M from Brian Michael Bendis (Ultimate Spider-Man) and artist Olivier Coipel (Thor). Wanda’s infamous “No More Mutants” action saw a vast amount of Earth’s mutant population rendered powerless. In a nod to the defining Scarlet Witch moment, Amazing Spider-Man Annual #2 includes a homage to the iconic page down to its panel framing, only replacing mutants with pesky co-pays.
Wanda may have begun her career as a valued member of X-Men foe Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and even destroyed several members of The Avengers in her rage, but she has since reformed and returned to fight alongside her fellow teammates. While Wanda’s mutant nature and mental stability have been recently called into question, the hero remains a powerhouse for good. Star herself shows potential for good in the tail end of her battle against Spider-Man but quickly reverts back to her old malicious ways. If Star is anything like Scarlet Witch in her darkest moments, there just may be a redemption arc in Ripley’s future.
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