“The Peril of Brother Grimm”

THE SPIDER-WOMAN — Issue no. 3, March 1978

Book: The Spider-Woman

Issue No.: 3

Published: March 7, 1978

Title: “The Peril of Brother Grimm”

Cover Price: 35¢

The story opens with costumed baddie Brother Grimm busting into a theater (where they’re putting on a Hansel and Gretel play, get it?) and killing a few patrons by dehydrating (yuck) them. Grimm talks a lot — like maybe they’re going for a manic late-’70s Robin Williams vibe?

Then Grimm leaves the theater without taking any money from the people there. Then he abducts a congressman, James Wyatt, takes the congressman with him to break into a bank, then he takes the money from the congressman’s safe deposit box and leaves the congressman locked inside.

Jessica Drew (AKA Spider-Woman) and Magnus (the wizard-type dude she met last issue) have made it from England to Los Angeles, and they’re moving in to a new apartment together. A young woman moving in with a weird old guy she barely knows? Generally wouldn’t seem like a good idea, but probably not a big deal if you’re Spider-Woman.

After getting the real estate issue settled, Spider-Woman breaks into the police station to see what she can learn about her father’s murder — she’d come to the States hoping to get info from her father about her mysterious past, but instead she learned that he’d been murdered. She discovers that her pop had a connection with the congressman Brother Grimm robbed earlier.

The next day, Spider-Woman confronts the Congressman at the capitol building (so I’m assuming this guy is a state congressman) in broad daylight. Bold move. Then the Congressman pulls a gun on her! What is this, Texas?

While Spider-Woman is slapping Wyatt around, trying to get answers out of him, Brother Grimm busts in. Again, this is at a government building in broad daylight. Maybe government building security was a lot more lax in California in 1978?

Oh, and I keep forgetting to mention that Congressman Wyatt is crooked. Aside from being trigger-happy, he’s also sitting on a pile of counterfeit money.

I started thinking that Brother Grimm was actually multiple guys wearing the same suit and going by the same name when Grimm attacked Spider-Woman while Grimm was also in police custody. Plus sometimes Grimm had been doing the manic Robin Williams thing, and sometimes he had been more serious/less chatty. And I’m thinking he (or more likely they) is a movie special effects expert of some sort, using the tools of his trade to do super-villain stuff, kind of like the original Mysterio. This assumption is partially based on Jessica's dead dad and Wyatt being somehow involved with a company called Pyro-Technics. With that name, it’s gotta be a special effects business, right?

But this is all just me guessing for now, as the story ended unresolved. I guess there is a small cliffhanger — Grimm (or one of the Grimms) escapes police custody.

Honestly, this story is a letdown after last month’s fun and weird story about possessed swords and the ghost of Morgan Le Fay. I double-checked the credits — did the usually reliable Marv Wolfman write this? (He did.) Hopefully all of this Grimm/congressman stuff is leading somewhere more interesting. Maybe we’ll find out in Spider-Woman no. 4.

Next time — I’ll be back Tuesday to wrap up the Marvel March 1978 week two books with everybody’s favorite superhero stuntman, the Human Fly!