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A Spider-man character entry. In the comics, Julia Carpenter was originally the second Spider-woman, then she went by "Arachne" for a hot moment and now she is the second Madame Web. For simplicity's sake I'm just going to refer to her as Julia Carpenter.

If you recall, I mentioned her by name in the Maximum Carnage extra, but she's had a background role for a while. She first makes her appearance in the continuity as a high ranking agent of a clandestine federal agency tracking the movements of Spider-man and his rogues gallery. You can kind of think of her earliest appearances like Ultimate Sharon Carter's appearances early in the Ultimate Spider-man comic, a secretive government agent trying to clean up some super powered messes. The very first time Peter actually sees her is during the first attack of the Sinister Six. She was on the scene to take Octavius and the other captured members of the six into their custody. She continued to appear occasionally as someone seemingly there to help lock away super criminals, but Peter could never shake the feeling that she and her organization were watching him as well.

Following Octavius's escape and the events of the Revenge of the Sinister Six the head of her local agency was fired and there was a power shift, Carpenter becoming the new second in command, resulting in less field work for herself. While part of the agency was focused on the recapture of Eddie Brock, who had fled all the way to San Francisco, Carpenter shifted her own focus to surveillance of the Spider-man, convinced that he was at the center of some sort of conspiracy.

She was right, of course, and it didn't take too long for the Clone Saga to unfold. Carpenter herself led the contingency of agents that put a stop to the fighting between the clones and Osborn's Scriers and was there when they learned Peter's true identity. While his activities as Spider-man were technically illegal vigilantism she was convinced by Peter's female clone, then known as the Scarlet Spider, to leave him be, in exchange for her and Kaine to start working for them. Carpenter was actually quite interested in pushing for super powered field agents but could not convince her superiors that it was the way forward at that point, and her agent experiment with the Scarlet Spider and Kaine was left as a side project, the only real bone she was thrown her way was Cassandra Webb, the blind machine linked woman they had found being held against her will by the Scriers.

But pretty soon after that Carpenter was able to prove her idea's worth, albeit at great cost--Morlun, the mastermind behind the Scriers, made his presence known fairly soon after the organization fell, and while the agents attempted to protect Peter from him Morlun cut a devastating swathe through them, killing many of the members of her branch of the agency including her direct superior. In the end it was the combined efforts of Spider-man, the Scarlet Spider, and Kaine that brought Morlun down. And with her superior dead and the mettle of her spider initiative proven, she was promoted to the head of her agency's branch. While Kaine fled the scene afterward the Scarlet Spider stayed on as Carpenter's top agent, becoming Jessica Drew, the Spider-woman.

Jessica proved a valuable asset to Carpenter, and with the further confiscation of various villainous groups she helped take down the agency began amassing more and more technology, and Carpenter started to consider expanding her super agent potential, coming up with what was known internally as the Outlaws Initiative. But this was hardly her only initiative. Another was known as the Arachne Project. The full scope of this project was kept a secret to all but Carpenter and a select few others--not even Jessica Drew was allowed to know what Arachne was really about.

What was known about Arachne was that part of it consisted of attempting to reverse engineer the machine link that Cassandra Webb had, but this proved somewhat difficult, as there seemed to be something unique about Webb's own brain that made the connection possible, but whatever that was the Scriers weren't telling. Even without this knowledge the Arachne Project had succeeded in creating a scaled down and simplified simulacrum of Webb's system which Carpenter had her own body strapped into, allowing her to better communicate with her agents, including Jessica Drew. The rest of the Arachne Project was shrouded in super secrecy, the only thing that Jessica knew was that Carpenter spent an awful long time in conference calls with some woman regarding it.

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Basically, think of the times that I mentioned the feds somewhere? Then kinda insert her there. She sort of plays the role that Ultimate Sharon Carter and Ultimate Nick Fury did at different points. Kind of a morally ambiguous authority figure. Basically none of this has anything to do with the original Julia Carpenter, lol.

I had been planning to do Carpenter for a long while. I was originally just going to do her in her Arachne identity, but I struggled to come up with a decent role for her in the continuity, as there are a lot of Spider-people to juggle around and she didn't really add anything other than redundancy. So somewhere along the line I remembered that Carpenter was originally a government agent in the comics, and somehow I combined that with her newer Madame Web look, you know, with the long coat and glasses and stuff, and realized, hey, wouldn't it be kinda neat if she was the leader of the government agency that kept cropping up? So that's how I arrived here. This allows her to still have a role related to both Spider-woman and Madame Web while still being her own thing.

The design I definitely based on her modern Madame Web look, as it's probably her most distinct look, though I changed it up to look more... government agent-y. Her coat is opened up to reveal a device similar to the one I depicted Madame Web wearing--this of course being the simulated Madame Web device I described in her profile. This kinda light colored spider symbol over red I actually took from her brief appearance in that Ultimate Spider-man show, which kind of combined her earlier Spider-woman look and Madame Web's together, which I thought was kinda neat looking. She's not blind like she is as Madame Web in the modern continuity, though. No real powers and I don't know if she's got a kid--my Julia is pretty much a completely original character that borrows things from various interpretations.

Description

A Spider-man character entry. In the comics, Julia Carpenter was originally the second Spider-woman, then she went by "Arachne" for a hot moment and now she is the second Madame Web. For simplicity's sake I'm just going to refer to her as Julia Carpenter.

If you recall, I mentioned her by name in the Maximum Carnage extra, but she's had a background role for a while. She first makes her appearance in the continuity as a high ranking agent of a clandestine federal agency tracking the movements of Spider-man and his rogues gallery. You can kind of think of her earliest appearances like Ultimate Sharon Carter's appearances early in the Ultimate Spider-man comic, a secretive government agent trying to clean up some super powered messes. The very first time Peter actually sees her is during the first attack of the Sinister Six. She was on the scene to take Octavius and the other captured members of the six into their custody. She continued to appear occasionally as someone seemingly there to help lock away super criminals, but Peter could never shake the feeling that she and her organization were watching him as well.

Following Octavius's escape and the events of the Revenge of the Sinister Six the head of her local agency was fired and there was a power shift, Carpenter becoming the new second in command, resulting in less field work for herself. While part of the agency was focused on the recapture of Eddie Brock, who had fled all the way to San Francisco, Carpenter shifted her own focus to surveillance of the Spider-man, convinced that he was at the center of some sort of conspiracy.

She was right, of course, and it didn't take too long for the Clone Saga to unfold. Carpenter herself led the contingency of agents that put a stop to the fighting between the clones and Osborn's Scriers and was there when they learned Peter's true identity. While his activities as Spider-man were technically illegal vigilantism she was convinced by Peter's female clone, then known as the Scarlet Spider, to leave him be, in exchange for her and Kaine to start working for them. Carpenter was actually quite interested in pushing for super powered field agents but could not convince her superiors that it was the way forward at that point, and her agent experiment with the Scarlet Spider and Kaine was left as a side project, the only real bone she was thrown her way was Cassandra Webb, the blind machine linked woman they had found being held against her will by the Scriers.

But pretty soon after that Carpenter was able to prove her idea's worth, albeit at great cost--Morlun, the mastermind behind the Scriers, made his presence known fairly soon after the organization fell, and while the agents attempted to protect Peter from him Morlun cut a devastating swathe through them, killing many of the members of her branch of the agency including her direct superior. In the end it was the combined efforts of Spider-man, the Scarlet Spider, and Kaine that brought Morlun down. And with her superior dead and the mettle of her spider initiative proven, she was promoted to the head of her agency's branch. While Kaine fled the scene afterward the Scarlet Spider stayed on as Carpenter's top agent, becoming Jessica Drew, the Spider-woman.

Jessica proved a valuable asset to Carpenter, and with the further confiscation of various villainous groups she helped take down the agency began amassing more and more technology, and Carpenter started to consider expanding her super agent potential, coming up with what was known internally as the Outlaws Initiative. But this was hardly her only initiative. Another was known as the Arachne Project. The full scope of this project was kept a secret to all but Carpenter and a select few others--not even Jessica Drew was allowed to know what Arachne was really about.

What was known about Arachne was that part of it consisted of attempting to reverse engineer the machine link that Cassandra Webb had, but this proved somewhat difficult, as there seemed to be something unique about Webb's own brain that made the connection possible, but whatever that was the Scriers weren't telling. Even without this knowledge the Arachne Project had succeeded in creating a scaled down and simplified simulacrum of Webb's system which Carpenter had her own body strapped into, allowing her to better communicate with her agents, including Jessica Drew. The rest of the Arachne Project was shrouded in super secrecy, the only thing that Jessica knew was that Carpenter spent an awful long time in conference calls with some woman regarding it.

----

Basically, think of the times that I mentioned the feds somewhere? Then kinda insert her there. She sort of plays the role that Ultimate Sharon Carter and Ultimate Nick Fury did at different points. Kind of a morally ambiguous authority figure. Basically none of this has anything to do with the original Julia Carpenter, lol.

I had been planning to do Carpenter for a long while. I was originally just going to do her in her Arachne identity, but I struggled to come up with a decent role for her in the continuity, as there are a lot of Spider-people to juggle around and she didn't really add anything other than redundancy. So somewhere along the line I remembered that Carpenter was originally a government agent in the comics, and somehow I combined that with her newer Madame Web look, you know, with the long coat and glasses and stuff, and realized, hey, wouldn't it be kinda neat if she was the leader of the government agency that kept cropping up? So that's how I arrived here. This allows her to still have a role related to both Spider-woman and Madame Web while still being her own thing.

The design I definitely based on her modern Madame Web look, as it's probably her most distinct look, though I changed it up to look more... government agent-y. Her coat is opened up to reveal a device similar to the one I depicted Madame Web wearing--this of course being the simulated Madame Web device I described in her profile. This kinda light colored spider symbol over red I actually took from her brief appearance in that Ultimate Spider-man show, which kind of combined her earlier Spider-woman look and Madame Web's together, which I thought was kinda neat looking. She's not blind like she is as Madame Web in the modern continuity, though. No real powers and I don't know if she's got a kid--my Julia is pretty much a completely original character that borrows things from various interpretations.