This article contains spoilers for Silk #1
J. Jonah Jameson has just hired the superhero Silk as his bodyguard. Jameson has always had a troubled history with superheroes. He was a child during the Second World War, and he well remembers the shock of hearing Captain America’s young sidekick Bucky had died. That news led Jameson to question whether superheroes were truly a force for good, or whether instead masked men and women were a threat and a menace, leading others to follow them into danger. This suspicion was inflamed when New York City gained its own masked defender, Spider-Man, and the two developed a bitter relationship characterized by conflict.
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That conflict has finally come to an end in recent years, with Spider-Man coming to understand Jameson’s suspicions and actually unmasking before him, revealing he is really Peter Parker. For his part, Jameson now seeks to find a way to atone for his past misdeeds, although ironically his attempts to help Spider-Man have often backfired to such an extent the wall-crawler probably wishes he’d just go away. But now Jameson’s life has taken a new twist, as he is forced to hire a superhero to act as his bodyguard.
He may not work at the Daily Bugle anymore, but Jameson is still a journalist at heart. He now runs an online news site called “Threats and Menaces,” and one of his employees is an old friend of Peter Parker’s called Cindy Moon. In Silk #1, by Maurene Goo and Takeshi Miyazawa, one of Cindy’s investigations leads to her boss being targeted by criminals. Fortunately, though Jameson does not know it, in reality, Cindy is the superhero Silk. She swiftly suits up to protect her boss, and then to her amazement he offers to hire her as a bodyguard.
Jameson has always had a high opinion of Silk, which is ironic given her connections to Spider-Man. As luck would have it, Jameson’s positive view of Silk has often been a hindrance for her rather than a help, particularly when she attempted to infiltrate Black Cat’s gang by pretending to be a crook; Jameson refused to buy it, and almost compromised the whole operation. Still, she never imagined being hired by Jameson as his protector. It shows how Jameson has developed as a character over the years, demonstrating he has put his old prejudices behind him.
Silk #1 is a tremendous comic, and Goo and Miyazawa are the perfect team to tackle the character. The book is full of the customary Spider-Man humor, with Cindy Moon occupying a corner of the Spider-Man franchise long since abandoned by Peter Parker himself – the idea he is involved in journalism. It’s an absolute delight to read the interactions between Silk and Jameson, which are at heart a refreshing riff on the traditional dynamic between Spider-Man and the pushy newshound.
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