Spider-Gwen: Smash #3

History

The series was first announced at San Diego Comic-Con 2023 under the working title Spider-Gwen: On Tour before Marvel retitled it Spider-Gwen: Smash ahead of solicitation — a change Comics Beat noted carried deliberate gamma-ray resonance given the Hulk's role in the plot. Writer Melissa Flores, whose prior Marvel work included Women of Marvel and The Dead Lucky, was paired with artist Enid Balám, a veteran of Kate Bishop: Hawkeye and Reptil, to bring Gwen back to her native Earth-65 after a lengthy stretch of Earth-616 multiverse-hopping that critics had noted left the character without a clear direction. Editor Elizabeth Pyle oversaw the issue, with colors by Fer Sifuentes-Sujo, inks by Elisabetta D'Amico, a cover by David Nakayama, and lettering by Ariana Maher; the series was collected in a trade paperback edition.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Released February 14, 2024 (cover-dated April 2024); written by Melissa Flores, pencilled by Enid Balám, inked by Elisabetta D'Amico, colored by Fer Sifuentes-Sujo, lettered by Ariana Maher, with a cover by David Nakayama.
• Reveals the secret origin of Earth-65's Hulk: Rick Jones, a conspiracy-theorist talk-show host and guitarist for Dazzler's band The Uncut Gems, who was drugged and brainwashed by Dr. Bruce Banner into an unwilling Hulk persona with no memory of his transformations.
• Confirms that Earth-65's Bruce Banner — a mad scientist obsessed with Dazzler's mutant gene — is the true architect of the Hulk threat, with Pixie (Megan Gwynn) acting as his accomplice in abducting both Dazzler (Alison Blaire) and Mary Jane Watson.
• Delivers the cliffhanger that Banner has reactivated the dormant Carnage symbiote inside Em Jay Watson — previously left from a King in Black tie-in — bonding her to Carnage in a way that triggers involuntarily through anger, mirroring the Hulk's rage-based transformations.
• Ghost-Spider (Gwen Stacy), Natasha Romanoff, and Glory Grant track and apprehend a de-powered Rick Jones, whose capture provides the lead to Banner's desert compound, establishing Romanoff's Earth-65 identity as a covert super-spy handler.
• Issue shipped with multiple variant covers: a 1:25 Rickie Yagawa variant and two Stormbreakers variants by Jan Bazaldua and Lucas Werneck, in addition to the regular David Nakayama cover.
• The series — including this issue — was collected in the Spider-Gwen: Smash trade paperback (ISBN 9781302956554), and all four issues are available on Marvel Unlimited.
• The Carnage symbiote's re-bonding to Mary Jane here is later revisited in Giant-Size Spider-Gwen #1, where the ongoing emotional cost of her anger-triggered transformations becomes a central plot driver, making this issue the direct narrative setup for that one-shot.

Cast · 12 characters

Full credits

Variants (3)