Spiders can bite lots of people in their lifetime. Even specially radiated spiders who were experimental and not meant to get out but life finds away. That very thing occurred to Cindy Moon, she was the other person bitten by the very spider to grant Peter Parker his spider powers. So where has she been for all this time while Peter was out swinging around and webbing criminals up? Let’s find out!
Cindy Moon was born with a photographic memory so she remembers everything she sees with crystal clarity. Her mother wanted her to use this to her fullest potential so she frequently pushed Cindy to academic pursuits. Cindy loved playing hockey though and she would even get a boyfriend behind her parents’ back. When her mother learned of this she would force Cindy to go on a school science class field trip.
That fateful day was when a spider, having been experimented on with particle accelerators, would escape its holding container and bite Cindy on the ankle after having bitten Peter Parker on the hand. The two would begin transforming, gaining powers of a spider, Cindy got one Parker didn’t, organic web-shooters that emit from her finger tips. Her spider-sense “Silk-Sense” is also far more sensitive so that it activates off the danger of others as well as herself. The webs would be discovered when she accidentally used them on her parents.
Soon afterward, a man named Ezekiel Sims would arrive to alert Cindy and her parents that her newfound powers came with a great danger, she was now tied to spider totems on a mystical level and that a deadly enemy of those with spider powers had sensed her due to her Silk-Sense being so strong. She would need to be trained and go into hiding in a specially built bunker. Cindy would stay locked away for thirteen years to keep her and everyone else safe from the being known as Morlun. She would be trained in the use of her powers while having plenty of supplies along with reading and viewing material, though Cindy was worried she would die of boredom.
Peter Parker would learn of Cindy’s predicament thirteen years afterward and go to immediately rescue her. She fought with him, knowing that Morlun could sense her if she stepped out, but Peter told her that he was dead, but he had died several times now so maybe she was right. She would decide to make herself a makeshift costume from her webbing and name herself Silk and make a bee-line for her parents’ home. This proved fruitless as they seemed to have moved with no way of finding them, Cindy now had the mission to find her parents.
While searching for her parents, Cindy had to build a new life for herself in the time that she was gone. She would begin dating Peter Parker and fighting crime. She would find work at the Fact Channel, a news source she hoped to use to find her parents. Things were seeming to be as normal as they could be for someone with spider powers.
It would turn out Cindy was right about Morlun and he had returned once again and was now beginning his great hunt for all those chosen by the spider totems. This would begin a trans-dimensional adventure uniting Spider-People from all over the multiverse, many of them were variants of Peter Parker while others were just as varied as the realities they hailed from. Cindy would struggle with her arrested development in the fact that she lacked the ability to take responsibility for her actions, probably from being locked away in a self-sacrificing way made it so she just took on one major responsibility and then nothing else.
Eventually the Spider-Army was triumphant and everyone were able to return to their home realities and go about their daily lives once more. Cindy would begin her hunt for her parents once more, and even find her estranged brother, this was all before reality was reset as Cindy’s universe collided with another. In the new reality, all was pretty much the same and her brother couldn’t help her in learning where her parents are. To help her further, she would begin working for SHIELD as a double agent for Black Cat who was building her criminal empire. The two had fought before but Cindy had teamed up with Spider-Gwen in a bit of trans-dimensional adventure in dealing with her own more nefarious equivalent from Gwen Stacy’s reality. This more criminal Cindy would end up getting her closer to Black Cat’s inner circle as Cindy was mistaken for having done those same criminal acts. This work would have SHIELD discover Cindy’s parents were in the Negative Zone, having gone there to try and find a cure for her powers so she could be freed from the bunker, and she would have to rescue them. Reunited once more, Cindy no longer needed to work at the Fact Channel and enrolled into SHIELD Academy since she enjoyed her time working for them.
There you have it! Silk is one of the more recent spiders to join the comics fray and one I wasn’t all that familiar with. She has a lot to do with Spider-Totems which can get really complicated in its mystical mayhem but she definitely seems like a lot of fun. Hopefully she’ll get to appear in more media beyond comics, here’s hoping she’s in that new Playstation 4 game as maybe a skin or even a side-DLC. See you next time!
Suggested Reading
Amazing Spider-Man #1, Vol.3
Silk
Spider-Verse
Dr. Bustos
drbustos@comicattack.net
