In the latest issue of Silk, a classic Spider-Man villain returns to deliver a shocking bit of information about the foe the titular hero is facing.
Warning: The following contains spoilers for Silk #3 by Maurene Goo, Takeshi Miyazawa and Ian Herring, available now.
In addition to being bitten by the same radioactive spider, Peter Parker’s Spider-Man and Cindy Moon’s Silk have proven to have a lot in common. For starters, the two web slingers both know what it’s like to work for J. Jonah Jameson. In her new series, Cindy is working for Jameson’s paper Threats and Menaces and protecting him from a powerful company’s goons. As she investigates a series of gruesome gang murders for the paper, she learns she and Peter may also share a rivalry with a particular kingpin from Spider-Man’s past, Silvermaine.
After Threats and Menaces publishes a story about the murder of the entire Mulligan Gang, a group of thugs threaten J. Jonah Jameson and warn him to stop digging into the murder. Luckily, Cindy overhears and is able to change into costume and chase them away from her boss. During the fight, she notices one of the goons is wearing an earpiece connected directly to his brain. She pulls it off and takes it home to study.
The earpiece comes from Fujinet, a mysterious tech company owned by Saya Ishii. Ishii, a younger version of the Kingpin, inherited the company from her mother and has been using Fujinet’s resources to gain power across the city. She runs the company with an iron fist, thinly masked by her vapid “influencer” persona. In addition to the men who threatened Jameson, she also has a gigantic cat demon, known in Japanese folklore as the Kasha, working for her. The Kasha has been killing gangs all over Brooklyn at her request. Silk and the Kasha have fought each other twice, but neither has been able to defeat the other.
Ishii’s reach seems to stretch from the world of cat demons to the minutiae of everyday life in Queens. In response to Cindy’s writing about the murders, she arranges to have Cindy’s therapist replaced by her half-brother, Max, who reluctantly reports back to her. Between Max’s spying and a potential myriad of other surveillance techniques, Ishii discovers that Cindy Moon and Silk are one and the same. So, when Cindy goes to visit Saya as a reporter, she is unpleasantly surprised to learn that Saya knows her secret identity. The conversation becomes even more tense when Ishii threatens Moon’s family, and Cindy ends up fighting a team of Fujinet security guards before leaping out the office window.
After her encounter with the aspiring criminal queen, Cindy heads back to the newspaper office where she receives an anonymous letter promising information about Fujinet and its ferocious CEO. Later that night, she goes to meet the person behind the note and finds herself face to face with Silvio Manfredi, AKA Silvermane. Silvio is the former head of the Maggia crime family who had long and bloody feuds with both Kingpin and Spider-Man. Silvermane almost died in a fight with Cloak and Dagger, but survived when his head was placed onto a cybernetic body. And now, years later, he is meeting Cindy Moon to talk about Fujinet and Saya Ishii.
Manfredi reveals that Ishii is his daughter, which comes as a surprise to Moon, but also sheds some light on Ishii’s personality. From this new perspective, her attempt to take over the criminal world can be seen as an attempt to follow in her father’s footsteps. Similarly, her willingness to attach technology directly to her employees’ brains suddenly reads as a fairly intuitive business practice for the daughter of a cyborg. She may have inherited her company from her mother, but it is clear she got her villainous nature from her father.
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