Cassandra Webb is a powerful psychic who uses her precognitive abilities to help Spider-People.
Becoming a Medium
Born in Salem, Oregon, without typical sight and a neurological condition known as myasthenia gravis, Cassandra Webb grows up to learn that she possesses powerful psychic abilities, and establishes herself as a medium. Using these powers, Madame Web discovers Peter Parker’s secret identity when Spider-Man rescues one of her students, Belinda Bell, is kidnapped during a scam at the Daily Globe newspaper where she impersonated reclusive publisher K.J. Clayton.
Precognition Powers
Madame Web possesses psychic abilities including telepathy, clairvoyance, and prescience. She can also perform astral projection and appear to others in spirit form. Madame Web is cybernetically linked to a spider web-like support system to attend to her bodily needs. The system can shift upright or recline, and provides robotic arms to substitute for her arms.
Web of Connections
Madame Web often helps Spider-Man protect others, and even protects his identity. She also aids him in defeating Stegron, and gathers a group of Spider-Women to capture her granddaughter Charlotte Witter who was being used in a plot by Otto Octavius, AKA Doctor Octopus.
When the Kravinoff family seek to defeat Spider-Man and resurrect two of their fallen members, they torture Cassandra into helping them. She is able to resist and keep sensitive information about the wall-crawler from them. However, she helps them bring back their loved ones and does so at the expense of Peter Parker’s clone, Kaine, and her granddaughter, Charlotte.
Future Forecasts
Later, Madame Web helped Spider-Man prevent an assassination attempt against a congressional candidate, Barney Wicker. When Black Tom Cassidy sent Cain Marko, AKA Juggernaut, to kidnap Web so he could use her powers for his criminal activities, she foresaw the attack and called Spider-Man for help. He was unable to stop the Juggernaut, who left Madame Web in a state of severe shock after he unwittingly removed her from her chair, which provided her vital life functions. After being in a coma and suffering short-term memory loss, she appeared to temporarily forget Spider-Man’s identity.
Madame Web contacted Spider-Man for help after foreseeing her impending death. Believing that joining Norman Osborn, AKA Green Goblin, in an arcane ritual called the Gathering of the Five would save her life, she asked Spider-Man to retrieve one of the five required artifact fragments. Each of the five participants would receive either knowledge, power, immortality, insanity, or death. Spider-Man succeeded, and in the course of the ceremony, Madame Web apparently received death. Actually, she received immortality, and found herself much younger and healthier. Soon after, Dr. Octopus created a Spider-Woman using Cassandra’s granddaughter, Charlotte Witter, whose siphoning powers absorbed the abilities of the other Spider-Women: Jessica Drew, Julia Carpenter, AKA Arachne, and Mattie Franklin. To capture Charlotte, Madame Web gathered the spider-women into a team. Charlotte was defeated, but later siphoned Madame Web’s telepathy, re-aging her in the process. With the help of Spider-Man and Franklin, Madame Web determined how to drain Charlotte’s power, leaving Witter unconscious in a dormant state. Madame Web, now youthful again, performed psychic surgery to sever her link to Charlotte and removed Charlotte and Mattie’s memories of Spider-Man’s identity. Madame Web continued to assist Mattie during the rest of her time as Spider-Woman. The Spider-Women team eventually disbanded.
Madame Web has since become elderly again, although she presumably has retained her immortality, potentially condemning her to an eternity in her current condition. She has returned to her apartment in Manhattan, where she has aided Spider-Man when Stegron attempted to turn the city into a wild prehistoric paradise using an artifact called the Rock of Life. They worked together and stopped Stegron’s heinous plot.
Later, when Spider-Man's Aunt May was comatose after being shot by a sniper, Madame Web psychically allowed May to give her nephew permission to let her die. Spider-Man refused, and after making a deal with Mephisto to save May’s life, Madame Web and the rest of the world no longer know Spider-Man’s secret identity.
After Madame Web looked into Spider-Man’s future, she saw someone unraveling the Web of Fate with spiders being hunted, and barely had enough time to react to the new presence in the room: Sasha Nikolaevich and Anastasia “Ana” Kravinoff, Kraven. The Kravinoff family captured Madame Web, and through torture, they forced her to help them defeat Spider-Man by resurrecting their fallen relatives, Sergei, AKA Kraven The Hunter, and Vladimir, AKA the Grim Hunter. She assisted them with a blood ritual, but it meant the sacrifice of young Spider-Woman, Mattie Franklin, and the Peter Parker clone Kaine. Though the ritual with Kaine failed and as such, Sasha cut Madame Web’s throat. Prior to her death, Cassandra transferred her powers to Julia Carpenter to become the new Madame Webb for the good of the Web of Fate.
Though Cassandra did not stay dead long as Dr. Miles Warren, AKA Jackal, resurrected her in a cloned body for his purposes of tracking down a hacker at his company, New U Technologies. She worked with Hobie Brown, AKA Prowler, a clone of the original. Though Prowler went missing and when Francine Frye, AKA Electro, wanted to track him down, she visited Cassandra. Though she knew that Electro would make an attempt on Prowler’s life and refrained from giving Francine the information, prompting her to electrocute Cassandra. Later, alone in New U’s facility, Carpenter found her dying from her clone body’s deterioration. Cassandra refused to take the necessary pills to stay alive, and just before she died, she shared the Jackal’s location.
