First
Appearance: Amazing Spider-Man II#546/2 (February, 2008)
Powers/Abilities: Via her consumption of human
growth hormone, Mutant
Growth Hormone, anabolic steroids, amphetamines, epinephrine,
paracetamol, and a COX-2 inhibitor, Jackpot had superhuman strength
(lifting five tons), agility, speed, endurance, and reflexes. They also
made her highly durable; she was nearly bulletproof. She had some
fighting skills, but was rather inexperienced.
Height: 5"10" Weight: 130 lbs. Eyes: Green Hair: Brown (wore a red wig as Jackpot)
History: (Amazing Spider-Man
Family#6/1 (fb) ) - When she was twelve years old, Alana Jobson and
her father were saved from an armed mugger by a young Spider-Man.
Through her teenage years, she feigned a crush on Spider-Man to serve
as a smokescreen for her burgeoning lesbianism. She eventually
graduated college and became a social worker, but the pressures of the
job and her sense of powerlessness drove her to alchoholism. Soon, her
co-workers
started to notice, and she was arrested for drunk driving. She lost her
driver's licence and her job, and wallowed in self-pity for a week;
eventually mustering the initiative to go grocery shopping, she bumped
into young scientist Sara Ehret. They became friends; Alana fell
in love with her, but never told her.
(Free Comic Book Day 2007 (Spider-Man)#1 - BTS/Amazing Spider-Man Family#6/1 (fb) )
-
One day, Alana saw Spider-Man and the superheroine Jackpot save a man
from a speeding car - from her eyes and body language, Alana recognized
Jackpot as Sara. Jackpot recognized her, and ran off, promising to
explain later.
(Amazing Spider-Man Family#6/1 (fb) ) - Sara
eventually did tell Alana how she'd gained her powers and registered
with the government, and also told her how much she hated being a
superhero. Alana lied to her, claiming that she had super powers, too,
and asked to buy the Jackpot identity from her. After a week of
pleading, Sara relented, handing over her costume and wig; she didn't
alert the Initiative, allowing them to continue to believe that she was
still Jackpot. To give herself powers, Alana started taking illegal
Mutant Growth Hormone. After an intense self-pep-talk, she debuted as
Jackpot; unlike her friend, she loved being a superhero, and enjoyed
being able to solve problems she never could as a social worker. She
eventually found that she needed more than MGH, however, and started
taking a number of other drugs, legal and illegal, to enhance her
abilities.
(Amazing Spider-Man II#546/2) - Hearing about an
explosives truck being hijacked on Park Avenue, Jackpot leapt into
action, jumping off a ten story building and landing on the back of the
truck. She raced to the front of the vehicle, where she found that
there was no driver. She crashed through the windshield and managed to
brake it, while the hijacker, the terrorist Menace, flew away cackling.
Jackpot swore that she'd get her.
(Amazing Spider-Man II#549) - While roughing up a
thug who was rumored to know the location of Menace's hideout, Jackpot
was interrupted by Spider-Man, who thought she was being mugged. He
soon recognized her (although he assumed she was the same Jackpot he'd
encountered before), and they both chased the fleeing criminal into the
subway. Spider-Man managed to grab on to the train, but jumped off when
the thug opened fire. He and Jackpot walked through the tunnels for a
bit, where she claimed Menace for her own rogues gallery, but she then
had to be saved from an oncoming train. Spider-Man asked her if her
initials were "MJ" (as Ehret had patterned her superhero persona after
her favorite soap opera actress, Mary Jane Watson, Spider-Man suspected
that Mary Jane was Jackpot), but Jackpot jokingly brushed him off. They
parted ways, and Jackpot tracked their quarry down on her own, learning
that Menace's hideout was a warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn. That
night, she investigated it...only to be punched in the face by
Spider-Man, who was also investigating it. As Spider-Man helped her to
her feet, she noticed that someone else had found them - Blue Shield,
who told Spider-Man that he was under arrest for violations of the
Superhuman Registration Act.
(Amazing Spider-Man II#550) - After a brief struggle,
Jackpot restrained Spider-Man while Blue Shield tried to unmask him;
just then, however, Menace flew overhead, distracting the registered
heroes. Spider-Man took advantage of this and knocked them both aside
to pursue Menace. The next morning, Jackpot returned to the warehouse,
where she found a sputtering Spider-Man trying to haul himself up on
the docks. She helped him up and gave him a cup of coffee, then joined
him in investigating Menace's lair, where they found blueprints for the
Apollo Theater. After Spider-Man asked for her identity again, this
time offering his own (Flash Thompson), she told him her name was Sara
Ehret.
(Amazing Spider-Man II#551) - That night, Menace
attacked the mayoral debate between Randall Crowne and Lisa Parfrey at
the Apollo Theater; Jackpot arrived on the scene in time to save a
web-fluid-less Spider-Man from plummeting to his death, and to see
Menace abduct Parfrey. The two of them boarded a police helicopter and
chased down the villain over Central Park; while Spider-Man engaged
Menace, Jackpot, dangling from a cable, snagged Parfrey out of midair.
She set her down in the street and joined Spider-Man in battling
Menace; unfortunately, Jackpot miscalculated, hauling Menace off her
glider and sending it speeding towards Parfrey. Neither she nor
Spider-Man could get there in time, and the candidate was fatally
impaled. Menace escaped, and when Spider-Man tried to comfort Jackpot,
she angrily shoved him away.
(Amazing Spider-Man Annual II#1 - BTS) - After
Parfrey's death, Jackpot decided to avoid fighting super villains and
go after normal criminals. She honed in on one in particular; corrupt
businessman Walter Declun, who she began accumulating information on.
She also checked on Flash Thompson and learned that he was serving
overseas in the military, and therefore wasn't Spider-Man.
(Secret Invasion: Amazing Spider-Man#1) - After
spending weeks tracking down Declun's
illicit dealings, Jackpot finally found out when his men were receiving
a shipment of illict goods. She burst into his warehouse and beat up
his men, only to discover that she'd just intercepted a shipment of DVD
players. Her misstep earned her a scathing article in the DB, written
by Betty Brant, and she went down to the DB's offices to complain,
accompanied by overzealous Initiative union rep Helen Rogers. While
Jackpot tried to explain that she only wanted to talk, Helen stormed
around the office, picking fights with both Brant and DB publisher
Dexter Bennett. Luckily for Jackpot, everyone soon had something else
to deal with when Spider-Man burst through the walls of the DB
offices...demanding to know where Spider-Man was. He attacked Jackpot;
as they struggled, she told the DB's employees to flee. The ersatz
Spider-Man revealed himself to be a Skrull, and shifted into his true,
Super-Skrull form, possessing the powers of six of Spider-Man's
deadliest enemies...
(Secret Invasion: Amazing Spider-Man#2) -
Jackpot fought the Skrull while simultaneously hustling DB staffers
Bennett, Brant, Joe Robertson, and NYPD officers Al O'Neil and Vin
Gonzales down the stairs to the parking garage. After hitting the
Skrull with a car's bumper, the five evacuees piled into a car and sped
off to the Baxter Building, with Jackpot clinging to the roof. The
Skrull, smelling Spider-Man's scent on all of them, followed. Jackpot
tore off the trunk and tossed it at the Skrull, toppling him, but they
soon found that the Baxter Building had been shunted into the Negative
Zone. After another tussle with the Skrull, Jackpot leapt back in the
car and they drove off to Stark Tower. Unfortunately, it was locked
down, and the Skrull caught up to them. It leapt atop the car and
tossed Jackpot into a Chicken Cow restaurant. Seeing the car drive off
with the Skrull atop it, Jackpot ran after them, only to be snatched up
by Menace!
(Secret
Invasion: Amazing Spider-Man#3) - Trying to escape Menace's
clutches, Jackpot kicked the goblin in the junk, then tried to yank
Menace's mask off (neither worked, because Menace actually looks that way due a mutation and does
not wear a mask). Menace tried to just push her off her glider, but
Jackpot grabbed on to its wing, throwing her off balance. They both
crashed to the streets below...right into the Skrull. Her fall broken
by a mailbox, Jackpot weathered the resulting explosion and found the
Bugle evacuees...only for them to run away, as the Skrull (now with a
goblin-glider embedded in its chest) was right behind her. Enraged, the
Skrull pursued her and the evacuees to the Flannigan Street Fish
Market. Jackpot had a flash of inspiration, and lured the Skrull into a
deep-freeze freezer. She pinned it under a forklift, then barricaded
the door with the evacuees until it froze solid. Several days later,
after the Skrull invasion had been thwarted, Spider-Man and Jackpot met
atop a rooftop to discuss recent events. Spider-Man showed Jackpot that
the DB had printed an apology (buried in the crossword), and that they
had given credit for defeating the Skrull to Walter Declun, who owned
the fish market. Later, Jackpot retired to her apartment for a warm
bath, during which she got a message from Sara on her answering
machine, telling her that she'd done a great job.
(Amazing Spider-Man Annual II#1) - Jackpot arrived on the scene at a
bank to foil a robbery by temporary-blindness-inducing villain
Blindside. Spider-Man arrived, as well, but too late for Jackpot to
inform him of Blindside's powers, and he was promptly blinded and
clobbered by the villain. Jackpot tended to him while Blindside
absconded with his stolen money. Hearing the police on the way, and
remembering that Spider-Man was still unregistered, Jackpot got him to
safety. Over coffee, Jackpot talked about her Declun investigation, and
suggested that Blindside was connected to him, as he'd worked for him
in his civilian identity, Nick Chernin. That night, Jackpot returned to
her apartment and found Spider-Man there; he'd tracked her down from a
fingerprint she'd left on her coffee cup, and had found her stash of
drugs and noticed the drug-induced rash on her back. She angrily
threatened to call SHIELD, but Spider-Man asked her about her illegal
drugs, and she admitted to buying the Jackpot identity from Ehret and
using the drugs to give herself super powers. Spider-Man told her to
quit superheroics and talked her into handing over her files on Declun.
She remembered Chernin's address, however, and went there to bust him
to get back in Spider-Man's good graces. There, she found Spider-Man
battling Blindside and his girlfriend, the villainess Commanda. Jackpot
swooped in to save Spider-Man, but Blindside injected her with his
Oedipus toxin while she was distracted. Spider-Man gave her the
antidote he'd devised, however, and together they defeated both
villains. As they started to leave Chernin's house, Jackpot collapsed,
suffering a massive heart attack from the cocktail of drugs in her
system interacting with Oedipus. As she told Spider-Man that "all I
ever wanted was...was to be a hero", she died in his arms. Later, Reed
Richards examined her body, determing her cause of death and absolving
Spider-Man of his fear that he'd accidentally poisoned her with the
antidote.
(Amazing Spider-Man Family#6/1) - Jackpot's spirit found itself in
a dive bar, talking over her life with the bartender. He showed her
that Sara was going to take up the Jackpot identity again, and told her
that in the grand scheme of things, she'd done more good than bad.
Deciding it was time to move on, she went out the front door, leaving
her Jackpot wig behind.
Comments:
Created by Marc Guggenheim, Greg Land, and Jay Leisten.
Sara Ehret later resumed using the Jackpot identity,
and after her identity was revealed, she went into witness protection
using
the alias Alana Jobson as a tribute to her friend.
The whole Jackpot mystery was pretty confusing -
initially, of course, it was heavily implied that she was Mary Jane,
given the red hair and the Jackpot code name, but it turned out that
Sara Ehret was just a big fan of MJ's from her Secret Hospital days
(and Jobson emulated that persona because she wanted people to think
there had only ever been one Jackpot).
And while Ehret was the Jackpot we first met in the FCBD book,
all subsequent appearances up until the ASM Annual were Jobson. Ehret's
aforementioned name change made matters even worse, because
this wasn't
confusing enough already. Still, hey, beats reading X-books.
Paracetamol is the non-American name for
acetaminophin (ie, Tylenol), a painkiller - presumably Alana was taking
a higher-than-recommended dose, which can be extremely dangerous. COX-2
inhibitors are anti-inflammatory drugs. Epinephrine is the
fight-or-flight hormone commonly known as adrenaline. Human growth
hormone is, no kidding, a hormone that induces cell growth, and Mutant
Growth Hormone is that same hormone extracted from superhumans (but not
always mutants). Anabolic steroids stimulate muscle growth.
Amphetamines stimulate the nervous system. All of the drugs she was
taking
have been known to cause high blood pressure or heart attacks. Comics
blogger and actual doctor Scott did a medical review of the issue over
at his blog, Polite Dissent. Check it out.
Jackpot was profiled in the 2008 Spider-Man Yearbook
and All-New OHotMU HC volume 14.
Profile
by Minor Irritant.
CLARIFICATIONS:
Jackpot, alias Alana Jobson, should be distinguished from:
Jackpot (Sara Ehret), her predecessor and
successor @ Free Comic Book Day 2007 (Spider-Man)#1
...but has no known connections to
Jackpot,
one-armed criminal, Howard the Duck foe @ Howard the Duck Magazine#1/2
or
any other people who totally aren't Mary Jane Watson
Appearances:
Amazing Spider-Man II#546/2 (February, 2008) - Marc Guggenheim
(writer), Greg Land (pencils), Jay Leisten (inks), Stephen Wacker
(editor)
Amazing Spider-Man II#549-551 (March, 2008)
- Marc
Guggenheim (writer), Salvador Larroca (art), Stephen
Wacker (editor)
Secret Invasion: Amazing Spider-Man#1-2
(October-November, 2008) - Brian Reed (writer), Marco Santucci
(pencils),
Mark Pennington (inks), Stephen
Wacker (editor)
Secret Invasion: Amazing Spider-Man#3
(December, 2008) - Brian Reed (writer), Marco Santucci (pencils),
Mark Pennington, Dave Meikis, & Victor Olazaba (inks), Stephen
Wacker (editor)
Amazing Spider-Man Annual II#1 (December, 2008)
- Marc
Guggenheim (writer), Mike McKone (pencils), Andy Lanning (inks),
Stephen
Wacker (editor)
Amazing Spider-Man Family#6/1 (July, 2009) - Brian Reed
(writer), Tim Levins (pencils), Victor Olazaba & Walden Wong
(inks), Stephen Wacker (editor)
Non-Marvel Copyright info
All other characters mentioned or pictured are ™
and
� 1941-2099 Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved. If you
like this stuff, you should check out the real thing!
Please visit The Marvel Official Site at: http://www.marvel.com
Special Thanks to www.g-mart.com for hosting the Appendix, Master List, etc.!
History: (Amazing Spider-Man
Family#6/1 (fb) ) - When she was twelve years old, Alana Jobson and
her father were saved from an armed mugger by a young Spider-Man.
Through her teenage years, she feigned a crush on Spider-Man to serve
as a smokescreen for her burgeoning lesbianism. She eventually
graduated college and became a social worker, but the pressures of the
job and her sense of powerlessness drove her to alchoholism. Soon, her
co-workers
started to notice, and she was arrested for drunk driving. She lost her
driver's licence and her job, and wallowed in self-pity for a week;
eventually mustering the initiative to go grocery shopping, she bumped
into young scientist Sara Ehret. They became friends; Alana fell
in love with her, but never told her. 
encountered before), and they both chased the fleeing criminal into the
subway. Spider-Man managed to grab on to the train, but jumped off when
the thug opened fire. He and Jackpot walked through the tunnels for a
bit, where she claimed Menace for her own rogues gallery, but she then
had to be saved from an oncoming train. Spider-Man asked her if her
initials were "MJ" (as Ehret had patterned her superhero persona after
her favorite soap opera actress, Mary Jane Watson, Spider-Man suspected
that Mary Jane was Jackpot), but Jackpot jokingly brushed him off. They
parted ways, and Jackpot tracked their quarry down on her own, learning
that Menace's hideout was a warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn. That
night, she investigated it...only to be punched in the face by
Spider-Man, who was also investigating it. As Spider-Man helped her to
her feet, she noticed that someone else had found them - Blue Shield,
who told Spider-Man that he was under arrest for violations of the
Superhuman Registration Act.
(Secret
Invasion: Amazing Spider-Man#3) - Trying to escape Menace's
clutches, Jackpot kicked the goblin in the junk, then tried to yank
Menace's mask off (neither worked, because Menace actually looks that way due a mutation and does
not wear a mask). Menace tried to just push her off her glider, but
Jackpot grabbed on to its wing, throwing her off balance. They both
crashed to the streets below...right into the Skrull. Her fall broken
by a mailbox, Jackpot weathered the resulting explosion and found the
Bugle evacuees...only for them to run away, as the Skrull (now with a
goblin-glider embedded in its chest) was right behind her. Enraged, the
Skrull pursued her and the evacuees to the Flannigan Street Fish
Market. Jackpot had a flash of inspiration, and lured the Skrull into a
deep-freeze freezer. She pinned it under a forklift, then barricaded
the door with the evacuees until it froze solid. Several days later,
after the Skrull invasion had been thwarted, Spider-Man and Jackpot met
atop a rooftop to discuss recent events. Spider-Man showed Jackpot that
the DB had printed an apology (buried in the crossword), and that they
had given credit for defeating the Skrull to Walter Declun, who owned
the fish market. Later, Jackpot retired to her apartment for a warm
bath, during which she got a message from Sara on her answering
machine, telling her that she'd done a great job.