Investigating Alias is a weekly issue by issue look at the source material that inspired the popular and critically acclaimed Jessica Jones Netflix show.

In this installment of Investigating Alias, I will be covering Alias #20-21(2003) written by Brian Michael Bendis, drawn by Michael Gaydos, and colored by Matt Hollingsworth with dream sequence art from Mark Bagley, Al Vey, and Dean White in Alias #21.

“The Underneath” wraps up in Alias #20-21 as writer Brian Michael Bendis puts the meat of the plot in these issues as well as humanizing J. Jonah Jameson and showing that Jessica Jones can be pretty damn heroic as she has a real connection with Mattie Franklin, the third Spider-Woman, who has been drugged and used as a source of mutant growth hormone (MGH) by her skeezy, wannabe Kingpin boyfriend Denny Haynes. Alias #20 opens up with Jessica Drew going all Emperor Palpatine on Jessica Jones with bio-electric venom blasts, and then our protagonist repays her in kind with a right hook. They bond over the fact that they hate the Avengers and costumes and meet with J. Jonah Jameson and his wife Marla, who formally hire them to find Mattie after an emotional plea. A database search and phone call later, they end up at Denny’s hotel room where another young superhero and former New Warrior Speedball is losing control of his very colorful force field powers. Between this and Civil War where he’s involved in the deaths of hundreds of school children in Stamford, Connecticut, I feel really bad for him.

Alias #21 concludes this arc and starts off with Matt Hollingsworth’s most colorful palette yet with the primary colored energy bursts causing Jessica Jones to lapse in a dream state. This completely silent three page sequence is drawn by Mark Bagley and Al Vey with colors from Dean White and is the first time Killgrave (aka the Purple Man) has appeared in Alias as he is shown kissing and manipulating Jessica before the Defenders led by Doctor Strange show up. It’s a harrowing look at Jessica’s dark past and features many Marvel Universe cameos. After this, Jessica Jones takes out Denny Haynes and with an assist from Jessica Drew and various hotel room furniture dispatches the rude, sexist guy, who was hopped on MGH and beat her up in the club when she was looking for Mattie a couple issues back. They then find out that Speedball has been working with the police to bust Denny’s MGH ring, and Jessica Jones has to fly across New York City with a barely conscious Mattie to avoid Jameson’s enemies using her against him.

The story skips six weeks forward, and a now clean Mattie thanks Jessica Jones for saving her, gives her a newspaper story from J. Jonah Jameson that portrays her as a hero taking down a drug ring, and Marla Jameson says an offer to work as a P.I. for the Daily Bugle is still on the table. Jessica rejects the offer and ends up having an awkward chat/apology with Scott Lang, who hasn’t talked to her in six weeks, but professes his love for her in a manner worthy of a Cameron Crowe film. She reluctantly agrees to another date.

Alias #20 and #21 are pretty big issues in the scope of the series as a whole with the first appearance of Purple Man setting up the series’ final arc featuring his return into Jessica’s life. There is also Jessica having her first kind of “superhero team-up” (in a non-traditional manner) with Jessica Drew, having her longest “flight” yet, and Bendis kind of setting up the sequel series he did to Alias called The Pulse where Jessica worked for a special section of the Daily Bugle focused around superheroes. But beyond these pivotal moments, Bendis and artist Michael Gaydos show the emotional connection that Jessica Jones has created with the Mattie Franklin case because both she and Mattie were young superheroes and orphans, who were manipulated by older, evil men to do things that they didn’t want to.

This is really captured in the closing of Alias #21 when Jessica is perfectly understanding and empathetic with Mattie. She loves smoking and drinking excessively, being snarky, and punching out her fellow ex-superhero P.I.’s, but also helps Mattie recover from her rape at the hands of Denny Haynes. Visually, Gaydos and Hollingsworth ditch the dark stylized noir of the New York, hotel room, and even earlier office scenes for a neutral palette and a simple nine panel grid as Jessica supports Mattie through the line, “Actually, I know exactly what you mean.” Jessica Jones is truly heroic because she doesn’t just punch out the rapists, but helps the victim recover by listening and just being there for Mattie Franklin

This conversation is followed up by an uncharacteristically positive superhero related story about Jessica Jones and Jessica Drew’s actions from J. Jonah Jameson, who Bendis had given some depth in Alias #20. First off, he has Jameson (through Ben Urich as a go-between) contact Jessica Jones first about helping him find Mattie after threatening her earlier arc, and after she scammed him and used his money to help charities instead of Spider-Man’s secret identity. This is a big step for him, and it’s because he is close to Mattie. Gaydos shows this emotion in his artwork with two close ups of Jameson’s sad face on an uncharacteristically silent page. If you remember, Bendis and Gaydos turned Alias #10 into an illustrated screenplay because Jameson talks so much.

A quiet J. Jonah Jameson is a big deal, and Bendis and Gaydos show this through the words and facial expressions of Marla Jameson. The scene is framed in the usual little square, big rectangle interview layout that’s been used throughout Alias, but Gaydos continues to zoom into Marla’s face and show how she partially feels responsible for Mattie going missing because of her and Jonah’s busy job. The final close-up shows her fear and the reason why she wants to hire Jessica Jones (and Jessica Drew) because the editor of a newspaper that attacks superheroes having a superhero foster daughter with drug issues could end Jonah’s career and ruin her family’s reputation. But Jonah’s motive isn’t entirely to save his own cigar chomping self, and Marla says that he truly cares for Mattie and wants to be a good father for her to make up for his mistakes with his son, John. Through this conversation and Jonah having to excuse himself earlier, Bendis and Gaydos show a more vulnerable, human side of the tabloid publisher. This is just a man, who wants his daughter to be okay and happens to mistrust masked heroes in an extreme way.

The most fun in Alias #20-21 comes from Jessica Jones and Jessica Drew teaming up. Bendis created Jessica Jones and revived Jessica Drew as a character putting her in the Spider-Woman costume for the first time in over 20 years in New Avengers and giving her own solo book in the Spider-Woman Origin comic in 2005. It’s safe to say he loves both characters and makes them equals in this adventure as they find common ground in their hatred for the Avengers and costumes. Bendis doesn’t have Jessica Drew come up with a huge reason for hanging up the Spider-Woman threads just that it made her “ass look fat”, and this sets up a perfect opportunity for Jessica Jones to quip about the leather The Matrix-inspired costumes that had been proliferating in the Marvel Universe since Ultimate X-Men. They both find a key piece of evidence to the whereabouts of Denny Haynes, and Jessica Drew gives Jessica Jones grief for using the Internet. This is because she doesn’t have an international network like Jessica Drew that pays for month long trips to Istanbul and has to make ends meet any way possible. However, Jessica Drew doesn’t come across as rich and annoying, and her venom blasts are really handy for getting inside locked doors. Hollingsworth uses harsh blue-white coloring for them to make them really jarring against the shadowy backgrounds of the hotels, streets, and apartments that Jessica Drew and Jessica Jones search for Mattie in. She is confident in her abilities, and it seems like Bendis is gunning for Jessica Drew to come back full time as a superhero, which she would two years later in New Avengers. (She was a Skrull though, oops.)

Gaydos and Hollingsworth make a rare artistic misstep in the scenes featuring Speedball’s powers towards the end of Alias #20 and at the beginning of Alias #21. The Dippin’ Dots-style colors for his forcefield abilities are really fun, and it’s like he wandered off the set of a kid-friendly Disney Channel show into an HBO drama. However, the yellow, blue, and green balls everywhere obscure the action when Jessica Jones takes out Denny Haynes and his high-on-MGH goon with Jessica Drew and lessens the catharsis of this beatdown. But even if the action is less clear to follow, Gaydos, Hollingsworth, and letterer Cory Petit create an aura of chaos with his powers going everywhere and show that Speedball, who is having problems controlling his powers, is unsuited for this kind of delicate work like secretly infiltrating a drug ring to get MGH of the street. It’s like a darker 21 Jump Street situation, but with superheroes.

Speedball’s colorful abilities do have one visual upside. They create enough of a trippy environment for Jessica Jones to fall into a kind of dream state for three pages, and the brightness of his costume and abilities is kind of a segue between rough hewn noir meets realism of Gaydos and the traditional superhero work of Bagley in the flashback scenes. The first page Bagley draws in a nine panel grid is the most powerful and unsettling as the shrouded, purple form of Killgrave has Jessica (in her Jewel costume) completely under his control. His appearance in the margins of the panel reminds me of early on in the Jessica Jones TV show where he just appeared in Jessica’s head or manipulated people from barely offscreen. His name isn’t mentioned in this issue, and the dream sequence is obscure foreshadowing, like the all-dream episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer “Restless”. The classic Defenders lineup of Hulk, Silver Surfer, Doctor Strange, Namor, Nighthawk, and Valkyrie showing up casts this dream even more into the realm of the weird. But Bendis and Bagley are wise to not let the cameo overwhelm the sequence and end with a close-up of Jessica Jones in her civilian clothes terrified and wielding some kind of energy weapon. It’s the first real visual taste of Jessica’s past mental manipulation at the hands of Killgrave, and Bendis keeps things extremely mysterious for now.

Even though there is an epilogue I mentioned earlier with Jessica Jones comforting Mattie six weeks after her incident and yet enough horrible conversation with Scott Lang, who calls Jessica crazy and then that he loves her, the full page spreads of Jessica flying with Mattie through the air are the true climax of “The Underneath” arc. It’s been mentioned earlier that Jessica can fly, but never figured out landing so it’s an ability she rarely uses. And in keeping with this, Gaydos’ flying pose for Jessica is pretty awkward, and she even crash lands in a random empty room saying the very Jessica Jones one-liner, “The shit I gotta do” before finding a taxi. But the opposite of Superman flying skills aside, this is one of the most heroic things Jessica Jones has done in Alias. She sympathizes with Mattie so much that she uses an ability that she is still uncomfortable with to make sure that Mattie gets home safe without the police and media using her as a tabloid headline. And unlike the beginning of the arc where she hesitates to stop a convenience store robbery, Jessica just jumps out of a window with Mattie. Even though she isn’t particularly inspirational and makes plenty of mistakes, Jessica Jones is a true hero.

Some visual issues with Speedball’s powers aside, Alias #20-21 is a real highlight reel for the series so far. There’s some banter and ass kicking with Jessica Drew and Jessica Jones taking down the men, who have been manipulating, drugging, and raping Mattie Franklin and some character growth as J. Jonah Jameson trusts and writes positively about superheroes who have touched his life personally. Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley also give us our first look at Killgrave and hint at the horrible things in Jessica Jones’ past, which she has used to empathize with Mattie in a powerful way. And finally, we get to see Jessica Jones fly in her own unique way with Michael Gaydos using a full page spread, but rejecting the iconic poses of superheroes in flight for Jessica struggling to carry Mattie. This scene is a real visual climax for the series so far and shows that Jessica Jones is a hero on her own terms and despite her self-doubt and lack of traditional superhero qualities.