Artwork by Ig Guara
After Hydra kidnapped her son and brainwashed him, Jessica Drew – aka Spider-Woman – headed to her old stomping ground of San Franscisco to search for leads on his whereabouts. While on a reconnaissance mission, she crosses paths with Angar the Screamer, who is under attack by a group of heavily armed security guards from the Hydra tech company Echidna.
Spider-Woman fights alongside Angar, hoping to gain his trust and learn more about Echidna. Unfortunately, a new team of teenage superheroes known as the Assembly arrives to take the supervillain into custody. Before he is subdued, however, one of Angar’s nightmare-inducing screams affects one of their teammates, Liberty. The teen later visits Jessica Drew, telling her that Angar’s scream brought back forgotten memories as opposed to a hallucinogenic nightmare – specifically, that she was trained as a superhero by Hydra.
“This is Hydra making a public relations play,” Spider-Woman tells herself in Spider-Woman #9, published in July 2024. “Wanting young ‘heroes’ they can control. And there’s no way that leads anywhere good.” She therefore devises a plan that involves breaking Angar out of prison and then using his scream to mentally free the other Assembly members. Simple enough, except for the fact that Angar is being held on Alcatraz Island, located in the middle of San Francisco Bay.
“The Rock” – as it is informally known – was given the name Alcatraz by a Spanish naval lieutenant in 1775 because of the island’s abundance of pelican inhabitants. It then went virtually forgotten for the next seventy-five years until the U.S. military realized its strategic value, even using it as prison for confederate sympathizers during the Civil War.
When the army abandoned Alcatraz in 1933, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover saw an opportunity to establish his own “super-prison” on the island. Hoover was in the midst of his “war with the American gangster” at the time and determined to build a “escape-proof prison for hard-core offenders” within the United States to detain the country’s most dangerous criminals. In August 1934, Alcatraz became that prison.
In his 2013 book Alcatraz: A Definitive History of the Penitentiary Years, Michael Esslinger offers a biographical account of the legendary facility, as well as the notorious criminals who found themselves incarcerated on The Rock. Al Capone is arguably the most famous of the group, and his reign as the premier gangster kingpin of the Prohibition Era has taken on mythical proportions in the years since his virtual takeover of Chicago in 1925.
After being convicted of tax evasion in 1931, Capone was initially interned at Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was protected by fellow inmates, bribed security guards, and continued to live in relative comfort despite serving time in jail. It was because of this ability to “leverage the system” that Capone was transferred to Alcatraz in 1934, where his special privileges quickly ended and he lost communication with the outside world.
George “Machine Gun” Kelly was another legendary criminal of the 1920s and 30s who ended up on Alcatraz Island. Originally a bootlegger, he moved on to bank robbery and kidnapping after marrying Kathryn Thorne in 1930. Thorne herself had a criminal background as well as a flair for the dramatic. It was Thorne, for instance, who purchased a machine gun for her husband and spread word of his notoriety throughout the underworld.
This new-found fame, however, also led to Kelly’s eventual rise to “Public Enemy Number One” and later conviction in the kidnapping of oil tycoon Charles Urscehl. Initially sent to Leavenworth, Kelly bragged that he could escape from the prison at any time. His boasts were taken seriously, and George Kelly soon found himself transferred to Alcatraz as a precaution.
While Al Capone remained defiant on The Rock, the same could not be said of Machine Gun Kelly. According to Michael Esslinger, Kelly “took a job as an altar boy in the prison chapel, worked in the laundry and served out his time quietly.”
“I’d assumed your team took Zzzax and Angar to an actual law enforcement facility or at least somewhere on the Echidna campus,” Spider-Woman says to Liberty upon their arrival at Alcatraz Island. “Nope,” the teen replies. “Every power foe we apprehend, Echidna has us bring here. Said it was ‘safer for the local community.’ Now I’m not so sure.”
After sneaking past security guards and entering a high-tech prison underneath the actual cellblocks of Alcatraz, Spider-Woman chats with Angar while Liberty searches for a way to open his cell.
“That girl with me?” Spider-Woman begins. “The people imprisoning you here messed with her memories so badly that she doesn’t know her own past. Her own name. The only reason she could break through the lies is because your scream helped her remember the painful truth. All we want is the chance to wake her friends out of their nightmares too. She’s not an oppressor, she’s a victim.”
For the rest of the brainwashed Assembly, however, Liberty is a “traitor” and the team arrives on Alcatraz to retrieve their fallen comrade. To distract them, Liberty doesn’t just open Angar’s cell but releases supervillains Icemaster, Quicksand, and Zzzax as well. During the resulting battle, Angar directs one of his screams at the Assembly, which immediately has its desired effect.
It turns out, however, that one of the group’s members – the Hulk-like Titan – is actually Titanium Man, who joined Hydra and formed the Assembly after faking his own death. He now plans on killing Spider-Woman for interfering with his plans.
The allure of Alcatraz goes beyond the historical and into the realms of popular culture as well. The island has been the subject of numerous motion pictures though the years, for instance, ranging from the reality-based The Birdman of Alcatraz and Escape from Alcatraz – starring Burt Lancaster and Clint Eastwood, respectively – to the fictional action thriller The Rock that featured Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.
Alcatraz has also appeared in a number of comic books, with the likes of Captain America, the Hulk, and the X-Men all visiting the former penitentiary. During a three-part Incredible Hulk/Captain America crossover published in 1979, Steve Rogers arrives on the island as a tourist in search of his kidnapped partner the Falcon, only to find a steel door leading to the clandestine lair of the evil Corporation hidden underneath the legendary prison. A drugged Bruce Banner is also being held captive, and the two superheroes battle each other before finding separate escape routes from Alcatraz.
Two decades later, the same feat was accomplished by the X-Men when their mentor Professor Xavier was taken prisoner by the Brotherhood of Mutants and likewise locked away beneath the cellblocks of Alcatraz.
“Hydra brainwashed us,” Liberty explains to her Assembly teammates. “You’re all waking up to that now, the same way Angar’s scream hit me. The Assembly might be a lie, but Liberty? That’s still me. And you’re still Moon Squire, Hellrune, and Cadet Marvel. We can sort the rest later, but we need to be heroes now.”
Realizing that Titan might be too powerful for even their combined strength, the group decides to concentrate on Icemaster, Quicksand, and Zzzax, freeing up Spider-Woman to focus on Titan. It is still a daunting task, however, and Spider-Woman encourages Hellrune to use her magical spear to fly the rest of the Assembly out of harm’s way.
Spider-Woman then deactivates the power inhibitors on each of the supervillains, who immediately attack Titan. Even Titan’s armor is no match against the onslaught, and the villain decides to self-destruct rather than face capture. The resulting blasts rocks Alcatraz Island just as the others make their escape.
On March 21, 1963, the federal penitentiary on Alcatraz officially closed. After nearly thirty years as the internment home for some of the most infamous gangsters, murderers, and thieves of the twentieth century, the small island off the coast of San Francisco ended its brief notoriety as an escape proof facility on an uneventful day that came-and-went with little fanfare.
After a two-year occupation during the early 1970s by Native Americans protesting against broken treaties from the past and demanding more rights in the present, Alcatraz was transformed into a national park and tourist attraction, topping the “must see” list for millions of visitors to the region each year. What they find is an island that is both hauntingly desolate and beautifully picturesque – a rock in the middle of a bay that offers mesmerizing views, a feeling of dread, and a long history wrapped in fact as well as fiction.
Anthony Letizia