Spider-Queen's History
In the early days of World War II, Adriana "Ana" Soria joined the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. Fearing that America was not powerful enough to contain Japanese and Soviet ambitions, efforts were made late in the war to resume the Super-Soldier experiments that had produced Captain America. Genetically-likely candidates were selected from among U.S. ranks and drafted into a special unit of the U.S. Marines Corps as part of Operation Crossroads. Soria subsequently became the first female marine to go into combat.
At one point, Soria's unit was lined up along the Bikini Atoll to absorb the radiation of ongoing nuclear weapons tests in the hopes it would activate any latent abilities they might possess. None of the subjects were properly informed of this before the experiment began. Most subjects soon perished from radiation poisoning, while the stress on Ana's metabolism drove her insane. Soria's abilities did not surface immediately, and the experiment was ruled a failure. She spent several years in an asylum before breaking out and going underground in the 1950s. In 1954, she kidnapped professor David Jaffe, the scientist in charge of Operation Crossroads.
She later appeared in New York City, calling herself "The Queen" and in full command of her abilities. She occupied a Manhattan high-rise as her "hive," where she surrounded herself with human drones. Captain America and Spider-Man investigated. Spider-Man had the insect gene, and could not resist Soria's control. Soria selected Spider-Man as her mate and infected him with a mutagenic enzyme through her kiss. Soria forced several of her drones to jump to their deaths in an effort to break Spider-Man's will, and S.H.I.E.L.D. launched an unsuccessful attack before Captain America caused Soria to fall from the building.
The Queen survived, and gathered a new army of drones and built an underground laboratory in Manhattan's subway system. Meanwhile, the mutagenic enzyme gradually gave Spider-Man the form of a real spider, with four eyes, eight limbs, and fangs. Professor Jaffe was put to work building a bomb that would disrupt human cognitive processes, similar to one developed by the United States during the Cold War. The bomb would spare most lifeforms, including insects, but kill humans lacking the insect gene. When the bomb was ready, Soria issued a warning: evacuate everyone within a 600 miles radius.
Spider-Man was instinctively drawn to the Queen, who subdued him and held him captive while he completed his transformation into a giant spider. The spider had been engineered to give birth to her offspring but died due to complications arising from the rapid metamorphosis.
In a fit of rage, Ana destroyed the laboratory with her telekinetic powers and ordered her drones to activate the bomb. Ana left before she could see the spider's husk split open, revealing a reborn Peter Parker. Parker was, for the most part, unchanged but seemed to gain additional spider-like characteristics. Spider-Man managed to disarm the bomb, and Ana seems to have been killed in an explosion caused by SHIELD when they attacked her subterranean base.
The Queen was the mastermind behind an infestation of spider-powers, planning to turn everyone into spiders so that she can bend them to her will. Approaching the Jackal, she provided him with a tissue sample taken from the husk left behind after Peter Parker had molted. Using this, the Jackal was able to engineer a virus that connected those infected to the Web of Life, granting them powers identical to those of Spider-Man post-metamorphosis and eventually transforming them into Man-Spiders or giant spiders, while allowing the Queen to control them using her powers. Somewhere before Spider-Island, she fought against Rogers and, with the Jackal's help, turned him into the monstrous Spider-King.
As more and more people were infected with the "Spider-Flu", the Queen's connection to the Web of Life was amplified and with it her powers. When she found out that the people at Horizon Labs were working on a cure to the mutation, she used her powers to manipulate the infected Jonah Jameson into killing Alistaire Smythe, who came up with a way to fight the epidemic.
However, she soon found out that they had already found a cure against the mutations, and had already cured Spider-King. The Jackal sent Tarantula (the mutated Kaine, Spider-Man's clone) to destroy the cure, but Spider-Man regained his spider-sense during the fight and threw him into the lake of anti-bodies, curing him in the process. Anya Corazon acquired spider powers identical to Spider-Man's enhanced ones as a result of exposure to the Spider-Flu and retained them even after exposure to the antidote.
Out of anger, she killed the Jackal with her sonic scream and discovered that the same process that returned Spider-Man's spider-sense had increased her powers to god-like levels.
Later on, she fought against the cured Captain America, and almost defeated him. However, Venom managed to fatally wound her with Captain America's Shield. Suddenly, she started to mutate into a twenty-eight stories tall spider-monster, drawing power from all the mutated New Yorkers. In her spider-form, she was stated to be an Omega-Level Threat by Airman Phillips (Captain America's pilot) and by Cap himself soon after. While she was fighting off dozens of superheroes, Spider-Man used Doctor Octopus' old octo-bots to distribute the cure to the millions of New Yorkers.
With her powers decreasing rapidly because of this, Ms. Marvel threw Kaine towards the Queen. Kaine, unaffected by the Queen's sonic scream thanks to Spider-Man's stealth suit, used his stingers to fly through the back of the Queen's head. The other heroes took the opportunity to attack her and quickly caused her to explode all over the city. Iron Man performed an autopsy on her afterwards and found that this was in fact Adriana Soria and she was dead.
Later, it was revealed by the true Jackal that the Jackal the Queen killed was only another clone. The Jackal stole one of her limbs and used her DNA to create several clones that he named the Spider-Queens. The clones were destroyed in a battle against Alpha and Spider-Man.
