Chapter 5 develops the spider’s web as a paradigm for comics-making. What can Bechdel’s fear of vomit and her mother’s fear of spiders reveal about inherited attitudes toward the female body and inherited patriarchal values? How do her mother’s unrealized artistic ambitions shadow their bond? This chapter tangles with the spiderwebs that recur throughout Are You My Mother?. Spider webs, I posit, reveal the very productivity of the female body as precisely the sticking point for modern women writers; spiders, after all, extrude their silk from their bellies. However, the spider web attaches by another corner to the symbolism of 1970s lesbian feminism, where it takes on emancipatory political valences as a radial alternative to vertical power structures. The latter part of the chapter demonstrates how Bechdel reclaims the web as an emblem of queer kinship and feminist commitment and community. I conclude with The Secret to Superhuman Strength, with a mapping of its intertextual affiliation with the poet Adrienne Rich, in whom Bechdel discovers what the poet Muriel Rukeyser calls the “moving relation between the individual consciousness and the world.”