[Stan Lee, John Romita Sr., Devin Grayson, J. G. Jones, Roy Thomas, John Buscema, Ralph Macchio, George Pérez, David Michelinie,] Eric Pearson, Jac Schaeffer, Ned Benson, and Cate Shortland, 2021

As I have noted in recent articles, even after Marvel brought back Captain America in 1964, he mostly continued to be pitted against Nazis or Nazi-adjacent organizations.  Though the Cold War was close to one of its zeniths⁠—1964 was the year of both Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove⁠—it was surprisingly rare for Cap to find himself fighting villains from the communist world.  The same could not be said for Iron Man.  At this point he was the headliner of a comic called Tales of Suspense, and in Tales of Suspense #50, cover date 1964.02, he takes on the Mandarin, who hails from what is described as “seething, smoldering, secretive Red China”.  In issue #51, he takes on the Scarecrow, who steals some of Tony Stark’s designs for new weapons in order to smug­gle them to Fidel Castro’s Cuba.  Then, in Tales of Suspense #52, Iron Man takes on a couple of Russkies.  As a sign of how serious­ly Stan Lee and co-writer Don Rico took this story, they cribbed from Bullwinkle and named the villains Boris and Natasha.  Boris would only appear in two other comics.  Natasha would appear in, as of this writing, 1330 more.  She’s the Black Widow.

In this first appearance, you might be excused for thinking that she was called “the Regular Widow”, as the creators put her in a veil as if she were heading for a funeral.  But her dress is not black but bright green, so it’s not that⁠—rather, a half-veil had once been a sign of glamor.  Marlene Dietrich often wore one, for instance.  Of course, by 1964 this look had been outmoded for quite a while, suggesting that Natasha is being put forward as a sophisticate of a certain maturity.  And the creators load her up with other markers of the pre-war aristocracy: a fur coat, eve­ning gloves, lots of jewelry, and by the next issue, one of those long F.D.R. cigarette holders and a star-shaped beauty patch near her eye like the ones Clara Bow used to wear.  This is not a super­villain costume of the sort that Electro was wearing over in Amaz­ing Spider-Man that same month, because the Black Wid­ow isn’t a supervillain⁠—she’s a spy.  Here’s the story.  In Tales of Suspense #46, Tony Stark, as Iron Man, had tricked top Soviet scientist Anton Vanko, who wore his own suit of armor as the Crimson Dynamo, into defecting to the U.S. and working at Stark Industries.  Nikita Khrushchev (who appears on panel) summons Boris and Natasha to kill Vanko, Stark, and Iron Man (because in the comics the public didn’t know that Stark was Iron Man until 2006).  They do this by walking into the lobby of Stark Industries, asking to see the head of the company, and sauntering into his office without even telling Stark’s secretary who they are.  “Wait! Whom shall I say is calling?”  “Do not bother! I shall introduce myself!”  The woman in the half-veil promptly does so, introduc­ing herself as “Madame Natasha”.  With this name and aristocrat­ic garb, you can probably guess where this is going.  She will ex­plain that she is the daughter of White Russian émigrés, dedicat­ed to using her family’s vast fortune to drive the Bolsheviks out of her ancestral homeland, and propose some joint ventures with Stark to achieve this end.  Perhaps the plan is to marry Stark before killing him, living up to her code name.  But no⁠—she says that she and Boris are from the Soviet Union and would like to see Stark’s munitions plant because Boris is a science teacher and would find it interesting.  Stark, thinking “What a beauty she is!”, replies that “I’ll be glad to show you around personally!”  “Minutes later”, according to the caption box, Stark changes the plan: “You’re much too lovely to spend all day touring a dull factory! Suppose we let Boris continue the tour himself while we have dinner together?”  So, while Stark and “Madame Natasha” are “at a swank supper club”, Boris, left to his own devices, blows the plant up.  It’s that trademark Tony Stark genius in action!

Anyway, while Iron Man is fighting Boris, Natasha tricks the armored Avenger into turning his back so that Boris can deal a critical blow: “A… a jet of water on my back!! Boris… he’s short-circuiting me!”  (I guess at this point Iron Man’s armor is basic­ally a red and yellow Cybertruck.)  “Gullible fool! It worked!” Natasha crows.  But Vanko sacrifices himself to save the day; he and Boris are killed.  Natasha makes her escape, however, and the next issue, she’s back⁠—now with black hair instead of brown⁠—and lands another appointment with Stark.  “It is so good of you to see me!… I feel so ashamed… to think I once tried to harm you…” she sniffles.  “There, there!” Stark replies. “I don’t make a practice of harboring grudges!”  He shows her an anti-gravity de­vice he had invented, at which point Natasha sets off a gas gren­ade she’d been keeping in her purse and steals it.  She spends the rest of the issue using the device to destroy Stark’s factories, but when the issue is almost over, Stan has Iron Man randomly dis­cover a way to disable the device.  “This proton electric charge will destroy the output of the ray forever!!”  Natasha gets away again, and the cops grumble to Iron Man: “Imagine Stark allow­ing that weapon to be stolen! If you ask me, he’s just an over­rated playboy… or worse!”  “It’s a good thing he has you around to correct his bumbling mistakes!”

Anyway, she’s fine, and in #60, she hears that Stark has gone missing and decides to send Hawkeye in to “steal the plans for the latest weapons!”  Hawkeye is dubious: “I have agreed to be your ally, my lovely Black Widow… but my heart rebels at the thought of treason!”  “It will not be treason, my bold hero!” Natasha replies. “I only serve the cause of international peace!”  (In that same panel, she thinks, “He believes any lie I tell him!”)  Natasha’s plan turns out to be a bust, because, as his secretary explains, “Mr. Stark keeps all his secret formulae in his head! He doesn’t dare trust them to safes!”  Still, Hawkeye makes a clean getaway.  The same cannot be said for Natasha, who is rounded up by the Soviets.  She’s afraid that she is soon to have a date with an open window, but instead Khrushchev has her retrained for a new role, which is an in-universe way of saying that Stan and company had realized that the eight-year-old boys buying Marvel comics didn’t want to read about a character who was explicitly described in the stories as a knockoff of Mata Hari, of whom they’d probably never heard.  They wanted to see super-people battling it out!  Spider-Man was popular, and here was another character who happened to be named after a spider.  So in Tales of Suspense #64, cover date 1965.04, the Black Widow returns as, essentially, Spider-Woman, with the same powers: clinging to things (with special boots), swinging around town on a rope (that shoots from her gauntlets), and even wearing a costume with a webbing pattern on it, though on her it looks like fishnets.  As that pop-up panel suggests, she’s still fighting Iron Man, and she’s still ordering a lovesick Hawkeye around…

…but the following month, Hawkeye would join the Avengers with Iron Man’s endorsement.  He explains that the Black Widow had been shot by “the communists” and taken away.  We learn in Avengers #29, cover date 1966.06, that with Khrushchev having been deposed, the Widow is now working not for the Soviets but for the Chinese.  (Her costume is changed to actually involve a lot of fishnets over bare skin, but this will be changed back the following issue.)  She is now backed up by not just one goon but two, the Swordsman and Power Man, and tries to recruit Hawk­eye, but he declares that “who challenges the Avengers, challen­ges Hawkeye!” and refuses to join her side.  Still, after the Widow and her partners are defeated (primarily by the Wasp, who earlier in the issues had spent a full page being menaced by a sparrow), Hawkeye cannot bring himself to prevent her escape.  A dejected Hawkeye tells Captain America to start his lecture, but Cap replies, “There’s nothing to say, fella! We’re all Avengers, yes… but we’re also human beings, with feelings, and emotions!”  (As if we needed any more proof that Captain America is a liberal.)

In the following issue, Natasha switches sides again, saying that the brainwashing the Maoists had put her through had worn off.  She would stay in the Avengers’ orbit for over a year.  She doesn’t officially join the team⁠—Hawkeye nominates her for membership, but Hank Pym vetoes the idea, saying, “As one of the original Avengers, I don’t care too [sic] see it turn into a rest home for reformed super-villains!”  But she does hang around as Hawk­eye’s ladyfriend, and occasionally joins the team on missions.  In Avengers #37, the fact that she is not an Avenger ends up saving the day, as she is able to scare off an alien warlord who hadn’t taken the actual Avengers seriously:

That kind of ruthlessness puts her on Nick Fury’s radar as a po­tential recruit, and he presents her with a proposition: she’s not a superhero but a spy, so if she has indeed reformed, her true place is not with the Avengers but with S.H.I.E.L.D., the Marvel Universe’s top spy agency.  Natasha signs up on the spot, which leads to a period of uncertainty about her loyalties: she disap­pears with little explanation and seems to be working with the Chinese again, so is she operating as a double agent on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s behalf?  Or is she a triple agent who actually has returned to villainy?  (The Black Widow of the Ultimate Universe does turn out to be a villainous traitor, after all.)  Eventually the Avengers writer of this era, Roy Thomas, gets around to estab­lishing an origin for the Widow.  We learn that the Natasha was married to a Soviet test pilot named Alexi [sic].  When the au­thorities drop by her apartment to inform her that her husband has been killed in an accident, Natasha said that she wanted to “do something to be worthy of his memory”, so the Soviet gov­ernment trained her to be a spy.  But her husband is not actually dead: the accident was a cover story.  In reality, Alexi had been put into a program that aimed to develop a Soviet counterpart to Captain America, which turned him into the Red Guardian.  Hawkeye is pretty bummed when he journeys “behind the Bam­boo Curtain” to rescue Natasha, only to find out that she’s mar­ried, that her husband is still alive, and that both of them are working for the communists, as Colonel Ling’s “advanced poly­graph” shows that the Widow is genuinely loyal to them.  She isn’t⁠—S.H.I.E.L.D. had loaded her up with psychic defenses so she could infiltrate the enemy camp and sabotage their doomsday device⁠—and the Red Guardian sacrifices himself to save her when she reveals her true purpose and Ling tries to kill her.  So Alexi’s out of the picture.  Still, this is the beginning of the end for the Hawkeye/Widow romance, as Natasha appears only spor­adically for the rest of the ’60s, ostensibly because she’s always off on S.H.I.E.L.D. missions we don’t get to hear about.  And Hawkeye is always busy with the Avengers⁠—when he grumbles that his duties are interfering with his love life, Natasha retorts, “What love life? It’s been weeks since we even had dinner togeth­er!”  Still, it is quite abrupt when, in Avengers #76 (cover date 1970.05), the Black Widow shows up at Avengers mansion⁠—her first appearance in a Marvel comic in a full year⁠—and announces that she’s leaving forever… and it’s not just a plot point.

For two months later, over in Amazing Spider-Man #86⁠—still written by Stan, this late in the game!⁠—John Romita Sr., whose appealing art had made Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson near­ly as much a part of the Marvel brand as the superheroes were, debuted a total reinvention of the Black Widow’s look.  Out went the mask, the fishnet patterns, the jewelry bearing big B’s and W’s, and the bob of black hair.  In came a slinky, skintight catsuit and⁠—out of nowhere, and unexplained⁠—a glorious mane of bright red.  “It may not be as fancy, but this new costume will be more in keeping with the swingy Seventies!” Natasha reflects.  And it wasn’t only the opportunity to have Romita be the one to create the model for later artists to follow that led to the Wid­ow’s new look premiering in Amazing Spider-Man⁠—the cover has Spider-Man declare “She’s a female copy of myself!”, and the creators double down on the notion that, yeah, her power set will be nearly identical to that of their flagship character.  (As J. Jon­ah Jameson puts it, “It isn’t the wall-crawler! It’s a girl⁠—copping his act!”)  The flimsy story of the issue is that the Widow decides to fight Spider-Man “to see what makes him tick!” so that she can “use it… for the benefit of… the new Black Widow!”  A sample:

If this reads like an advertisement to some of the slightly older Amazing Spider-Man readers⁠—“Hey, dudes! You know how you like watching Spidey swing among the rooftops? You know how you like watching Mary Jane do basically anything at all? What if they were the same character?”⁠—there’s a reason for that: Mar­vel had decided to launch a new volume of Amazing Adventures, a bimonthly book whose first half would feature the Inhumans and whose back half would feature the Black Widow.  The prem­ise of the Widow solo series turns out to be that, after ditching superheroics to settle into civilian life as an “international jet-setter”, the Widow finds that flitting between luxurious pent­houses and having flings with the world’s most eligible bachelors bores her.  So she keeps finding reasons to get into the catsuit and go fight bad guys.  Since her new costume doesn’t have a mask, and since she is a regular in the society pages, it is pretty much immediately that the public tumbles to the discovery that the famous, suddenly redheaded Madame Natasha and the fa­mous, suddenly redheaded Black Widow are one and the same.  Anyway, sales weren’t great, and her run on Amazing Adven­tures only lasted eight issues.

She soon got another shot at co-headlining a book, though: only two months after her last issue of Amazing Adventures, the Black Widow pops up in, of all places, Daredevil #81 (cover date 1971.11).  Though she doesn’t know Daredevil at all, she sees a villain dump his semiconscious body into the Hudson, and impul­sively jumps in to save his life.  Three issues later Daredevil has revealed his secred identity to her (and we finally learn Natasha’s last name, given here as “Romanoff”).  Three issues after that, they’ve moved in together⁠—on the other side of the country, out in San Francisco.  By issue #92, the Black Widow’s logo is on the front of the book.  It’ll stay there through #107, and the Widow will remain the co-star of the book, with her own corner circle, all the way through #124 (cover date 1975.08).  But in that issue, she abruptly leaves, just as she had done to Hawkeye.  It’s true that her relationship with Daredevil had been tempestuous: Natasha was depicted as hot-tempered and strong-willed, so she didn’t take it well when Daredevil treated her as something less than an equal partner, which he often did.  But this split was not an organic outcome of a narrative thread: once again, she left because she was being moved to a new book.

The five original X‑Men had been in limbo after their book went into reprints at the beginning of 1970.  Stories about the team went back into production in 1975, but with a mostly new lineup.  Cyclops and Marvel Girl stuck around, while the Beast went to the Avengers.  So, what to do with the Angel and Iceman?  Writer Tony Isabella envisioned a series that would have had the two of them traveling from town to town having adventures.  But editor Len Wein vetoed most aspects of this idea.  First, they’d have to have a home base; Los Angeles was selected for a change of pace, since the vast majority of the Marvel line was set in New York.  Wein also declared that having more than one hero meant that this was a team book, and teams needed to have a minimum of five members.  At least one had to already have a solo book.  At least one had to be a strong guy.  And at least one had to be a woman.  For these roles, Isabella selected, respectively, the Ghost Rider, Hercules, and the Black Widow.  Together, they became the Champions⁠—and their book was canceled after only seventeen issues.  Turns out people didn’t have much interest in a super­hero comic with no theme and no reason for this particular group to work together.

This left Natasha without a book to call home.  Her appearances consequently became more sporadic.  She drifted back over to Daredevil, now as an occasional guest as the lead character’s ex… and then Daredevil suddenly became a phenomenon.  Frank Miller took over the writer’s chair, introduced Elektra, brought back Bullseye, poached the Kingpin to serve as Daredevil’s arch-enemy, and made what had previously been an afterthought into one of Marvel’s best selling and most critically acclaimed books.  So when Miller and his partner on the art chores, Klaus Janson, reinvented the Widow’s look for the 1980s, they had the juice to make the rest of everyone else follow suit.  They chopped off her magnificent hair and gave her an appalling 1982 helmet cut, which poor Natasha would be stuck with well into the ’90s.  They also changed her costume.  You may have noticed that while her ’70s costume is supposed to be black, Marvel’s colorists didn’t really do black anymore.  Sure, you could splash as much black ink onto the page as you wanted, but that was flat.  If you wanted shading, the usual solution was to use blue instead.  It’s bizarre⁠—they could certainly do black in the mid-’60s, by coloring the highlights dark gray.  Here’s a panel from Tales of Suspense #53, cover date 1964.05, in which Tony Stark and Madame Natasha both clearly have black hair.  But by the time I was reading com­ics, Tony Stark’s hair, which was still supposed to be black, invar­iably had the highlights done in bright blue.  Changing Natasha’s hair to red saved her from that fate, but her costume still made her look more like the Blue Widow a lot of the time.  So Miller and Janson got around that problem by giving her a gray cos­tume⁠—one that the colorists couldn’t touch, and potentially get wrong, because it would come to them “pre-colored” in screen­tone, that pattern of black dots.  Clever, in a way, but at best it interfered with the shading and at worst made her look like she was being pasted in from a different medium.

After Champions had been canceled in 1978, Marvel had kicked around the possibility of a new Black Widow series.  There was a series called Marvel Premiere that was intended to showcase potential ideas for new books; the first three offerings, featuring Warlock, Dr. Strange, and Iron Fist respectively, all did go on to get their own series after an arc in Marvel Premiere.  Maybe the Widow could get a few issues.  Of course, step one was to address why her earlier books hadn’t sold.  Maybe it was because of the bait and switch?  Marvel had lured in readers with the prospect of seeing her drawn by John Romita Sr.⁠—and then those readers had found the art on her book done by the likes of Don Heck and Sal Buscema, who couldn’t deliver on the promise of “hottie in a catsuit” in quite the same way.  So maybe the secret was to get a hotshot artist to commit to the project, maybe by offering him an opportunity to branch out into plotting?  Star penciler George Pérez hopped on board, and he and scripter Ralph Macchio put together a four-issue story full of shots of a hottie in a catsuit.  Sometimes the catsuit got a little shredded.  And then Marvel Premiere got canceled before the Widow story could be pub­lished.  In 1982, Marvel launched a new series called Marvel Fan­fare that attempted to burn off “inventory stories”⁠—completed but unpublished comics that were just sitting around, such as fill-in issues that were never needed and no longer fit the hero’s status quo, for instance⁠—by putting them on glossy paper with no ads and marketing them as a premium product.  Pérez’s Black Widow story certainly qualified, so in 1983 it finally got to see the light of day. Marvel Fanfare #11 is notable for the debut of an armored supervillain called the Iron Maiden: “You once knew me as Melina Vostokoff. We both toiled in the service of the Soviet state then⁠—before you defected to the West, and I became an independent agent. For year my achievements went unnoticed, overshadowed always by the more flamboyant exploits of the Black Widow. Now I shall avenge those slights⁠—and destroy you in the process.”  (She doesn’t.)  Anyway, with Pérez fully booked up with his gig drawing the massively successful New Teen Ti­tans over at DC Comics, there was little chance that this Fanfare run would lead to an ongoing Black Widow series, and it didn’t.

Natasha finally got a regular gig again in the ’90s: having offici­ally joined the Avengers in Avengers #111 (cover date 1973.05), but never having served a lengthy stretch with the team, she re­joined in issue #329 (cover date 1991.02) and stuck around for years.  In Captain America #402 (cover date 1992.07) she was named team leader, a position she held until the Avengers dis­banded in 1996.  I don’t know all the details of her tenure because I found this era unreadable.  With rare exceptions, 1992 to 1996 was the worst period in the history of the Marvel Universe and possibly of superhero comics in general.  Art went downhill as professional artists were replaced by a generation of newcomers who had learned to draw by filling their school notebooks with stiff, misshapen sketches of grimacing musclemen.  Writing went downhill as well; coherent storytelling fell by the wayside, re­placed by sprawling, half-baked “events” such as “The Cross­ing” and “The Clone Saga” that aimed for big sales with dra­matic shakeups: Iron Man is revealed as a murderer and dies and gets replaced by a teenage Tony Stark from another dimension! The real Peter Parker died in the ’70s and Spider-Man fans have been reading about a clone ever since! The Wasp now looks 25% more like a real bug!  I tried to browse through some of these issues so that I could get a sense of how the Widow was por­trayed as the leader of the Avengers, but I just bounced off them.  I did see that in 1995 they finally updated her haircut.  Given the year, I guess it’s not too surprising that they gave her a Rachel.

One measure of how dark this era was for Marvel was that at the end of 1996, the company filed for bankruptcy.  In dire straits, Marvel started farming out its properties to other outfits.  For instance, the reason the Avengers disbanded is that their book was canceled and relaunched with a new #1 issue produced by Rob Liefeld’s Extreme Studios.  This was a disaster; Liefeld was notorious for having the lowest talent to success ratio in the industry.  But a year later, Marvel took a different tack.  It re­claimed the books it had contracted out and put acclaimed but highly conventional creators on them: Avengers, for instance, went to Kurt Busiek and George Pérez.  Then it took four other properties⁠—Daredevil, the Black Panther, the Punisher, and the Inhumans⁠—and handed them over to Joe Quesada’s Event Com­ics to try something different: put edgier talent on the books and aim for top quality.  The project was called Marvel Knights, and it brought the company out of its tailspin.  Black Panther by Chris­topher J. Priest and Mark Texeira started a new direction for a largely mothballed character that, twenty years later, would cul­minate in a movie that grossed one point four billion dollars.  In­humans by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee was a critical darling.  And Daredevil, by movie director Kevin Smith and Joe Quesada him­self, saw its sales jump from an average of 26,623 per month for the last half dozen issues of the old volume, good for 84th to 102nd place, to an average of 83,798 per month for the first half dozen issues of the new volume, good for 10th to 15th place.  And its trajectory was stable⁠—it didn’t start with a big splash and then drop 50% each month.  This is not to say that it was good: Quesada’s art is highly overrated, and even if you’re a fan, you can’t see much of it here because Smith covers it up with so many caption boxes and speech bubbles that the book looks like a prose novel.  But this new volume of Daredevil did claim the Black Widow for Marvel Knights, and it did more or less restore her to her classic 1970s look⁠—in an era when her catsuit could finally be colored black instead of blue!⁠—though it’s hard to escape the feeling that Quesada gave Natasha her long hair back mainly so he could draw her getting it in her face.  The audience response was positive enough that a fifth Marvel Knights series was announced with the Black Widow in the starring role.  It was only slated to run for three issues, but it wound up redefining the character for the new century.

That’s quite an accomplishment for a writer who was just start­ing out.  Devin Grayson had written a few books for DC Comics’ Batman line, but I would never have heard of her had I not met her at the one and only comics convention I have ever attended (Charlotte, 1997).  But right there in Black Widow #1, cover date 1999.06, she introduces the element of the Widow’s backstory that most character bios would start with today: the Red Room, the Soviet and then Russian program to train young girls to be­come the world’s top spies and assassins.  Inhumans v2 #5 had tried to drum up interest in the upcoming Widow series by offer­ing a sneak preview in which a young blonde woman in a black catsuit, seen only in shadow, makes a delivery to a surprised American agent from her superior, a Col. Yuri Stalyenko.  “Who are you?” the American asks.  “I’m the Black Widow,” she replies.  In Black Widow #1, this new character is fully introduced: she’s Yelena Belova, “the first student in the history of the Red Room to surpass” Natasha’s marks.  Though an antagonist at first⁠—because she’s been sent by the Russians to subvert Natasha’s mission, and because Yelena’s personal mission is to take Nata­sha’s place⁠—before the series is over, Natasha has appointed her­self Yelena’s tough-love mentor, whether Yelena likes it or not.  The next Black Widow series, written by Grayson and Greg Ruc­ka, explored this dynamic even further.  The one after that, for Marvel’s adults-only “MAX” line, was a Yelena solo series.  These were three issues apiece.  In 2004, the focus was back on Natasha for her first ongoing solo series, but it ended up lasting only six issues.  Then we enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe era, with the Black Widow regularly featured in movies, and Marvel has kept trying to give Natasha her own book.  I count at least four additional series, all intended to be ongoing, that have lasted eight, twenty, twelve, and fifteen issues respectively.  I think there was another limited series in there somewhere, also.  I’ve collected some of these; I passed on others.  The most recent one was written by Kelly Thompson, so I did make sure to pick that one up⁠—she’s generally great, and this series was no exception.  And in it, Natasha and Yelena are steadfast allies.

But back to ’99 and that first series.  The other way it set the template for the Black Widow heading into the twenty-first cen­tury was through the art.  Scroll back up and look at those John Romita Sr. panels, which were inked by Jim Mooney.  You can see one or two folds around the knees and elbows, but basically, Romita drew Natasha’s body, Mooney covered most of it in ink, and an uncredited colorist filled in the highlights with baby blue.  For that matter, the same goes for Spider-Man: it’s Peter Parker’s body with a pattern drawn on top of it.  That’s cartooning for you.  And there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that⁠—there are worse things to be than a legendary cartoonist.  Here’s another one, Bruce Timm, doing pretty much the same thing in 2002:

A lovely drawing, but that is basically body paint.  Compare that to what artist J. G. Jones does in Black Widow:

That’s not body paint⁠—that’s clothing.  There are ripples, seams, zippers.  It reflects light the way black vinyl would.  Its neck is wider than hers⁠—he didn’t just draw a line to indicate where her neck stops and the costume starts.  The metal bits look like met­al.  The hard plastic bits look like hard plastic.  What may have impressed me most of all were the shoes⁠—the Widows are con­stantly running, jumping, climbing, etc., and look at the soles of Yelena’s catsuit.  They actually seem designed for that sort of thing:

That takes us up to the end of 1999, and I’m going to stop there because (a) I don’t actually know all the details of the Widows’ biographies in the twenty-first century⁠—I think both Natasha and Yelena were killed at various points and then brought back as clones with memory implants?⁠—and (b) I’ve finally covered everything I recognized that went into the movie.

Oh, yeah, the movie!  So, in the MCU, Natasha and Yelena were in the Red Room together, and while still children (Natasha was eight, Yelena three), they were assigned to play the daughters of an all-American couple who were actually Russian agents steal­ing classified information.  (Boris Yeltsin, how could you?)  Three years later, with S.H.I.E.L.D. hot on their heels, they make a dar­ing escape to Cuba, where eleven-year-old Natasha and six-year-old Yelena are taken back to the Red Room to complete their training.  So, who played their parents?  Dad is Alexei Shosta­kov⁠—in the comics, minus the second “e”, that’s Madame Nata­sha’s first husband, the Red Guardian.  He’s the Red Guardian here, too, and even spends a significant chunk of the film wearing the suit, though this is played for laughs.  Mom is Melina Vosto­koff; in the comics, that’s the Iron Maiden, though that’s not part of her MCU incarnation.  So, we jump to 2016.  Yelena’s genera­tion of MCU Widows are subjected not just to psychological con­ditioning but to outright chemical control; Yelena gets free, and reconnects with Natasha to try to free the others and take down the Red Room.  The two of them have their obligatory fight scene but over the course of the movie rebuild their sisterly relation­ship.  They even manage to begin repairing their bond with their fake parents.  There’s a lot of banter involved, of varying quality.  There’s also a lot of punchy kicky shooty explodey stuff through­out.

Though the movie’s big bad is the director of the Red Room, the main supervillain in the movie is the Taskmaster, which sur­prised me, because so far as I’m aware he has no particular his­tory with the Widow.  She was the chief antagonist in the third Taskmaster series (which was quite good), but that was cover dated 2021.01–05, after the movie was complete.  (Black Widow was originally slated for a 2020 release, as an epilogue to Aven­gers: Endgame, but was delayed for over a year when a pesti­lence descended upon the land.)  In retrospect, I reckon the series must have been commissioned as a movie tie-in, though I didn’t realize that at the time.  Anyway, the Taskmaster first ap­peared in Avengers #195, cover date 1980.02.  His gimmick is that he has “photographic reflexes”: “Any physical feat I see⁠—even once,” he explains in Captain America #334, “my body automati­cally knows how ta do.”  His gimmick is that since his primary motivation is financial gain, he has found that rather than being a supervillain himself, it is more lucrative to train henchmen for other supervillains.  By the time I ran into him again circa 2002, when he was a supporting character in Gail Simone’s books Deadpool and Agent X, he had become more of a mercenary antihero (like Deadpool himself).  I believe that’s still his current status quo.  But while the Taskmaster in this movie has the same powers and basic look, it turns out to be a complete different per­son behind the skull mask, so none of the comics’ Taskmas­ter’s history is really relevant.  Thus, no Taskmaster rundown today.  I did find it surprising that the MCU people would lock themselves out of doing any of the stories involving the Task­master from the comics, but I guess that even with the massive amount of material they’re churning out, they can’t get to every­thing.

I won’t go full spoiler here, but the Taskmaster in the movie turns out to be someone who has no comics counterpart, but is instead tied to an earlier MCU movie.  Which brings me to my main observation about the Black Widow movie: in one key respect, this is basically Better Call Saul.  I wrote about it in my article about the show, which discussed:

[…]  the redemption of… not the ludicrous, exactly, but the random.  Waaaaay back when Saul Goodman first debuted on Breaking Bad, the writers needed a speech for him when Walter White kidnapped him to give viewers a sense that he was already in over his head with the local drug trade, and this is what they came up with: “No, it wasn’t me, it was Ignacio! He’s the one! Oh, no! Oh, no, no, no, no! Siempre soy amigo, siempre, siempre soy amigo del car­tel!”  Then, when Jesse Pinkman says to speak English: “…⁠Lalo didn’t send you? No Lalo? …Oh, thank god!”  And while the writers themselves had no idea what any of that meant at the time⁠—they just needed something evoca­tive⁠—that little speech basically became the plot of […] Better Call Saul.  Over the course of seven years, we meet Ignacio, find out what he did to make him “the one”, meet Lalo, find out what he did to make him Saul’s ultimate boogeyman, and learn the ultimate fate of these guys.

The first Avengers movie was full of lines that were intended to suggest some of the backstory that put “red” on the Widow’s “ledger”, but which were random: Budapest, São Paulo, the hos­pital fire, Dreykov’s daughter.  Well, here they fill in Dreykov and his daughter the same way that Better Call Saul filled in Lalo and Ignacio.  That was one of the things I most disliked about the first Avengers movie⁠—all the Potemkin storytelling, with references that don’t lead to anything.  Well, nine years after the fact, now some of them do.  Does that mean that those earlier references are no longer random?  It does not!  They didn’t lead to anything then, so bailing them out after the fact makes little difference.

“P. V. C. (live)” (Kenickie, 1997.0822)

	comment on Tumblr	reply via email	support this site	return to the Calendar page