True Believers: Black Widow #1 (Marvel)
From November 2015/January 2014.
writer: Nathan Edmondson
artist: Phil Noto
Ever since Scarlet Johansson showed up in the movies as Black Widow, Marvel has made tepid efforts to make the character more visible in its comics, including a number of solo series attempts. This reprint of the second-most-recent attempt (Marvel's recent penchant for restarting titles about once a year is a really weird business practice for anyone attempting to keep track of what's actually working and whether they're just goosing sales for everything to mask such things) comes from a few years ago.
But you can see how achingly Nathan Edmondson follows the movie template of the mysterious Natasha Romanov. I know first issues tend to generalize in order to contextualize the concept, but I felt like I was reading an impression of the movie character rather than someone who's existed in the comics for decades. This is a very, very bad thing.
I mean, I get corporate synergy and all. I scratched my head for years while Marvel failed to sync up the movie and comic Tony Starks (which finally the only man capable of doing so, Brian Michael Bendis, did, only to set up a teenage black girl to replace him). But a character who does exist in the comics, who theoretically has a richer history than has so far been depicted in the movies, should have something better than this.
I also get that the whole point of these particular True Believers reprints were meant to spotlight Marvel's rich crop of female-led comics it's got going on (part of a complete diet of diversity that's kind of hard to argue with).
In this context, Black Widow becomes like Wolverine. No, not the current Wolverine, who of course is a girl, but the original, part of whose mystique was that for years he didn't and we didn't know much about his origins. But the strange thing about Black Widow is that she exists in an Avengers universe where the movies, for those members lucky enough to get their own movies (unlike Black Widow or Hawkeye), have been all about origins. I honestly don't know if the comic book Black Widow has always been this mysterious, and I honestly don't know how this benefits her. Because she's a character who's literally a Russian spy who inexplicably works alongside Americans without really referencing the fact that historically and in the present, Russians and Americans really only get along in the International Space Station.
But Edmondson seems perfectly happy writing a comic where such nuances don't exist. And we just sort of vaguely follow along the movie template. This is shallow writing. I don't blame Edmondson, but the editors who sanctioned this series, and the filmmakers too cowardly to handle Black Widow the same way they've handled nearly every other Avenger. (I mean, sure, Captain America: The Winter Soldier was as much a Black Widow movie as it was a Nick Fury movie, and only vaguely a Captain America movie, and even more vaguely about the Winter Soldier, but...)
I don't mean to sound so negative, but it's just that it's offensive for Marvel to handle Black Widow like this in two mediums. The least it could do is let someone do a Black Widow comic like the excellent Hawkeye comics of the past few years. I mean, if you're going to not even pretend she's anywhere near the guys anyway, at least let the series be fun to read, right?
Yeah all this renumbering is really confusing. I read the Mark Waid-written Black Widow #1 recently. There was almost no dialogue in it; all she does is jump around to escape a SHIELD helicarrier. It really can't be that hard to write a decent Black Widow comic. They should have your boy Mike Costa do it. That seems like something that would be in his wheelhouse.
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