Natasha: The background on these victims is awfully thin…
Sharon: What are you thinking?
Natasha: Just… the Winter Soldier never hit innocent bystanders. There’s something hidden about these people. And I think I know where to look for it.
Probably the most frequent criticism I read about the whole Brubaker Bucky/Natasha saga is one I don’t really understand— that we don’t see it much from her perspective. Even within Brubaker’s books, we get a lot of these scattered sequences from Natasha’s POV, and they almost always deal with Bucky and his current or past misadventures. (The life she has outside of him, to the contrary, remains mostly implicit.) In fact, the idea of their romance was introduced through her memories, not his.
This isn’t full on expository monologuing, but that she’s in Russia pouring through old KGB documents in the first place, when she doesn’t enjoy homecomings or paperwork, is still something. The line about innocent bystanders sort of foreshadows Captain America & Bucky #624, which flashed back to a mission where Winter Soldier lost it and had Natasha protect the bystander. No idea if Brubaker was thinking far enough ahead for that to be intentional. But it works!
From Captain America #617, by Ed Brubaker and Mike Deodato.
