Natasha: I should take him down.
Sharon: Absolutely not, Natasha.
Natasha: This night doesn’t need more variables. We’ll regret leaving that guard there.
Sharon: Well, I’ll add that regret to the list I’m making right now.
People say a lot of things about Sharon Carter. For example, she doesn’t have a personality!! This isn’t true, Sharon is a dedicated soldiertype who has seen so much horror in her job as a SHIELD agent that she’s developed a cynical façade to cope. But deep down, Sharon wants to believe in duty and apple pie and her Aunt Peggy’s World War II adventures in the French resistance, everything that made her enlist in the first place. That’s the fundamental tension of her relationship with Steve, because he represents an ideal she wants to believe in, but is no longer sure she can.
Brubaker hasn’t always been the best at portraying this!!
But I wound up liking 2011’s various Sharon/Natasha team-ups more than I thought I would. Natasha’s usually playing the role of ultra-practical cautious type. When she’s teamed up with Bucky, she’s usually there to underline how stupid his quote-unquote plans are, for instance. But Sharon is more hardline than Natasha. When you think about it, they’re natural foils. Sharon got into espionage as an eager young woman looking to follow in her aunt’s heroic footsteps, but she became disillusioned with the reality of the work. Natasha was manipulated into the KGB and had no real choice in the matter, but she learned to turn the skills she learned to her own idealism.
Also, Mike Deodato, that is definitely how spines work.
From Captain America #617, by Ed Brubaker and Mike Deodato.
