Fuck Yeah, Black Widow

Natasha: So what tipped him over the edge?
Strike: The Nuke incident. You know, the super-soldier who went amuck. Hazzard fears the same destructive potential in himself. It was as if the blind spot between his eyes… woke up. All the suppressed memories and images and illusions he once had are cascading back. He’s racing backwards now, back to his roots, his infancy, like a rubber band snapping. like a star that burns too hot too fast— eventually the system blows! Next, he’ll either collapse in on himself, like a black hole— suicide, of course— or he’ll supernova… and take a lot of people with him. I fear Hazzard’s a supernova. Your assignment is to force him to go the other way: make him destroy himself. Hazzard loved two things— second to his country, of course— God, and his mother. I doubt you’ll find god anywhere, but you may be able to use his mother to push the right buttons in his brain.
Natasha: Six six six. The number of the beast…
Strike: Excuse me?
Natasha: His eyes. They burn right through you…
Strike: Agent Widow, please. The intensity of his eyes is a deception of the hologram. Natasha: … An illusion, of course. Excuse me…
Strike: Oh, by the way— according to my calculations, wherever Hazzard is. He’s dreaming. Which means he may be having waking dreams. Flashes to— things that disturb him. That’s all of it. If you run into trouble, there’s always…
Natasha: Yes, doctor.
Strike: Murder, Natasha… is the ultimate intimacy. Good luck.

The “Nuke incident” is, for you Comics 101ers, a reference to Born Again, Frank Miller’s second run on Daredevil and widely regarded as one of the best stories in the history of Marvel Comics. One of the things that makes Nocenti’s run fascinating is that she had follow that.

Notice the disturbing ring of the last line of dialogue, and how it’s juxtaposed with the narrow panels and extreme close-ups. This is a very intimate page, uncomfortable and claustrophobic.

Natasha, significantly, mistakes the menace of the hologram eyes for true intensity. Strike refers to Hazzard’s “suppressed memories” as illusions— these are the things that had been wired out of him, but now they are coming back. It was inevitable, because I don’t think in Nocenti’s world you can write the humanity out of the man. It has to come back, more terrible and vibrant than before. But Strike still calls these things illusions, dreams, even though by some reckonings these brain impulses represent the truest things about Hazzard.

So Natasha is spooked by the hologram. But is she spooked by Hazzard himself, and his awful fate, or by Hazzard’s illusory nature, its unsettling intensity?

When Fear Itself was announced and we had no clue that it was actually going to be about hammers and TRON makeovers, there was a lot of talk about what character’s worst fears might be. This? I think this is pretty close to Natasha’s. Pretty close, pretty intimate.

From Daredevil #236, by Ann Nocenti and Barry Windsor-Smith.

Strike: We strip the mind down and reveal its core, the reptilian brain— a much finer machine.
Natasha: Reptilian? As in lizards and snakes? Sounds… chilling.
Strike: How so? Tell me, Agent Widow— wouldn’t you like to be rid of the clutter of memory and emotion— to be a more effective espionage agent? Let’s move on to section six: Agent Hazzard. His raw material was splendid. He had all the proper… childhood traumas. We were able to take that pathos, bypass the inhibitor systems, the guilt… and hone him into the perfect soldier, capable of anything. You see, Natasha, Agent Hazzard… is very much a reptile.

Remember when I was basically going through every panel of Brubaker’s Captain America run and writing paragraph upon paragraph of overthinking it? I’m doing it again but with Nocenti’s Daredevil. For a lot of reasons, but mostly because I find it interesting.

This issue (Nocenti’s first writing credit on the title) opens with a villain monologue, then cuts to Natasha’s reaction. Of the story’s major players, Daredevil is actually the last to debut.

I’ve talked a bit about how control, or lack thereof, is a recurring theme in Natasha’s stories. But it’s not a simple control-good! / no-control-bad! dichotomy. There are no easy goods and bads, and to be an agent, by definition, is to sacrifice some of your own self-determination to act in the service of some greater cause. Compare this with being a super-hero. In the 616 to put on gaudy colored tights is to become both man and symbol. To take up a mask is to conceal your identity and move beyond it. But the superhero wears her own colors, acting almost as an individual writ-large instead of as a part in a large machine. Superheroes do not have bosses.

What Dr. Strike proposes to Natasha, what he’s wired into Hazzard, is a sort of total control. Complete dominance over emotions, of guilt, of all these things that get in the way of being a supremely effective field agent. But it’s also a complete sublimation.

Notice also when Strike refers to Black Widow as Agent Widow and when he calls her Natasha. Notice also that he never calls Hazzard by his first name— Jack.

From Daredevil #236, by Ann Nocenti and Barry Windsor-Smith.