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Fuck Yeah, Black Widow

Fallaces sunt rerum species

Здравствуйте from FYBW, your one-stop tumblr shop for Black Widow news, no-prizing, and oversaturated .gifs. Some MCU, mostly comics. Often overwritten. Always overthinking.

Black Widow created by Lee, Rico and Heck & is © Marvel Entertainment.

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You might have heard— Marvel is doing a gigantanormous 700 issue free digital bonanza and this means for the first time I get to do a masterpost for some of my favorite Black Widow comics!!

Black Widow v6 #1 (url)
The kickoff to the 2010 ongoing is still my preferred intro point, because this is a kickass run of comics that mixes grade-A character study with the context of the wider Marvel universe. Again, this is the Natasha story I think everyone should read. This story arc continues with #2-5 of the same series.
Words by Marjorie Liu, art by Daniel Acuña
Black Widow v1 #1 (url)
The 1999 mini introduces Yelena Belova, a second Black Widow and mixes glossy international espionage with themes of identity and individuality. I still love this one, and it was my go-to rec before the 2010 ongoing came out. Continues in #2-3 of the same series.
Words by Devin Grayson, art by J.G. Jones
Black Widow v2 #1 (url)
This is a spiritual sequel to the first Grayson mini, and is a mean, twisty mindfuck of a story. I like this because it shows Natasha at her worst, and also shows what drives her there. Continues in #2-3 of the same series.
Words by Devin Grayson & Greg Rucka, art by Scott Hampton
Enter the Heroic Age #1 & CA and the Secret Avengers #1 (url & url)
Two linked one-shots by Kelly Sue DeConnick, involving copious ladysnark, over the top Bond-villainy, and an assortment of cute coats and puppies. Read Enter the Heroic Age, then the SA issue.
Words by Kelly Sue DeConnick, art by Jamie McKelvie and Greg Tocchini
Fear Itself: the Black Widow (url)
This takes place during the Fear Itself megacrossover but you don’t need to read the big crossover to understand what’s going on. I like how this one explores Natasha’s ruthlessness in the context of her vulnerability, and the art is lithe and elegant.
Words by Cullen Bunn, art by Peter Nguyen

These are all #1 issues, so they were written as starting points and should be easy for anyone to download and digest.

ETA: the demand on comixology’s servers caused them to pause the promotion, but fill out this form and they’ll let you know when you can get your free comics.

Anonymous asked: I know there's the big debate if Natasha is a super hero a spy or both but what do you think she considers herself?

I wrote a whole essay about this, but to sum up: she’s both, and that tension is imho one of the things that makes her unique as both a Marvel comics superhero and as a pop culture spy.

And I agree with Marjorie Liu about how Natasha concieves herself, so I’ll just quote:

Mentally, she’s a very flexible person. It’s very seamless. She can go from being a spy to being a hero in one breath because that’s just who she is. Being a spy is so natural to her, she does it without even thinking. But she’s also got a good heart, deep down. She’s ruthless and she’s all of the above, but she’s not really a bad person. She knows the difference between right and wrong. She knows how to walk the grey ground. I’m not going to focus on some split in her personality: I’m a hero! I’m a spy! How do I reconcile? She is who she is.
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Natasha: You can watch if you want, James.
Logan: Yes, James. Don’t mind me.
Bucky: Shut up.
Natasha: Yes, Logan, Please do. You’re not out of the woods with me, yet. A little warning would have been nice.

I guess I wish I lived in a world where I could go off on a rant like yesterday’s without feeling the need to clarify: you can be anti sex trafficking without being anti sex. But, if I’m honest, the feminist movement has a bit of a historical problem with this. There’s also a Dude in the Comments Section with a historical problem. Like, every time someone blogs about Uncomfortable T&A Pose, take eleventy billion, Some Dude will show up to whine about how feminists are censoring female sexuality. (For this dude, “female sexuality” is defined as sexy things he wants to see women do.)

Here’s the tricky truth of it: we live in a society that both pressures women to have sex they do not want and shames them for having it. Sexual liberation isn’t really about the freedom to be sexy— it’s about the freedom to have the sex you want. The other tricky thing is that fictional characters do not want. They’re fake. But we need to believe in them.

That means that they need to be believable. believable doesn’t have to mean realistic— but if a story’s going to chuck the laws of physics out the window it’s generally got to give us something else to keep it from spinning apart. Without internal logic or consistency, there’s nothing for us to hold onto. Superhero comics are actually a perfect example of this, because they are a place where wearing underwear over your tights is a kind of visual shorthand for bravery, but fans still try to mine them for threads of logic. We’re all searching for the mathematical formula that will make the sliding timescale comprehensible. Fans will notice if, several years and creative teams later, Teddy from Young Avengers is wearing the wrong amount of earrings.

This detour brought to you by the letter O and what I’m actually trying to say here: when it comes to the fake people sex stuff, you have to convince me. I’m all about what these women want, what I can believe they want. The reason so many comic book sex scenes fail is that they twist anatomy around to make sure we see everything, then use magical shadows and sheets to make sure we see nothing that counts. If every woman has the same hairstyle and bodytype it is difficult to believe these parts of their character design are really tied to character. And if women are always drawn sexy, pouting and thrusting in every panel, it is difficult to believe in that sexiness as a choice.

So, like, yeah, I don’t have an issue with plunging necklines, just the idea that a stealthy superagent would choose to go backflipping in one. Natasha’s attitude toward sex and sexuality is going to be informed by her quest for bodily autonomy, the harassment she’s had to deal with, all of her love affairs turning out to hopeless & tragic or Matt fucking Murdock, and the fact that she enjoyed them anyway. It wouldn’t be believable otherwise.

Anyway, this is a scene with boob that I like, one that works because of specific characters and specific contexts. We understand that Bucky is a ~gentleman, that Natasha might not be a ~lady, and that Logan’s a little bit creepy uncle— but Natasha’s self-confidence is such that the last bit doesn’t phase her. All of this makes sense so I believe it and none of it means the creepy dudes from pages past were right about her sex life. They were just right to be afraid of her.

From Black Widow #5, by Marjorie Liu and Daniel Acuña.

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Natasha: Do you know why I’m here?
Laura: It is not to help these girls. You are the spy, Black Widow, an Avenger. The Avengers cannot stop slavery or help hurt girls.
Natasha: Neither can the X-men. But we try.

Just as a final meditation on today’s impromptu theme: one of the things Natasha’s had a special interest in throughout her superhero career is sex and child trafficking. Laura points out that this is an unusual preoccupation for an Avenger, and she’s right. This is not the kind of thing that usually gets dressed up in capes and tights. But Black Widow deals with this stuff semi-regularly, even, because she’s not a typical superhero and this is why she fights.

As much as her origin story has been muddled recently, it has, always, in every iteration, been wound around themes of control and liberation. Natasha was once a loyal servant of lies and half-truths, a perfect agent who blinded herself to her conscience and her masters’ cruelties for the sake of being a perfect agent. But she couldn’t let them tell her who and how (not) to love, and she broke free.

There’s a gendered element to this, too. The Red Room trains only women, the chemical treatments given to their best operatives drive men insane. And so the men in charge of this whole twisted scenario christen their best agents after a spider that devours her mates, something that they fear, but also demean. They sharpen these women so that they may be as tools, weapons, something manufactured and replaceable. Not women at all.

(Natasha knows she is one-of a kind, unique, and is therefore unstoppable.)

So her career in espionage gave her ability and paranoid edges, but it also commodified her. This is the basic Marvel formula: power is the gift and the curse together. And as a result, she has a special interest in keeping women from being manipulated, from having their bodies and their sexualities be treated as commodities or weapons, instead of tools of their own enjoyment. Instead of bodies.

That’s why she tries to help rescue these trafficked girls but recognizes that their trauma isn’t something that can be fixed with punching. It’s why she reaches out to Laura Kinney, who has been grown in a lab and taught to kill for other people, and offers to teach X-23 how to be useful on her own terms.

(It’s also the reason why I cringe sometimes to see her twisted around for easy ass shots, to see her uniform tweaked and modified so that we get a better view. It’s like Ms. Deconnick says about Carol Danvers: It’s bizarre. There’s a part of me that’s like, “Why do you care?” And part of me that gets angry about it. That’s not what she’s about. Or at least, I don’t think it’s what she’s meant to be about.)

From X-23 #20, by Marjorie Liu and Phil Noto.