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AVENGERS #11
JONATHAN HICKMAN (W) • MIKE DEODATO (A)
COVER BY DUSTIN WEAVER
“WAKE THE DRAGON”
• As Shang-Chi battles an ancient enemy, the Avengers hang out in Hong Kong’s swankiest casino.
• Captain Marvel, Black Widow and Spider-Woman find out it doesn’t pay to gamble in the spy business.
• Cannonball and Sunspot play craps with a bunch of AIM Agents. AND WIN!
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.
Sharon: —it’s going fine, Steve, our cover worked perfectly… and we may be on to something… not a lead, exactly, but Natasha thinks this was a sanctioned hit the KGB covered up… yeah, and not— Steve? We got cut off.
Natasha: Just as well. He wouldn’t have liked my plan, anyway.
So the Marvel Universe kind of has this thing going on where Steve Rogers is the unquestioned moral center of it, so I like that Natasha’s got enough confidence in herself to just follow her own plan without waiting for his go ahead.
I’m not sure why she needed a disguise that consisted of only a wig and a terrible fur collar when apparently Sharon Carter ultra high ranking agent of SHIELD did not. Maybe Natasha just likes playing dress up.
From Captain America #617, by Ed Brubaker and Mike Deodato.
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.
Yuri Petrovich. Talk about a name from the past. Yuri was the fourth man to wear the Crimson Dynamo armor. And his early life was just as twisted as what the Soviets did to me… Lies, indoctrination, mind-altering drugs, the whole deal. Yuri should have been the perfect armored agent, but instead he turned against his handlers, and even lost his mind for a while from what I was told.
Probably the most frustrating thing (for me) about Brubaker’s Captain America run is the way he incorporates a lot of Natasha’s continuity without incorporating Natasha in it, despite her being a constant presence in the book. A lot of the Winter Soldier mythos is cobbled together from disparate Black Widow arcs; the “memory altered KGB sleeper agent” has been done a lot in Black Widow stories back when Bucky still stayed dead. Nowhere is this more apparant than in Gulag.
This character, Ivan Petrovich, was introduced in the Champions as part of an extended plotline dealing with Natasha’s and Ivan’s past. (It also introduced Darkstar!!) Yuri is the son of Ivan Petrovich Bezukhov, Natasha’s creepy Bronze Age sidekick. Properly, his name should be Yuri Ivanovich Bezukhov, but this was before Marvel researched Russian naming conventions and learned how patronymics worked!! In any case, he felt intense jealousy towards Natasha because Ivan seemed to like her more. When he found out that he’d been kidnapped by the KGB instead of abandoned by his father, like he’d been led to believe, he sort of went berserk.
Tony Isabella, who created Yuri Petrovich, had plans to reveal that Ivan was Natasha’s biological father, as well!! But he never got around to it.
All of this was published in the mid-70s, which means they took place in the late 90s sliding timescale style at the earliest. Bit of a connundrum for Winter Soldier, who was inactive the entire decade. Ed Brubaker has told me I overthink continuity, true story.
From Captain America #616, by Ed Brubaker and Mike Deodato.
From Marvel Swimsuit Special ‘95, by Mike Deodato.
