Natasha: You say I pick sides. I pick good guys. I pick winners. I pick regret and kindness and mercy.
From Black Widow: Deadly Origin #4, by Paul Cornell and Tom Raney.
Fuck Yeah, Black Widow
Fallaces sunt rerum species
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Alexi: She was hard to live with. She wants to be a mother, a sweetheart— but they made her barren and a… and a…Paul Cornell reprised this point in his uncomfortable blending of false memories and arranged marriage. Again we see that false dichotomy: a mother and a sweetheart, barren and a… possibly a less-noble word for warrior. The joke’s on Alexi, here, though, because by Cornell’s take she’d been a fighter long before she feel in with the KGB. If they turned her into anything it was a “sweetheart”— but that can’t be so, because that’s not what the Red Room is for.
A mother, a sweetheart, then, is what Alexi himself wanted from Natasha, a warrior what the Soviet state demanded. What Natasha wants for herself goes unsaid. Like with Lyudmila, there’s an inversion in how this scene is framed. Earlier, Natasha, the good housewife stormed into the same office demanding an intelligence post. And here, though it is Alexi who is dead and Alexi who is wearing the hero’s uniform, it is Alexi who is sobbing, embracing others for comfort.
From Black Widow: Deadly Origin #2, Paul Cornell and John Paul Leon.
boofadil asked: So I assume you've probably discussed it before but what are your thoughts on Black Widow: Deadly Origins? I see it doesn't have a place in your recommended reading.
My feelings are long and complicated and touched on in multiple posts the deadly origin tag. Basically, a lot of the flashback sequences reverse much of the agency she displays in the original stories— as a particular example, the scene with Tony Stark, where she’s outwitted and physically dominated by a morally triumphant Tony— in the old comics she successfully played him a few times, and always escaped him, and was never confessing her love for him while he pressed his hand around her neck.
I also do not like the decision to tell her origin story mostly through vague flashbacks to relationships she’s had with men, men who typically sell more comics than her, men who crowd up her page time. The villain’s plot, too, is basically elaborate slut-shaming, coupled with threats of rape and incest, it’s all extremely uncomfortable things to dwell on. I felt that like Richard K. Morgan, Paul Cornell inserted a lot of extra misogyny into her past for the sake of pointing out that misogyny. I realize and understand that the point of it is for Natasha to heroically subvert all this misogyny, to deny that she’s simply a serial girlfriend, the sum of a bunch of Marvel romances, but that is something that I think should be taken for granted. I’m not sure it needed to be said— and if it did, I don’t think there was the page space to accomplish it effectively combined with all else Cornell had to do.
There are things I appreciate about the series, chief among them Leon’s art. But I also like a few of the individual sequences, the themes of Natasha’s closing speech, the way Cornell plays around with history. I like especially that he got rid of much of that terrible child soldier origin, and the twist he did with Natasha joining up with Soviet intelligence to save Ivan’s life. I don’t think it’s all bad. But I do think it’s somewhat hopelessly cluttered, that it makes Natasha’s origin more desperately confusing and less tonally certain than it had to be.
I have a lot of similar misgivings with Morgan’s stuff, but I think Homecoming holds together better as a story. Morgan is also a lot of people’s favorite take on Natasha, so I felt obligated to include it, even if it isn’t mine. General opinion on Deadly Origin is mixed-at-best, and I see a fair bit of angry reaction posts about it, even now.
Hercules: The others say they have lost heart. Not I, of course.
Angel: This team just doesn’t make sense.
Johnny: Why should such disparate people stay together?
Natasha: Because we’re not “disparate” at all. For this town, we’re typical. Half-god, half-demo, half-human, half-westerner— out west to seek our fortune!
The primary appeal of the Champions was that they didn’t make much sense but tried to be heroes anyway. They weren’t A-list or awe-inspiring, but their hodgepodge nature lent them an anti-establishment, underdog appeal, and that’s why I think the fascination with the team in flashback has long outlived the original not-always good 17 issue run.
The Champions were also the first Marvel team to have a female leader, c. 1975. In the eighties, the X-men and Avengers would follow suit.
From Black Widow: Deadly Origin #3, by Paul Cornell and John Paul Leon.
Medic: Do you want to save your friend’s life just to give him a ticking clock?
Nick: ‘Tasha? It’s your decision.
Natasha: James actually prefers long odds… do it.
Medic: All right then…
Ivan: Just you fron now on…proud of you. My little girl—
Winter Soldier: The comrade needs medical treatment. My superiors offer you both this chemical in exchange for your renewed loyalty. It will heal him— and increase your life spans. But there is an extremely limited supply, comrades.
Ivan: Don’t…don’t…
Natasha: We say yes.
I wanted to highlight the way these two scenes mirror each other instead of pointing out how this just happened in the last arc of New Avengers. Both times we see Natasha in charge of administering immortality juice to some guy she loves with a hole in his chest, and both times she decides damn the future steroid testing, full speed ahead.
But there’s a huge difference: one of these scenes is a mistake, the kind of mistake you have to spend the rest of your life making up for. The other takes place 50 years later and is an escape from the consequences of a capital-e summer Event. So, heh, did Natasha learn anything in those fifty years?
Obviously, where she screwed up the first time was pledging herself to a lifetime of service to an oppressive black ops regime. But she also was paying more attention to what she wanted for Ivan than to what Ivan wanted for himself. Giving him that shot of comic book juice prolonged his life, but didn’t save it. Ivan just twisted up into a cruel shell of a person— he couldn’t cope with all that time. She couldn’t have known that, of course, but Ivan did tell her to say no. She didn’t listen.
With Bucky, at least, she makes reference to what he would want. The scenes work to such different purposes, I’m pretty sure there’s no echo intended. But the echo’s there anyway. The scene with Ivan was such a turning point for her, how could she not remember it when confronted with such a similar dilemna?
From Fear Itself #7.1 by Ed Brubaker and Butch Guice, & Black Widow: Deadly Origin #1, by Paul Cornell and John Paul Leon.
Natasha: You certainly have your share of ex-girlfriends. But in your case, all the stories are jolly.
Hercules: Because I’m a myth.
Natasha: Because you’re a mister.
From Black Widow: Deadly Origin #3, by Paul Cornell and Tom Raney.
