Skip to content Light View

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.

Anonymous asked: This isn't a baiting question; but these for some reason people assume that Natasha, and Clint, both sleep around. That's easily disproven, but I was wondering if whether or not YOU believe they have ever been ~intimate~ with one another. If they have, whatever; it's not really our business, is it? I wonder though, because if you look back at the period where they WERE involved it almost reads like Natasha seduced him, promising her goodies once they killed Iron Man. That never happened, so...

Yeah, I assume they’ve slept together, given they were involved for, idk, five years our time. I’m not sure where this comes from, other than the totally understandable “comics are hard”, but I see a lot of people assuming that Clint and Natasha’s romance only lasted for those four Tales of Suspense issues. But the plotline carried on into the Avengers, which, for me, is where things actually got interesting, and they didn’t break up until Avengers #76. (For some context, Clint joins the team in Avengers #16.)

I mean, all the usual caveats apply: as Silver Age characters, Clint and Natasha went from zero to true love in the space of like, five panels, and that true love was mostly comprised of chaste touching, melodramatic glances, and monologuing. Clint’s out-of-costume persona also wasn’t particularly developed— he didn’t have a first name until Avengers #63! But given the length and depth of their relationship, the fact that they were talking about marriage at one point, and what we’ve learned about the characters since 1968, I think it’s pretty reasonable to assume they’ve slept together, regardless of whether or not they “sleep around.”

FWIW, in Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes II, sort of a modern retelling of that era of Avengers comics, Clint and Natasha are share a room with a single bed and fight in their underwear:

Scene from Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes II

I don’t really take this series as continuity gospel but it’s a corollary at the least!

sugarfey asked: Hi, what do you think the chances are of Black Widow getting another solo comic? I know a lot of people who would buy it! I thought Marvel dropped hints a while back but we haven't heard anything since and I'm getting worried.

When they were first announcing Marvel NOW! there was a widespread assumption they’d put a Black Widow book in there, since Marvel was notably strapped for female leads. They shot that rumor down pretty specifically, w/Alonso saying that they didn’t have any solo plans for her. (Besides being a “prominent character” in books like Winter Soldier.)

More recently though (early February) there were definitely hints:

We wanted more titles anchored by female characters — that was a goal — but that doesn’t mean that any pitch that featured a female protagonist got rubber-stamped for approval. “Fearless Defenders” was approved because Ellie [Pyle] submitted a great pitch. Elsewhere, adjectiveless “X-Men” got a gust of wind in its sails when Jeanine Schaefer and Brian pitched a phenomenal concept for an all-female team. And — spoiler alert — perhaps there’s something on the horizon for Bla>cough< Wid>cough

So I’m pretty optimistic something will be announced within the year. I’m not too worried about nothing announced yet— they hinted about DeConnick’s Captain Marvel way before title was launched. And we’re kinda just getting into convention season, when they announce new books. I also suspect they might try to tie it loosely to some Big Event fallout or another, the way Hawkeye kind of came on the heels of him being incinerated in AvX.

Sort of a weird thing to say, but: it helps Natasha’s chances that Winter Soldier was cancelled too. I’ve always kinda suspected that the feeling was a Black Widow book would be too similar, and yeah, pretty much everything Winter Soldier did had been done before thematically in earlier BW books. But they’re already hinting they might relaunch Winter Soldier fairly soon! That’s sort of where you go to see how screwed female characters are in superhero comics: Black Widow is a Soviet spy for decades, Bucky is a dead sidekick killed off because sidekicks are dumb, but bring the guy back and slap on a Soviet spy backstory and readers’ll go for that instead.

As long as Natasha keeps appearing in movies and raising her profile that way, I’ll have hope, even if that February hinting comes to nothing, even if she needs twice the screentime as Hawkeye to get half the chance. With Captain America 2, we’re coming up on four times the screentime as Hawkeye, so that’s like, one whole chance!

So, anon, I really like Hawkeye. I like him enough that when they said they were gonna put him in a movie I was immediately:

a) excited because they were gonna put him in a movie
b) angry because they were probably, inevitably, gonna put him in movie wrong
c) anticipating a legion of “hah hah arrows are so stupid lol” clever internet comments

I like Hawkeye, and so I’ve never understood why “he wears a purple loincloth, staples the letter H to his head, and proceeds to fight world-crushing horror with nothing but a bow and some arrows” is supposed to be a knock on Hawkeye. That’s exactly what makes Hawkeye great; he wasn’t born a god or subject to secret government power-granting experiments, he is a dude who put on purple tights and said, “alright evil, you’re next.” That doesn’t make him the most useful Avenger, maybe, but it sure as hell makes him interesting.

I love Natasha because I think she’s interesting.

She’s smart like the wink on a dagger. Not the sort of smart that builds plot machinetech superdevices but the sort of smart that twists and turns— the sort of smart that means her stories have to be smart, too. There’s something about Natasha that says, “keep looking.” Even her codename is fitting in how it’s all wrong.

I love how weird and rich and deep the Marvel universe is, but I also love its inconsistency. It’s a strange thing to say, but what fascinates me about Black Widow is the seeming contraditions: that she’s a spy, soldier, and superhero, an agent with agency, redemption without apology, the tragedy and the heroine together. She’s the best there is at what she does in a universe where the settings are much more looming-intergalactic-death than international espionage. She’s the best there is at what she does and that’s brought her suffering and white death and all the real good she can milk from it. I love that she’s so cold but so passionate, that her compassion comes from the same place as her cruelty. I love that vast Siberia of her continuity because there’s so much there to think about. Changing attitudes in politics, shifting standards of characterization, dialogue that Stan Lee wrote. There’s so much there to be confused by, and so much to figure out. But it works, I think. She’s enigmatic, but fully formed. Not broken. Just complicated.

It fascinates me too, that I can find all these things in her stories, all these ideas worth unthreading, and so many other people can see a token female or the ex-girlfriend of the Marvel Universe at large or a Mary Sue, or worse, a collection of bodyparts engineered solely for dudely amusement. None of those things are interesting, but the way people are often ready to call her useless before knowing much about her at all, that’s really interesting to me. And I might like her the way you would a secret: she’s much more badass than you know.

So I love Black Widow because I think about Black Widow, I think because I love, on and on forever and ever amen with karate kicks in the background.

Source: fuckyeahblackwidow

Anonymous asked: What do you think of how Marvel keeps referring to Natasha as Hawkeye's 'Work Wife' in both Hawkeye and Avengers Assemble? I know Fraction and Deconnick are fan favorites, but it seems rather forced; despite their history.

It’s not a particularly accurate description, no, since while Clint and Natasha were partners (in literal crime), that working relationship died before their actual romance. And, yeah, they’ve been teamed up pretty rarely since the Silver Age— since 1972 Natasha’s lived in the Daredevil sphere of things at least as much as the Avengers and neither Natasha nor Clint has been able to leg a solo series past issue eight. When they have teamed up (see, oh, the Nicieza Hawkeye series, Thunderbolts #43, or Avengers #400) they have had a pretty easy, familiar relationship. But the team-ups were infrequent; I’d call them old friends more than constant co-workers.

That said, now that they are on five different Avengers teams that inexplicably share the same six characters, idk, I think it makes sense to focus on that more. I don’t think it’s any more forced than five different Avengers teams that inexplicably share the same six characters. “Hawkeye and Black Widow working together a lot” is not a movieconsequence I’m afraid of, I guess. It always seemed like they would work together a lot if their schedules and comics were set up to permit that. And I guess I’m just too tumblr to blink at silly catch phrases. Pairing names have forever inocculated me. (A week ago I found out “Stucky” was a thing, guys. Stucky!!)

TL;DR, I don’t think it’s the most accrate description of what they’ve been in the past but it doesn’t really bother me as a character direction. There are so many things Marvel’s screwed up with Natasha since the Avengers film (not even trying to give her a starring role someplace in the ongoing Marvel universe, all the brainwashing, that whole Maxim thing, artists constantly forgetting to draw her costume all the way on) that like, I don’t think I could like comics at all if I got bothered about more stuff. Nitpicky continuity rage is one of the specific joys of being a comic fan and I would never try to take that away from anyone. But DeConnick just wrote the sort of Black Widow story I’ve been whining for months that no one was writing. So if I don’t want to give up on this genre, I have to focus on that.

Good question, anon! You’re correct that the red-hourglass belt buckle is a pretty recent addition to her costume; it wasn’t there when her current “look” was developed in the 1970s. But the hourglass being a part of her iconography goes back much further than the mid-2000s. It begins (~ominous tones~) with Frank Miller.

Daredevil 187

I swear, he used to be so much more than an internet punchline.

Miller cut off her hair and gave Natasha made her jumpsuit aerobicisable— she was a very modern gal, c. 1983. He also incorporated a spider decal into the design, in the front left corner, and more prominently, in the back. I think the move to give Natasha a symbol is smart, but this one loops a bit too close to Spider-man’s, a character seeped into Marvel’s branding that Natasha has no particular link to. It’s better than the previous attempt, at least!!

codenamezinc asked: Hi! So, I recently read Black Widow: Name of the Rose and I LOVED it. Throughout the comic, I noticed that Natasha and Wolverine are friends. I really enjoyed the dynamic of the two characters, brief as their interactions were and I'd like to read some more comics with them. I was wondering if you have any suggestions. Thanks so much!

The classic is Uncanny X-men #268! Some others that touch on that relationship: Wolverine #125, Wolverine Weapon X #10 (both of these are sort of “Logan and the women” themed issues), Punisher War Zone #2, Black Widow: Deadly Origin #1 and Astonishing X-men #50, which is by the same writer as Name of the Rose.

None of these issues are about Logan and Natasha’s friendship because no one’s really written that comic, but they have scenes where the two interact. There’s also Wolverine Origins #16 but that’s one of those issues I like to cover my ears and pretend never happened.