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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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lalalorhen:

Black Widow goes on a dangerous mission in Secret Avengers #1, out tomorrow!

ZIP HER SUIT UP, FOR GOD’S SAKE!!!

I actually— gasp shock dramatic music— try not to be such a broken record on this topic, but I am feeling saucy today and so I will tell you a (true!) story about this comic book page and a Dude On the Internet.

This is a dude who is real offended that women a) read comics and b) sometimes discuss what they do not like about these comics, as he sees this as a threat to Art or his perfectly natural should-not-be-shamed heterosexual desires, the two being very much linked in his mind. Anyway, he saw this panel and then decided to go into defensive-defense mode.

His first argument was that Natasha is a trained ballerina-gymnast hyperflexible person ergo anyone who calls this pose unrealistic is wrong!! And honestly, I kind of agree with him here, in that it’s fine with me if Natasha doesn’t move like a normal person. I love it actually when artists try to convey the idea of her dance background in the way she fights. But I also think one of Luke Ross’s weaknesses as a penciler is movement— he struggles with kineticism so often his action sequences seem stiff. This is a great example of that. Natasha seems sort of suspended, still, in midair, instead of in the middle of an epic backflip or something. And that stillness makes the pose itself a lot more awkward feeling than it needs to be.

Then when it came to her boobs falling out, our enlightened internet dude was willing to admit this might be a bit much, but pointed out that well, they probably wouldn’t be falling out so much if she weren’t hanging upside down with her zipper undone like that. Physics, man. It’s just realistic.

And I loved him for actually saying this, I guess, for constructing a two-part defense of an awkward looking panel on character flippy tendencies and the logical physics of boobs without considering that maybe a professional acrobat superspy woudln’t wear something that wouldn’t stay all the way on when she’s doing professional acrobat superspy things. Maybe she would know how a zipper works. Maybe she’d know about sportsbras.

I’ve mentioned before that Luke Ross pencilled Natasha extensively in Captain America, and while I sometimes found his anatomy and action scenes awkward and stiff there, too, he didn’t have this zipper issue. That’s new. And I think I can probably blame it on the movies, like so many stuffy comic book fans do when things don’t go their way. The other stuff Ross has changed about Natasha between Captain America and Marvel NOW! definitely take cue from the films. The fingerless gloves, the pouchy utility belt with attached leg-holster things, the boots, the weird Iron Man 2 hairstyle. Yeah. And in the filmic continuity Natasha habitually unzips her suit a little.

A little. Like, you actually have to squint real hard if you want to see cleavage. But never fear, comics can take care of that problem! Scarlett Johansson might have a nice body and not small breasts but this is not enough. The translation from screen to print gives us these twin orbs of realism, lovingly outlined, shaded, emphasized. The artist doesn’t try to make her more muscular, more like a ballerina or a gymnast, or more heroic, somehow— he just makes her more booby.

The difference between Scarlett Johansson wearing a for real catsuit and how superhero comics imagine Scarlett Johansson wearing a catsuit should pretty much tell you what is wrong with superhero comics!! And my favorite thing about Internet Dude’s impassioned defense of this panel was that he did it before any “hypocrite females” started critiquing. His defense wasn’t a response to me, it was a response to this panel. Which means he recognized that there are girls out there who’d find it alienating. He knows that this kind of costume malfunction is over the top and unnecessary and silly, however much he wants to keep it in his comics. Deep down, he knows.

I think Marvel knows they can do better than this, too.

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I have really no idea what they’re doing; one assumes that since they’re gonna focus on the SHIELD staff like Coulson, Hill, and Fury Jr., they probably won’t devolve those characters into mustache-twirling villainy. I can see why they might not think it’s “that bad”— I can even understand why someone might want certain memories erased.

But Natasha has survived decades of being used, of spy organizations coming in and tweaking her memories to preserve their secrecy, not hers. This is a woman who records everything that happens to her to a computer chip she installed in her body, who sees information as a commodity. This is a woman who has just gone through an arc of brainwashing SHIELD hell over in Winter Soldier. This is a woman who has fought, tooth plus nail, for the right to own her own memories and her own actions. Who doesn’t want to forget her past, but to live up to it. A woman who is a superhero specifically because she doesn’t want to see anyone used and manipulated the way she used to be.

She’s also ludicrous paranoid, so why would she trust anyone who said “I’m going to erase your memories of this mission” to only erase memories of that mission? I’m really trying not to be too harsh, here. I don’t want to damn a book without reading an issue of it, and this all seems like such a big sparkletexty statement of the obvious that I can’t imagine it won’t be addressed in story.

I know I’m a bit of a broken record re: Natasha’s major themes and origins, I can feel myself slowly metamorphosing into Comic Book Guy and I fear every minute of my descent into a hell created by own no-prizing. But I’m Real Tired of seeing Natasha written as a blandly capable secret agent who can’t zip up her own costume. She has motives and compassion and a reason for doing what she does, and one of the big-time reasons is keeping shadowy government agencies from sticking mind needles into people. She shouldn’t be reacting casually to any kind of mindwiping, imho.

Reposted to make rebloggable per request.
Anonymous asked: Talk to me about your feelings on the Nat brainwashing that's happening in the new Secret Avengers. I'm so grossed out by them doing this to her :/

Okay, let’s rap.

I think it’s really… confusing that SHIELD is treating her (and Bobbi) as an unpredictable asset. I can get the “Avengers don’t know how to be spies” thing, because Secret Avengers has proved that so far, but it doesn’t apply to Natasha or Bobbi and I don’t know why SHIELD would think it did.

Because Natasha is/has been a level 10 agent, the highest rank there is, and she’s really the only person to ever earn that rank. Nick Fury was a level 10, and he promoted Daisy Johnson when she was still a raw teenager to help cover his ass. And that’s it. That’s all the level 10s. Natasha’s even acted as the director of SHIELD. So it’s a mystery why Coulson/Maria Hill/Nick Jr. et al feel she’s such an ???? factor that they need to brainwash her to get her to go on missions. Natasha’s the opposite of an unknown quantity, she’s been with SHIELD since the sixties, their best agent. If they can’t trust her to do and understand her job, what the heck are they doing?

I’m also worried because when this all explodes as it (surely, inevitably??) must, I don’t know how Natasha won’t straight-up quit SHIELD for an extended period of time. And while I actually am quite intrigued by that storyline possibility, I’m not sure it’s a great direction to take the character in right now from a marketing perspective.

My major worry, though, is a lot deeper than that. I’m not totally grossed out by mind-control stories on principle, though I think there’s a special contextual ickiness when it happens to female characters. Mind control is a very powerful, very comic bookish obstacle: it comes with no subtlety attached, and allows heroes to prevail in a battle of will instead of punching. It’s also a special obstacle for Natasha, since she’s a character fundamentally about agency, self-control, and self-determination. Her story is about being manipulated and freeing herself from that manipulation, so by facing mind-control and then overcoming it, she’s in a sense renewing her origin— reminding us why she’s a superhero. For a good example of this, see Marvel Team-up #81-85.

The problem is that I don’t know that most writers at Marvel realize she has core character themes. I think right now she’s coming across as simply a collection of traits— Russian, redheaded, cold, competent. And if you write a “brainwash Black Widow” story without realizing that her character is all about her fighting back and taking her life into her own hands, you’re gonna be writing a pretty awful brainwash Black Widow story, one that stomps all over her empowering themes to boot.

So that’s what I’m crossing my fingers about, anon. Please don’t screw this one up, Marvel.

More Secret Avengers

Nick Spencer, of course, wrote the book for the Fear Itself tie-in issues, and has done some other work at Marvel, which, imho, hasn’t lived up to the promise of his indie stuff. Luke Ross has drawn Natasha before, he was one of the artists of Brubaker’s Captain America run, but I think his stuff looks better when he’s not trying to line-up with Epting. So, let’s start off with the thing that rings alarm bells:

S.H.I.E.L.D. brings the biggest twist in their approach to the team — using similar technology to what the original Nick Fury employed in 2004-2005’s Secret War, the team’s memories of their adventures will be erased following each mission. Thus the existence of this Secret Avengers a secret to even the Avengers that are a part of it.

“Avengers make for terrible S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. They’re used to calling their own shots, you can’t really trust them with high intel because one of them goes bad every week, or turns out to be a Skrull,” Spencer said. “At the same time, they have mindwipe and memory implant technology. The trick is, the last time they did it, it blew up in their faces and basically set off a chain of events that brought down S.H.I.E.L.D. Of course, they’re going to try it again — the temptation to get their hands on weapons like the Hulk is just too great.”

This is the exact kind of abuse Natasha left espionage to escape, why she actually defected to the Avengers and not SHIELD, and why she would up quitting both for a time. That is her superhero origin story, through every needless retcon— she reclaimed her humanity from people who thought of her as a tool. So, any way you slice it, this is a giant leap back for her.

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