From the recap page to next week’s Secret Avengers #19. I don’t put too much stock in these things— Moon Knight’s last blurb was “crazy person”— but this isn’t the first time someone’s forgotten that Natasha’s ballet career was all lies. Since I prefer the ballet backstory to the “brainwashed from infancy” stuff they tried to replace it with, I really don’t mind.
Anonymous asked: Hi, this is probably a silly question, but someone recently told me that Natasha is supposed to be have been born in the 1920s and is the result of a Russian super-soldier-esque program? Was this ever true? Is it still or has it been retconned? Or is she 100% pure human?
It’s true, and still current in mainline Marvel continuity. Natasha was an orphan adopted and raised by a soldier, Ivan, and the Battle of Stalingrad has been an important part of her backstory since just about the very beginning. (I have a “secret origins” tag where I go into more detail.) When Ivan was mortally wounded, Natasha accepted the KGB’s bizarro healing serum and agreed to become their agent in order to save him.
There’s a bit of inconsistancy whether the treatment did anything beyond slow her aging. She isn’t usually shown to have Steve Rogers-esque strength, though iirc the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe gives it to her.
In the Ultimate universe, she’s similarly vaguely enhanced.
We all burn. We burn in fire. We burn in blood.
Liu did a lot with her short flashback sequences, but something easy to miss is her revision of Natasha’s childhood. It’s not quite out of step with previous versions— you can point to where in Cornell’s origin miniseries this had to have taken place. But, thematically, it’s a huge shift.
There are wolves in the night. The soldiers would say that, when I was a girl. My uncles and brothers, in war. Raising me on the battlefield because there was nowhere else to go.
Natasha was a war orphan going back to her 1970 Amazing Adventures feature (shades of Modesty Blaise), and though Morgan reimagined her as having grown up in Lady Alica’s Sweet Sixteen Executioner’s School, Cornell retconned it back pretty quickly. But Liu says: she didn’t just have Ivan, she had everyone in his unit looking after her. She grew up in gruesome circumstances, but surrounded by people who loved her. That was new. The central strength of Liu’s Natasha was that she could lose so many of these men, so many that she loved, and still see kindness in the world. That was what let her escape the Red Room with her soul intact.
From Black Widow #3-4, by Marjorie Liu and Daniel Acuña.
Sumi: I brought you playmates.
Ninotchka: Pretty Natasha.
Boris: Puny little Natasha.
Ninotchka: You remember me, yes? I do not see how you could forget. We were in the ballet together, in Moscow. But you were taken away, recruited… and then so was I. The K.G.B. loved its dancers, did it not?
Natasha: You always talked more than you danced.
Ninotchka: You’ve forgotten what I can do. You can’t touch me.
Boris and Ninotchka are actually obscure Power Man and Iron Fist villains, but what’s interesting about this scene is that Liu references the discarded Natasha-was-a-ballerina continuity. There are a lot of ways to no-prize this (Natasha was undercover at the ballet while Ninotchka was there for real) but it’s hard to write off as a mistake. Liu referenced Deadly Origin pretty specifically, both the flashback stuff and the modern day cyber Ivan plotline.
From Black Widow #3, by Marjorie Liu and Daniel Acuña.
