Hold on a second-wasn't Natasha a little girl when she met Wolverine?

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She's only twelve here (this comic gives her birth year as 1928).

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Super-Soldier Formula or Infinity Formula?

Or is it something else that makes her immortal?

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The Russian's version of one or the other, I think. It also gave her peak human strength and agility and a mild healing factor.

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The art in this is so nice I have a hard time caring about anything else.

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Motto. That panel in the second to last page of her staring blankly is very nice.

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Excellent art. Love the depiction of 'focus' in the panel where Wolverine is holding a gun.

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As usual, the pseudo-Cyrillic font used in establishing captions bugs me. It took me several tries to understand what they were saying. And Natasha's uniform on the second page is wrong (it was introduced in the later half of what we Russians call the Great Patriotic War).Other than that, it was a good issue.

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motto! My brain attempts to read russian letters, stumbles and fall flat on its ass

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See, I know what the Russian letters mean, but it really doesn't help at all, since we're supposed to read them as similar-looking Roman/Latin characters. I am Russian, so my first instinct is to read them the way I would react actual Cyrillic characters, which makes for some really weird words. For example, if I render all of the pseudo-Cyrillic characters using their actual Latin equivelents, the first caption would look like this:

Tyaanieenc Fasilich Nyeaya Moscow
USSYA, 1940

If you think this is bad, here is what the last caption looks like to me at the first glance:

James Vayaies
Tne Wiiteya Soldeya
Vyaaiiwasned Soviet
Sureya-acait

I really hate it when English-speaking comic book writers use this sort of font, but this sort of thing probably won't go out of fashion any time soon.

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I really don't understand why they can't use a Soviet-styled font without using я all over the place. I mean, people use blackletter-style fonts without actually using the crazy ligatures of actual blackletter fonts.

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dont forget the backwards "N" too. Oddly, only some of them are flipped in this thing

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Ugh, me too. It bothers me enough just having taken Russian all through college, I can't even imagine how much it would bother a native reader of a Cyrillic language.

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I'm starting to think Wolverine is some kind of junior Watcher.

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Or Marvel's Wandering Jew or Cain.

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I'd have gone with Forest Gump.

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Or Jenny Everywhere.

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Or the Phantom Stranger.

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Forrest has a daddy named Logan, too?

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Love the art on this.

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So is this ignoring the stuff Daniel Way did in Wolverine Origins?

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No skin off my nose if it does.

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I wouldn't complain either; just wondering if Brubaker is going to ignore it or not.

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So, Black Widow is over 80 years old?

Is this the first introduction of her unagingness (which certainly allows them to keep her original origin as a Soviet agent, at least), or has it been established before now?

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Been established since at least the mid-80s.

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I don't know much about her, but do we know why she doesn't age? Or will this series touch on that?

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This should be Marvel's answer to DC/Vertigo's Madame Xanadu, as far as that in concerned.

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That serum that Bucky is offering her there is a variant of the supersoldier formula (or somesuch; there are a million of those floating around); that's the culprit.

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Tells you how much I read with her in it, I guess.

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Does this invalidate Black Widow: Homecoming? I can't tell.

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I'm pretty sure it messes with Black Widow: Prom.

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I don't like putting her birth back 10 years-- the fact that she's way older has been something continuity has wavered on. It came about in an issue of X-men with flashbacks to WW2 that other writers very much ignored: in Marvel Knights, she mentions hearing stories from her grandfather about the Battle of Stalingrad, in Black Widow: Homecoming, she's said to be "almost 40" and while they mention the formula they give her slows her aging, there's nothing that would make it the Infinity Formula. Then Brubaker took the old Claremont X-men story and ran with it, for the sake of integrating her into his own book. But that sort of meshed up. Natasha was a very small child during WW2, which goes along with her original origin story told in the early 70s issues of Daredevil, which had her being found by Ivan during the Battle of Stalingrad. And in the flashbacks in Captain America #27, Natasha struck me as being quite young, 18 or 19, maybe, in what had to be the late 1950s. I have no evidence, except that it clearly took place before her marriage to the Red Guardian, which was always a very idealized "young naive people in true love" type of thing, even though who knows how it stands up under the various retcons of the past decade. But all those dates lined up perfectly, and now this just goes and messes things up again. OTOH, I don't see any reason why Cornell needed to mess with the timeline to tell his story, OTOH, it's therefore pretty easy to ignore. OTOH this is hugely nitpicky and no one cares.

Other comments: I have no idea when the present time bit is supposed to happen in continuity. Natasha going on CIA missions in the middle of Dark Reign when Osborn has every reason to be after her seems fairly unfeasible. And the flashback art is so pretty. Also, what's up with Bucky's arm?

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Can we just stop with the incredibly long-lived characters, already? I mean, it seems at times like about a third of Marvel's characters have histories that date back to WW2 or earlier. There's Captain America, of course, Bucky, the original Human Torch, Toro, Nick Fury, Dum Dum Dugan, Wolverine, Sabretooth (in some interpretations; the movie version, anyway), Namor, Spitfire, the Whizzer - assuming he's still around; I think he is - the Red Skull, Arnim Zola, the Hate Monger, Magneto, the Blazing Skull, the Thin Man, Night Raven - and now Black Widow (well, OK, this is just the first I've heard of it, but still). I'm probably leaving out a lot of them, too - the Agents of Atlas come thiiiis close to qualifying, but they're from the '50's, not '40's, so I'm leaving them off the list.
Don't get me wrong - I LIKE characters like that; they're always interesting, but enough is enough. Moreover, it makes the 'comic book time' which keeps disbelief suspended really difficult to keep up - I mean, in a few decades, most of these characters are going to be centenarians. How are you going to explain that away?

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The Widow has near-enough always been around since the Second World War, though. It's part of her established history and has been for ages, even without the Brubaker-inspired use of Bucky.

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Well, like I said, I only just learned about that. It's not that so much that I'm grumbling about, it's the fact that Marvel has enough characters who've survived WW2 and are still hale and hearty to fill up a small town.

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Most of it is due to necessity - they were mostly either created or reintroduced by Marvel during the 60s and 70s when it wasn't unfeasible that they would still be around and they have had to find excuses for it (cryogenics, deaging, immortality, etc) as the years have started to add up.

If you really want to complain, then I suggest bringing up characters like Iron Cross, reintroduced into the present in 2001 and still an active hero - despite having fought in WWI, making him at least 103 when he reappeared, and with no powers or event that could explain it.

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I looked him up on Wikipedia, and apparently he's still alive because his armor has some sort of life-sustaining powers. Far-fetched, yes, but not impossible.
And as for the Widow, I'm not sure it IS necessary - at least, not at this point. She was introduced as a Cold War-era Russian spy, and later as a Soviet defector. That was, of course, perfectly fine at the time, given that the Cold War was still going on, and it's still pretty much fine now - the Cold War ended in '89, about twenty years ago now. Sure, having an anti-aging formula inside her would make sense, given that she still looks like she's in her thirties, but that would still only make her about fifty, if you fudged things a little and pretended that her introductory story took place in roughly '85, and that she was in her mid-twenties then. She could skate on the whole 'ex-Soviet spy' thing for another decade or so, then be retconned into simply being ex-KGB, an organization that still exists, as far as I know. It's a little sneaky, sure, but comics do it all the time - there's nothing in her history saying that she HAS to have been a contemporary of Captain America.

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The original Whizzer who'd adopted Wanda and Pietro is dead. Any Whizzers running around now are clones, villains who use the name, or alternate universe counterparts. Also, the original Hate-Monger is dead, having been absorbed by the Cosmic Cube. He was "reborn" as an energy being, then killed again. Then a second one showed up, and got wiped out by the Punisher.

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OK, scratch the Whizzer and the Hate-Monger (although, given the nature of comics, they could show up again at any time). That still leaves 17+.

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Keeping some of them on the list would still be considered cheating though, just because they aren't human at all anymore, or were only partially human to begin with, like Spitfire or Namor. Continuing to hold them to standards of human aging or longevity makes no sense. Especially in Spitfire's case, since freaking Dracula's shown up in canon more than once.

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The issue I have is that there are as many CHARACTERS of WW2-or-1 vintage around, not humans. My beef is not about the realms of physical possibility, or their respective humanity or inhumanity - this is comics; I've long since learned to ignore such stuff. Also note that I have included no immortals on the list - existing for thousands of years is much more happily general; it doesn't tie them down to any one time. My beef is that there are so many characters from roughly the same time period - it's like they're all members of the same club, y'know? They're members of the World War Club, and you bet your sweet bippy that, at some point, EVERY SINGLE ONE of its members has encountered every OTHER single one of its members. And we are now in the 21st Century - as time goes on, their continued existence in the present will become more and more implausible. Captain America's period of hibernation has already been extended by some fifty-odd years (a recent retcon has him adjusting to modern-day television after being revived and being horrified by 'Fear Factor'), and he at least has the 'frozen in ice' thing as an excuse - most don't even have that. As WW2 recedes further and further into the past, the continued presence of so many characters who've participated in it is going to start seeming somewhat quaint, to say the least.

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