InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "You'll put your eye out!"

colonel_green (colonel_green) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-11-04 16:46:00

Entry tags:

char: black widow/natasha romanova, char: captain america/bucky barnes, char: wolverine/logan/james howlett, creator: john paul leon, creator: paul cornell, publisher: marvel comics

Such a wonderful century it's been.

Natasha Romanova's been all over the place the last few months, and now she finally gets a story all her own. Four scans from Black Widow: Deadly Origin #1.

The first issue cuts between some scenes from Natasha's past and her present. In the past, after a man named Ivan takes her to a man named Taras Romanov for training/parenting (since they have the same name) (and with a brief cameo by the Man of Steel himself), she meets the omnipresent man:

"No matter how many Nazis we have to kill...who we have to work for to be free...I'll never leave your side." (this said over a montage that includes some images from the famous Wolverine/Cap issue of Uncanny X-Men)

Jump ahead sixteen years:

Meanwhile, in the present, someone has activated the "icepick protocol", which is systematically targetting everybody she knows.

(Post a new comment)

	(Anonymous) 2009-11-04 10:27 pm UTC (link)
	Hold on a second-wasn't Natasha a little girl when she met Wolverine? (Reply to this) (Thread)

	colonel_green 2009-11-04 10:46 pm UTC (link)
	She's only twelve here (this comic gives her birth year as 1928). (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	earthelemental 2009-11-05 12:35 am UTC (link)
	Super-Soldier Formula or Infinity Formula? Or is it something else that makes her immortal? (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	lieut_kettch 2009-11-05 12:45 pm UTC (link)
	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. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	(Anonymous) 2009-11-04 10:42 pm UTC (link)
	The art in this is so nice I have a hard time caring about anything else. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	neuhallidae 2009-11-04 10:49 pm UTC (link)
	Motto. That panel in the second to last page of her staring blankly is very nice. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	kelseyg 2009-11-04 10:48 pm UTC (link)
	Excellent art. Love the depiction of 'focus' in the panel where Wolverine is holding a gun. (Reply to this)

	strannik01 2009-11-04 11:47 pm UTC (link)
	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. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	persoconchii 2009-11-05 12:35 am UTC (link)
	motto! My brain attempts to read russian letters, stumbles and fall flat on its ass (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

strannik01
2009-11-05 01:05 am UTC (link)

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.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	darklorelei 2009-11-05 02:45 am UTC (link)
	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. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	persoconchii 2009-11-05 03:14 am UTC (link)
	dont forget the backwards "N" too. Oddly, only some of them are flipped in this thing (Reply to this) (Parent)

	darklorelei 2009-11-05 01:00 am UTC (link)
	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. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	va1tyr 2009-11-05 12:00 am UTC (link)
	I'm starting to think Wolverine is some kind of junior Watcher. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	proteus_lives 2009-11-05 12:38 am UTC (link)
	Or Marvel's Wandering Jew or Cain. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	fredneil.livejournal.com 2009-11-05 01:16 am UTC (link)
	I'd have gone with Forest Gump. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	freezer818 2009-11-05 01:38 am UTC (link)
	Or Jenny Everywhere. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	earthelemental 2009-11-05 02:34 am UTC (link)
	Or the Phantom Stranger. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	earthelemental 2009-11-05 04:08 am UTC (link)
	Forrest has a daddy named Logan, too? (Reply to this) (Parent)

	darklorelei 2009-11-05 01:01 am UTC (link)
	Love the art on this. (Reply to this)

	xdoop 2009-11-05 01:41 am UTC (link)
	So is this ignoring the stuff Daniel Way did in Wolverine Origins? (Reply to this) (Thread)

	halloweenjack 2009-11-05 03:55 pm UTC (link)
	No skin off my nose if it does. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	xdoop 2009-11-05 04:07 pm UTC (link)
	I wouldn't complain either; just wondering if Brubaker is going to ignore it or not. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	kamino_neko 2009-11-05 01:49 am UTC (link)
	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? (Reply to this) (Thread)

	colonel_green 2009-11-05 02:21 am UTC (link)
	Been established since at least the mid-80s. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	ghosty732 2009-11-05 02:31 am UTC (link)
	I don't know much about her, but do we know why she doesn't age? Or will this series touch on that? (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	earthelemental 2009-11-05 02:38 am UTC (link)
	This should be Marvel's answer to DC/Vertigo's Madame Xanadu, as far as that in concerned. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	colonel_green 2009-11-05 03:29 am UTC (link)
	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. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	kamino_neko 2009-11-05 03:51 am UTC (link)
	Tells you how much I read with her in it, I guess. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	marlowe84 2009-11-05 06:36 am UTC (link)
	Does this invalidate Black Widow: Homecoming? I can't tell. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	kenn_el 2009-11-05 07:10 am UTC (link)
	I'm pretty sure it messes with Black Widow: Prom. (Reply to this) (Parent)

ellimere
2009-11-05 07:50 am UTC (link)

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?

(Reply to this)

psychop_rex
2009-11-05 08:52 am UTC (link)

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?

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	statham1986 2009-11-05 09:41 am UTC (link)
	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. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	psychop_rex 2009-11-05 10:40 am UTC (link)
	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. (Reply to this) (Parent)

(Anonymous)
2009-11-05 11:29 am UTC (link)

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.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

psychop_rex
2009-11-05 10:34 pm UTC (link)

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.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

neuhallidae
2009-11-05 04:53 pm UTC (link)

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.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	psychop_rex 2009-11-05 10:18 pm UTC (link)
	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+. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	neuhallidae 2009-11-05 10:35 pm UTC (link)
	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. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

psychop_rex
2009-11-05 11:02 pm UTC (link)

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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