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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.

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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?

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