InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Jump off the bandwagon!"

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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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?

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	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.

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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.

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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.

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	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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