Final week of Black Widow month.

Hi, again! This will be the second installment of this recurring series on Marvel’s True Believer comics. According to WordPresses handy stats thingy I got a total of nine visitors to this blog and no more than two of them were me! 

This is the final week of Black Widow month for the True Believer series and we have two entries. A team up between Black Widow and the Thing in Marvel Team Up #10 and the first issue of the 1999 Black Widows Marvel Knights series .

Marvel Two-in-One #10-Written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Bob Brown-Cover date July 1975.

In this issue Black Widow and the Thing are captured by a terrorist organization The Sword of Judgement and they must both escape  and prevent the group from setting off an H-Bomb which will wipe out the eastern seaboard. I think I’m going to make a rule for this series that in certain circumstances I’m not going to even bother recapping an issue.

My review of this issue

Boring and forgettable

Verdict? don’t buy it

1/4

Black Widow #1-Written by Devin Grayson and Drawn by J.G. Jones-Cover Date June 1999

This issue isn’t great, but it is still pretty good and is worth going into a bit. First, this comic was part of the “Marvel Knights” brand, which signified that the comics were going to be darker and more mature, though honestly it is not particularly dark by modern standards or even by the standards of 1999.

 The issue opens with a scene of a new biological weapon being tested on soldiers on Rhapastan (Seems like the Marvel equivalent of Qurac from DC) before cutting to the apartment of Natasha Romonav (Black Widow) who in her own words is feeling a little mortal these days and revisiting old melancholy memories with Matt Murdoch before receiving summons by the Pentagon for a mission into Rhapastan to secure the weapon we saw in the opening page. Black Widow heads to the airport but is tailed by a mysterious blonde woman in a similar outfit to her.

 We then cut to the camp in Rhapastan where the opening scene was.  Black Widow is snooping around only to be interrupted by another spy in a similar outfit to hers who has run into some problems with the guards. After working together to beat them and finding the briefcase full of the biological weapon, the other spy reveals herself to be Yelena Belova a student from the Russian Red Room the same program which trained Natasha Romanov. Belova is working on behest of the working government to secure this weapon for themselves and in addition Belova is set on surpassing Romanov and becoming the Black Widow herself believing that the title belongs to someone loyal to the Russian people and not a traitor like Romanov.

The rest of the issue is a series of escalating action scenes with Romanov and Belova fighting each other and the guards. After a spectacular fake out by Romonav involving faking her own death via exploding helicopter, she escapes with the briefcase from the camp in a truck during the confusion with Belova hiding on the roof of the vehicle waiting for her chance to even the score and the issue ends. 

This is not a great comic, the dialogue is meh and the art is just okay but it has some very good elements. First of all it is well paced. It sets up the relevant background and  Romanov’s mental state early on, introduces the character of Belova to further complicate things and then finishes with a series of escalating action sequences ending with a striking cliffhanger on the final panel. Secondly, Belova is a good antagonist with a clearly defined set of internal motivations and reasons for opposing the protagonist (to surpass Romanov as Black Widow and be the hero to Russia that Romanov failed to be).  She is almost sort of like a Venom or Bizarro-like villain, someone who is an inverted version of the hero and represents what Romanov could have been under a set of different circumstances. So there is a lot of good material in this comic, but it is let down by thestilted dialogue and so-so art. Still I think it is worth reading, especially if you are a fan of the character and looking forward to the upcoming MCU movie as it introduces a lot of important elements to the Black Widow mythos.

3/4

Next month’s True Believers are focused on issues which will tie into the “King in Black” event happening this december. This is one problem I have with this series. Sometimes it ties into events about which I don’t know the foggiest, I literally had not even heard of it until doing a quick google search while writing this very paragraph. It is supposed to be coming out of Donny Cate’s run on Venom and Carnage, I haven’t read a single page of any of it, but I did enjoy Cate’s “Thanos Wins” arch from a few years ago. 

Anyway bye for now.