Here’s the deal with origin stories: Regular readers know them. Many casual readers know them, too, based on brief overviews from web sites or “introduction scenes” when the character guest stars in an ongoing series. So if you’re going to devote a four-issue miniseries to retell an origin, make sure you have something to say. At bottom, that’s the problem with this book.
Black Widow’s past is disjointed and doesn’t make much sense–she was created as a Russian villain but was immediately popular and therefore got (kinda romantically) linked to Tony Stark and then Hawkeye. Hawkeye, too, was introduced as a villain–and when he turned, Black Widow began her “turning process” too–but this was back in the Stan Lee days when a character’s inner life was mostly established by a few facts or signal events (e.g., Uncle Ben dies, Captain America is woken up decades later as a man-out-of-time, Tony Stark has a heart condition, etc.). So, Black Widow’s true rationale for moving from the USSR to the USA never made much sense.
Cornell’s retelling of her origin also reflects the less-clear aspects of her history.
After she became a hero, she got the “Red Room” backstory to make her sympathetic to readers–and that period of her life is inevitably a part of this series.
Paul Cornell seems to try to make sense of it using a ton of flashbacks. He uses her handler/daddy stand-in Ivan Petrovich as her moral anchor. He dies in this series and his death serves to drive Widow into the main plot. But his brain and spinal cord are put into a metal body filled with nanites and he turns into an insane cyborg. She is forced to kill him in order to save the world from nuclear annihilation.
Cornell also walks us through her extensive sex life (the people attacking her in this story start going after many of her past partners). These and many (too many) other flashbacks take away from any sense of cohesion or urgency. Plus, the art is…Far from Tom Raney’s best work.
For the characters appearing in this book, I’ve only tagged those who appear in the present-day story or in important flashbacks that actually provide new information (there aren’t many of those). But of course lots of guys appear in flashbacks, like Wolverine, Red Guardian, etc.
English (US) · 