Black Widow #4

I hit a sweet spot last Saturday. There is one 5K that is my favorite. It takes place in a residential neighborhood at the the city's northern edge at the end of September. A guy who has some sort of association with the Catholic Church there organizes the foot race. I enjoy it so much because there aren't too many runners; there are enough so that there is plenty of good competition; everyone has enough room to maneuver and there is just the right amount of spacing that makes for optimal pacing.

I ended running a decent race. And while my time was not a personal best, or even what I would call a normal performance based on what I've done over the last several years, it was the first race I have run since I injured my foot in May where I felt like I was on my way back, that the finish line for my long convalesce is just around the bend.

The early fall weather was gorgeous and the light was perfect. I took my runner's high back to my studio apartment where I dug into Black Widow, part of All-New Marvel NOW! series of titles.

When I started reading comic books as an elementary-school kid, one of the first titles I followed was Daredevil. This was at a time, 1971 to 1975, when the blind costumed crime fighter was teamed with Natasha Romanova, the Black Widow. They lived together unmarried (though sleeping on separate floors of their apartment in order to satisfy the moral strictures of the weakened but still functioning Comics Code Authority) in the Hippie Mecca of swinging San Francisco.

The backstory is that Daredevil was going to being rolled into a comic book with another flagging Marvel superhero title, Iron Man, but Gerry Conway, who would also co-create The Punisher during the Watergate era of cultural ferment, had the idea instead to hook Matt Murdock up with Natasha Romanova and move them out of New York City to the West Coast capital of the counterculture. The idea worked and the title proved to be popular.

The Black Widow originally was a beautiful Russian spy, a run-of-the-mill mid-'60s "Bond Girl," when she appeared in the Iron Man title Tales of Suspense. 

Eventually she was clad in a costume (a fishnet leotard with a Cinderella ball mask) and teamed with former circus act Hawkeye to take on the Golden Avenger.

Then Black Widow defected, joined Nick Fury's S.H.I.E.L.D., and becomes part of the American war machine. In 1970 she assumes the look we have come to identify with the character, and the one she wears in her present title -- the long red hair and the black, form-fitting scuba-suit-like full-body unitard with a pan flute shooting out rappelling line wrapped around each wrist.

After the Inhumans proved to be more of a draw, Marvel drops Black Widow from Amazing Adventures; that is when the character begins her run in Daredevil.

As a kid I remember thinking that the Daredevil-Black Widow relationship seemed like the man-woman ideal, that which would be awaiting me when I reached adulthood: a romantic pairing of co-equals, each powerful and self-assured, assisting one another in doing good and making the world a better place.

Of course as each of us comes to find out in his or her own way, the exact opposite is usually the case. Adult couplings between the sexes are for the most part a toxic neurotic stew of co-dependency, a combat of the vicious and needy to see who can drag the other one down to the pit the quickest. Yet the duel turns out to be none too quick; it goes on for years, in some cases a lifetime. Really the war goes on forever, waged unconsciously, passed down from generation to generation in a plodding somnambulant trail of tears. The world is not made a better place. Anyhow, that's one bachelor's perspective.

What makes this latest run of Black Widow so enjoyable is that Nathan Edmondson tells a story of a woman who is singularly alone -- not paired up with Buck Barnes assuming the role of Captain American, or Daredevil, or Hawkeye. This Black Widow is a worker working jobs (assassinations, etc.) to earn money so that she might pay the families of the victims left in the wake of her prolifically violent career. Natasha Romanova keeps her distance from people as best she can. There are those she has to deal with to do the job. But her private life is kept as clear as possible of all human entanglements.

Edmondson describes the warrior's way, but I found, reclining on my mattress on the floor on a Saturday afternoon, that he was describing my life as well. Not that I leap from rooftop to rooftop to trade punches with super-powered madmen; but that I am a solitary individual who outside of work is keenly aware of the distance I keep from others; I am also like the comic-book Romanova woman in that I am constantly carrying on a conversation with myself as to the wisdom of this practice.

Below you will find seven scans, including cover page, from Black Widow #4. The art is by Phil Noto who I think does incredible work accentuating the sense of Black Widow's solitariness and isolation. There is a gauzy, spacious quality to the panels. It is like looking at a comic-book version of Antonioni's The Passenger (1975):