Open Mike Night: Black Widow (2016) #1 & Tales of Suspense (1959) #52

Black Widow (2016) #1

Written by: Chris Samnee and Mark Waid
Art by: Chris Samnee
Colored by:  Matthew Wilson
Lettered by: VC’s Joe Caramagna

Published by: Marvel
Cover Price: $3.99

Maillaro: This may have been one of the most simple comics I’ve ever read. They don’t bother with trying to explain the characters or the relationships to you. We see Black Widow breaking out of a SHIELD facility.  She has stolen something they consider very important.  The whole rest of the issue is a running battle between her and various SHIELD troops under the command of Maria Hill.  

I will give them credit for this, it’s a pretty intense comic.  It immediately grabs your attention and puts you right in the action.  I suspect that with the character being in the movies, they felt they didn’t have to do much explaining on who she is.  Which might be a fair point, though I am a firm believer that you need to treat every comic like it might be someone’s first exposure to the character.  

Weaver: Normally I agree, but in this case, I have to ask, is this necessarily a bad way to be introduced to Natasha?  We start with a protracted fight scene of her kicking much ass, and I do mean much ass.  I liken this to a movie that starts in a high speed chase, letting you figure out the characters once the smoke clears.  In fact, that’s a pretty common spy movie gimmick, so with Marvel’s greatest spy, it seems fitting.

We don’t know what it is Natasha stole, but we do know that she’s really determined to have it, SHIELD be damned.  I’m pretty sure that she kills at least a couple agents in this fracas too, although we don’t specifically see corpses.  And in the end...she’s not sure if it’s going to be worth it.  Pretty high stakes.  I’m interested.

Maillaro: I just think they maybe could have put a little more characterization in for her.  An all action opening for a movie works, but for a comic, I like getting a more completely story in a single issue.  even if this doesn’t happen as much as it should these days.  At the end of the day, I worry that you could have swapped Black Widow with anyone else, and this comic might not have changed all that much.  It’s just because I have so much history with the character that it’s clear how high stakes this is.  The context has to be brought to the story, because I’m not sure it’s all that clear from the story itself.  Black Widow wouldn’t be stealing from SHIELD if there wasn’t a real reason, and that definitely makes the story more powerful.  But you have to know that going it.  

This wasn’t quite what I was expecting from Waid and Samnee on Black Widow, but that actually might turn out to be a real good thing.  Waid can be a bit wordy at times, but this time, he stepped back and let the action tell the story.  And it definitely showed Black Widow to be an incredibly brave and kick ass character.

Weaver: I disagree.  If you switched Black Widow for, say, Hawkeye, it might not change a lot except for the specific moves being used to handle business.  I could accept the same answer for Mockingbird.  Just about anybody else, it doesn’t quite work.  Black Widow has a high recognizability factor within SHIELD, so people can hop on her immediately.  And again, it would be the same with Hawkeye or Mockingbird, but those are about the only people I could mentally switch in since Black Widow not having powers is a pretty key concept to the threat level.

Maillaro: Bucky? Fury? Sam Wilson? Dum Dum Dugan?  Maybe even Coulson...actually…  You can even just have it as a random SHIELD agent.  Yeah, Natasha is far more recognizable than random SHIELD guy obviously, but I think there are a lot of options for how this story would not have to change if you changed the character, IF, you didn’t come in knowing who Widow was coming in.

Weaver: I dunno, it has to be someone you could trust to carry action, which...alright, I’ll give you half those guys, but I draw the line at Dugan and Coulson. Also, I think that if I didn’t know Natasha, at some point during this I would wonder, “Who is this total badass?  I must know more.”

Maillaro: That I will definitely give you!  

Weaver: I was surprised that the comic was basically run by the art as well, since I have the same opinion of Waid’s occasional wordiness.  It’s safe to say that nothing in this issue was what I expected when we decided to review it, and I think that’s net a good thing.

Maillaro: Yeah, there were quite a few scenes here where the art told the whole story.  Which made sense, it’s not like Natasha had a lot of people to talk to. You mostly just get SHIELD agents yelling at each other for botching the job,  I loved the little lipstick stain she left on one of the SHIELD agents helmets. That was a nice touch.

Weaver: Flying car was my favorite part.  One agent takes a moment to get in and buckle up in the flying car while the rest of the suckers are suiting up with jet packs, and Natasha just casually walks up the car hitting the eject button.  Note to self: don’t make your flying car a convertible.

I really enjoyed this comic, and the art told the story really well.  I’m giving it a 5, and a 4 for story because, well, most of what Waid did was get out of the way.

Maillaro: I think those are perfect scores for this one. This comic did such a great job making me want to buy the next issue.  Terrific action and intensity.  It might have been better with a little more characterization, but what we got here was a great start.  If nothing else, it sure wasn’t boring.

Tales of Suspense (1959) #52

Written by: Stan Lee and N. Korok
Art by: Don Heck
Lettered by: S. Rosen

Published by: Marvel
Cover Price: 12 cents ($1.99 on Comixology)

Weaver: This week’s trip in the wayback machine brings us the first appearance of the Black Widow.  In this tale, Natasha and some big dude named Boris are assigned by Russia to go to America and kill Tony Stark and the Crimson Dynamo, who defected recently.  It’s pretty simple for them to handle the Dynamo and Iron Man, both of whom Boris decides to bring home alive despite being told to kill them.  Kind of iffy reasoning, but obviously killing Iron Man was not really an option from a sales point.

Iron Man uses the last of his strength to break a light bulb, then plugs a handy extension cord into the socket and recharges for round two.  Unfortunately, Boris in the Dynamo armor still overmatches him, especially when Natasha fakes being injured in order to distract Tony.  Vanko (the original Crimson Dynamo) uses this issue’s McGuffin (a laser light) to save Iron Man, killing himself and Boris theoretically.  The issue ends with Natasha wandering around another city, not daring to go home because she fears the price of failure.

First, let me say that we reviewed the comixology digital recoloring of this issue, and it seems to have some issues specifically with the Dynamo armor. Looking at stills from the original issue, it’s definitely more red than the pink monstrosity we see here.  As far as the story, this was a pretty simple paint by numbers silver age story, although I wasn’t expecting Vanko’s death.

Maillaro: BORIS AND NATASHA!  There is no way that was accidental.  

Yeah, any real complaint I have about this book is really much more to deal with the version I bought on Comixology.  The coloring definitely seemed odd in places.  And it annoyed me that they charged $2...but all you get is the Iron Man story from the original issue.  Which meant it was for only like 15 pages of story.  That is a bit of a rip off.

One thing that I really enjoyed about this issue is that they seemed to dodge some stereotypes.  Black Widow was a Femme Fatale, but she was also a pretty capable leader.  Boris was a big mountain of a guy, but everyone seemed convinces that he was a scientist.  You kind of expected him to just be muscle, but there was more to him that that.  And Vanko’s death was not only a surprise, but also made a lot of sense for the story.  If he survived, he would be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life.  He decided to make his death count.  For an early Iron Man story, I enjoyed this far more than I expected to (I was never much of a fan of the character until they tweaked him to more resemble the Robert Downey Jr version).

Weaver: Also on that topic of stereotype dodging, Natasha is completely unemotional and unimpressed by Tony Stark, which kind of flies in the face of not just the “overly emotional” female stereotype, but also the “every woman loves Tony” thing that Iron Man often ends up with.  I did like how that all worked out. Black Widow’s early costumes get a lot of negative commentary, but I thought she looked pretty dead on society girl here.  It does, sadly, get worse in her next few appearances, though.

The interesting thing with Vanko’s death, besides what you mentioned, is that Natasha herself ends up in the Vanko role later, as hinted in the end of this comic.

Maillaro: Yeah, if I didn’t know the story, I would have expected the story to go a bit like a James Bond movie.  Villainous woman shows up.  Hero flexes a little.  She fawns over him and turns traitor to ensure the hero wins.  Actually, when you think about it, Tony didn’t do much here.  He got beat up.  Came up with a clever way to get back into the fight...only to get beat up again.  If not for Vanko’s sacrifice, Boris and Natasha clearly could have gotten away with their plans.  

Considering you only got 15 pages or so, I thought they managed to get a lot of story, action, and characterization here.  I did read this one before the new issue of Widow, so I wonder if they jaded me a little.  In 15 pages, you get what seems like would take the new series 3 or 4 issues to achieve.  Though the action and intensity was much bigger in the new series.

Weaver: Every time we review a Silver Age comic, I’m impressed with how much they can stuff in it.  I wonder if part of that had to do with the fact that newspaper strips were what a lot of these artists cut their teeth on.  With one of those, you have to squeeze enough story into three or four panels to make someone want to read three or four more tomorrow.  You see this with the layouts too, that Silver Age comics tend to have very square boxes in defined lines and few splash pages.  I think once comics started becoming their own art form and people started to experiment...like Steranko for instance...we slowly got less story and more flash.  I don’t mind the flash, even if it sacrifices a little of the story space, but I think it’s out of control these days.

Anyway, yeah, Iron Man was basically a nonfactor here...and Boris just suited up as the Dynamo for the first time a couple pages before.  That’s especially interesting because old Iron Man tended to play Cold War politics a lot...Tony being better than anything the Eastern Bloc could throw at him, plus the Chinese. Every significant positive outcome in this book was done by a Russian, whether it was Vanko, Boris, or Natasha.  All Tony did was plug into a light socket. Which...I really hate any time an early Marvel character narrates a power that they’re essentially pulling out of their ass as if it was always there.  I guess in a way, this one literally was pulled out of his ass.

Maillaro:  Don’t forget, this was the early 60’s.  It wasn’t really that long after people got a lot of their power directly from bulb sockets (I learned that from Pawn Stars). It wasn’t quite still the norm in the 60’s, but recent enough where the writer/characters would have grown up with it.  So, Iron Man having an adapter that would let him pull energy right from the socket doesn’t require a huge leap of faith.  

So scores.  I thought some of the coloring was odd in this version, but I am pretty sure that wasn’t quite as true in the original, so I will ignore it.  They managed to get a lot of story and art in, and I really enjoyed this quite a bit.  I’ll got a 4.5 for both.

Weaver: I’ll vouch for the coloring.  I checked several ebay sales to get glimpses of the original, which was much better colored.

I want to ding this a few times for being formulaic Silver Age, and it really is, but at the same time, you bring up a great point about how much it didn’t care at all for the stereotypes of the era.  Plus, I’m usually the defender of Silver Age Silliness.  In the end, I have to agree with you on two 4.5’s.

Maillaro: Archer and Armstrong are finally getting their own series again, and Valiant sent us over a review copy.  So that is my pick for next week.  

Weaver: Sounds good.  I’m pretty much tabula rasa when it comes to them, so it’ll be another time where we’ll have one of us very familiar with the characters and the other just coming to them for the first time.  

Maillaro: Anything in mind for a classic book?

Weaver: Let’s do something with Cap and Bucky...but not Winter Soldier Bucky.

Maillaro: Captain America Comics #1?  Let’s punch Trump...I meant Hitler...in the face!

Weaver: Sounds like a plan!

Final Scores