Review: Black Widow #2

It’s not a surprise to anyone that I love Natasha Romanoff. In fact, a lot of her writing previously for Marvel by Nathan Edmondson and Ed Brubaker is the reason I took to cosplaying her to begin with. She’s a strong, well written character with layers that you have to dig through to get to the center of who she is as a being under all the webs she’s weaved. That being said, I really hoped that this title was just as good as her writing previously, which I sort of fell off of after Marvel ended up killing her off back during Civil War II.

Funnily enough, the comic itself even addresses that in a not so subtle little quip from Nat that earned a smile out of me. I appreciate this little snarky levity from Jen and Sylvia Soska a lot. In true fashion, they both write a beauty to the nature of Nat’s self that’s mostly touched by violence; the internal monologue some of the best prose that I’ve read from Marvel in quite some time. Plus, I really can’t stress how much I actually love them for bringing back a slightly obscure side character in Tiger Tyger.

Nat cuts her way through words and people much in the same regard as her blade. It’s also nice, considering how often we see her firing guns, to be reminded that Natasha is a skilled master of various types of weapons and that her skills as far as close range combat are not ones to be underestimated. Even her tactician skills and understanding of how exactly the world she’s infiltrating works manages to touch the pages in ways that remind us of why we fell in love with her in the first place.

I think, for me and only me, the one thing that I wish might have been different in this title is the art. This isn’t to say that Flaviano’s art, Veronica Gandini’s colors, and VC’s Joe Caramagna’s letters aren’t beautiful. Heck, I actually think that Caramanga’s lettering choices very beautifully add to Gandini’s color palette. It’s just that the pages sometimes feel choppy and sluggish and much of the subtle things that we love about Nat like very brief glimpses in changes of expression are sort of lost.

Still, it’s good enough that the writing itself should make up for what exactly I had qualms with that really isn’t that big of a deal at all. For me, Black Widow earns a solid 3.5 out of 5 stars. I look forward to seeing what Jen and Sylvia and their team do next as my love for one of my favorites rekindles itself.

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(W) Jen Soska, Sylvia Soska (A) Flaviano (CA) Clayton Crain