”THE WIDOW… ALONE”
Script: Ralph Macchio | Pencils: George Pérez | Inks: John Beatty & Brett Breeding
Letters: Diana Albers | Colors: Ben Sean | Editing: Allen Milgrom
Editor-in-Chief: Jim Shooter
Script: Ralph Macchio | Pencils: George Pérez | Inks: John Beatty & Brett Breeding
Letters: Diana Albers | Colors: Ben Sean | Editing: Allen Milgrom
Editor-in-Chief: Jim Shooter
Widow is thrown into a dungeon but manages to escape. She bumps into her guardian, Ivan, brainwashed by Dran, and knocks him out. As she explores Dran’s complex, the Widow is attacked by Snap Dragon, but this time she defeats the assassin. Ivan regains some of his old memory and joins Widow in her mission.
The Widow calls the helicarrier and convinces those aboard that the Black Widow with them in an imposter. Fury shoots the false Widow and orders all weapons to open fire on Dran’s island. The island, filled with munitions, explodes, and the Black Widow and Ivan are found drifting in the sea by a S.H.I.E.L.D. aircraft.
Sub-Plots & Continuity Notes: Damon Dran ("The Indestructible Man"), who first appeared in DAREDEVIL, where he was beaten by Black Widow and the Man Without Fear, really, really nurses a grudge.
Dran is apparently killed when his island explodes, but years later, Mark Gruenwald would bring him back as a villain in CAPTAIN AMERICA, in stories edited by this issue’s writer, Ralph Macchio. (Though... he is indestructible.)
Strangely, there’s no sign whatsoever of Fury’s old C.O., Sam Sawyer, who was running the Widow’s mission back in the first chapter of this serial.
Snap Dragon is apparently killed by falling “several hundred feet”. Mark Gruenwald would later bring her back in CAPTAIN AMERICA issues edited by Ralph Macchio. Is this sounding familiar yet?*
My Thoughts: So it occurs to me that Ivan’s brainwashing would seem to be what Black Widow meant back in DAREDEVIL #188 when she said he’d “been through a lot lately.” That issue was cover dated November 1982; this one is dated March 1984. I have my suspicions that this story was created much earlier than it was published. Every issue comes in at either seventeen or eighteen pages (the original FANFARE issues included backup stories and pinups to fill the remaining space), and as we know, Marvel comics only featured seventeen pages of story up until around 1980 — or eighteen pages without a letter column.
Add to this the fact that George Pérez left Marvel in 1980 to work on NEW TEEN TITANS over at DC, and it seems likely that this entire story was conceived for one of Marvel’s anthology titles like MARVEL SPOTLIGHT or MARVEL PREMIERE, but wound up sitting in a drawer instead, perhaps due to the cancellation of those series.
But the thing that gets me is that Frank Miller knew about this story despite the fact it hadn’t been published, and even tossed a reference to it into one of his DAREDEVILs! That’s what we call dedication to continuity, folks.
So anyway, that’s it for Black Widow’s serial. It’s not great, but it’s not awful, either. The George Pérez artwork is lovely. The story, on the other hand, is a little hard to swallow: Damon Dran put together this massively elaborate plot simply to lure Black Widow into his clutches? Why didn’t he just send his six assassins after her at her apartment? She has a publicly known identity! Honestly, it almost feels like Macchio and Pérez changed course after the first issue (or perhaps partway through the second) and went off in a totally different direction than they’d originally planned.
But like I said a couple issues back: logical inconsistencies and other plot problems aside, this is the sort of story I believe Black Widow should be involved in: glamorous, globe-trotting adventures in the vein of the best James Bond films, and this story follows the Bond formula quite nicely, from the previously mentioned "cold open" to stops in a couple of exotic foreign lands (Russia and Hong Kong) to a grand finale on the villain's hidden island lair. This sort of concept fits Black Widow's character perfectly and I wish more writers would do this stuff with her!
Semi-Nude Score: You know how it goes: you’re trapped in a dungeon with a window twelve feet above the ground. The only way to get out is to tear apart your costume and fashion it into a rope, then run around for the rest of the issue wearing its shredded remains. There’s really no other option. The final score for the full serial is 5.
(By the way, nowadays the Black Widow’s costume appears to be made of leather or latex or something. I don’t think that would tear apart quite so easily, so I assume back when these issues were published, it was considered to be cloth.)
* Gruenwald would also very definitively kill Snap Dragon off again by having her held underwater until she drowned on-panel. Years later, Brian Michael Bendis would bring her back with no explanation. Bendis brought back a minor character named Cutthroat as well, who Gruenwald also killed quite definitively: his throat was slit, again on-panel. These are but two examples of why Bendis is a horrible comic book writer. He could be the best, most skilled wordsmith in the world (which he’s not), but his lack of respect for the historical continuity of the shared universe would automatically void any redeeming qualities in his work.
(For those keeping score: when Mark Gruenwald disregards continuity and brings characters back to life with no explanation, it’s okay because he’s not Bendis. When Bendis does it, it’s unforgivable simply because he is Bendis. It’s a double-standard, sure — but I don’t make the rules, folks.)
A comment directed at this issue was accidentally posted on another page, so here it is:
ReplyDeleteUnknown September 19, 2017 at 4:33 PM
It's completely unrelated to pretty much everything you said but can we take a second to admire that cover? That is what Rob Liefeld's work would look like if he tried a little harder. It even makes that hideous costume design look a tiny bit better.
Art Adams definitely has a cult following but it's always bothered me that he never gained the popularity level of the Image guys.
I wonder if Adam's relative lack of popularity in comparison with Lee, McFarlane, Liefeld, etc. is because they all held down monthly penciling gigs (albeit with frequent fill-in issues), while Adams mostly stuck to annuals, specials, mini-series, covers, etc.
DeleteAdams would have always had a ceiling on his popularity: he, by his own admission, is a slow artist due to the detail he puts into his art, and he could've never held down a monthly gig. Which meant that when his art showed up in an annual or a special, it became an event. I know seeing Art Adams as the artist on an annual meant I was picking it up without question.
DeleteI like to think there's an alternate universe somewhere that has an Art Adams that can keep up with deadlines who became the artist on Uncanny X-Men instead of Jim Lee. Given how well he worked with Claremont on annuals, that would've been amazing.
ReplyDeleteI just have to assume that Gruenwald figured this story was out of continuity, because there’s virtually no chance he’d use such obscure villains without being aware Macchio had done so earlier.
And I clearly should have read all four of these posts before leaving comments on the earlier ones. 8^[
I will add that it’s very possible Macchio and Pérez did indeed change direction on the plot since it sure looks, both in the broader conceptual sense but also in terms of the difference in the art, like the story was unfinished when it got pulled out to run in Fanfare.
Don't worry about it! In retrospect, I probably should've just responded to all your comments here.
DeleteI really don't know what the deal was with Gruenwald and Macchio acting like these characters hadn't died here. Iron Maiden, I don't mind, since as I noted in my post a couple issues back, her death scene was ambiguous enough to leave a possibility of survival. I guess you could even make a case for Snap Dragon since we don't see her body.
But Kono is the one that gets me! He seems pretty definitively dead, yet Gruenwald brings him back with no comment, and not even a scar on his face to represent his supposed "death".
All that said, and notwithstanding my tongue-in-cheek digs at Bendis v. Gruenwald above, I really don't mind that Gruewald brought these characters back. He did some interesting stuff with them, making Snap Dragon an old rival of Diamondback, who Diamondback eventually kills, and revealing Kono to be Snap Dragon's brother who later comes for revenge on Diamondback.
Anyway, Gruenwald pretty clearly knew about these stories, because he still has Kono working for Damon Dran, albeit in a spiffy-looking suit instead of his traditional sumo attire.
I’ve always “read” this costume as being of a heavy, substantive material like leather or latex — from its very first appearance, which I had in both the Marvel Tales reprint issue and Fireside’s The Superhero Women softcover anthology. That said, I like the deal with the weapon on her back; it’s very much the Q’s-gadget part of this as a James Bond story. And you’re right that it’s a shame we never got more of Black Widow in this vein.
DeleteI swear I tried to add this ^ comment as its own thing after I realized I was replying in threaded fashion to your comment — which is of course the opposite of the problem I usually have — but was outsmarted (outstupided, more like) by good ol’ Blogger.
Delete