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This is a companion piece of sorts to my Friday Night Fights post over at the Show. In it, I posted a page of the ill-fated late 90's Black Widow, Yelena Belova, a character which I have a great deal of affection for and who was stupidly killed a couple of years ago in the shittiest possible way by writer Brian Michael Bendis.
Here is a spread from her final starring miniseries, 2003's Black Widow: Pale Little Spider, written by Greg Rucka and illustrated by Igor Kordey. This two-page scene pretty much cemented my admiration for the character- it shows her contradictory nature perfectly, and is damn fine drama to boot. A bravura scene. Not too melodramatic or overblown, and it hits all the right notes as far as I can see. In it, she is having to face some unpleasant truths about her recently murdered Russian colonel father figure who trained her to be what she is, and who she was very close to. The final panel, in which she breaks down into tears, never fails to move me.
I was gonna post this to
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scans_daily, but didn't feel like dealing with the snarkmeisters over there. I didn't want to attach this to the otherwise light mood-wise FNF post, so here she be. Let me know what you think!Of course, click to supersize it.
2007-06-30 03:36 pm (UTC)
It's a great, mature spy thriller from a writer who knows his way around the genre. I never read Igor Kordey's stuff before this book, but I thought it picked the mood perfectly.
Yelena - and Natasha, for that matter. What the heck is "Ms. I'm No Hero I'm A Spy" doing on Stark's Avengers? - was one of the more interesting and complex female characters in Marvel's pantheon.
So, natch, they HAD to make her a Super Adaptoid!
2007-07-01 01:17 am (UTC)
Regarding Yelena, I just wish they'd left her alone in limbo, or in the small cameo appearances she made after PLS was done. He didn't HAVE to do that to her. They could have used any anonymous SHIELD agent or Soviet spy or anything- there was no great throng that hated her and wanted to see her gone. It wasn't logical character development or anything of the sort, just a dumb, cynical, comicbookish thing to do by a writer who should have known better. Oh well, c'est la vie.
Hey! Maybe it was a Skrull disguised as Yelena!
2007-07-01 01:23 am (UTC)
2007-07-01 01:09 pm (UTC)
Plus, the way she was killed bugged me. It was like, "Oh, she's dead. Let's get back to the wedding!"
I think there's still something of a mystery as to why she was in the Savage Land in the first place (if it was explained, I don't remember), so maybe that IS tied into the Skrull business.
2007-07-01 03:31 pm (UTC)