Barbelith Underground > Comic Books

Starting here, there's been some discussion of the second Black Widow and how poorly she was handled. Okay, so what would you do to make her better? How would you go about writing a Black Widow comic?

I'd probably start off with the idea that she's a legacy spy. This is different from a legacy super-hero, and primarily because it reinforces that she can be replaced. Either because she defects, goes into hiding, or dies. She's essentially expendable and she's constantly going over what went wrong with Natasha Romanov - poring over the government files, S.H.I.E.L.D. documents, stolen Avengers data, anything to demonstrate what Natasha's weaknesses were so that she can properly extrapolate her own and more importantly avoid mistakes. I'd probably play this as her primary internal struggle.

That said, Yelena's actually very good at her job; she's extremely well-trained and probably has some enhancements (along the lines of the Ultimate Black Widow, maybe). If I was to somehow use the misused "she's a woman" fallibility angle it would be once, and it would be her reacting improperly/uncontrollably and being worried that she's falling in love with Nick Fury. Only it would actually be a Life Model Decoy commandeered by an enemy and reworked to give off ultra-pheromones in the vein of the Livewires' Social Butterfly - the whole incident proving to be a bit of the mind control, to give Yelena something to work against as a potential weakness she might see in herself. The truth would be that this would be an isolated incident, Yelena is fairly good at compartmentalizing and she'd struggle to improve her capacity to seperate herself from the pack of humanity on the grounds that she has to be an extremely good black ops agent.

Note that I'd want to do everything in my power to avoid the Abrams Alias comparison.

Maybe I'd pull in the last remaining Livewire, Stem Cell, as a sidekick or apprentice. Other than the LMD incident, Yelena has only occasional contact with the real Nick Fury, and he treats her with detachment on the grounds that she isn't Natasha, and she treats him with the air of somebody far too old for their job - she reasons that his dependence on the Infinity Formula is a major weak point. I'd try to give some inkling of what she wants to do after she's retired, although of course she doesn't believe she can just walk away, on the grounds that spies just tend to be killed and that's it.

Maybe more later. What would other people do?

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