FIRST ISSUE: BLACK WIDOW

BLACK WIDOW BACK AGAIN

An admirable first issue must, above all else, contain such matter as will compel a reader to buy the second issue. At the same time, while provoking curiosity through mysteriousness, a good first issue must avoid being so mysterious as to be cryptic or incomprehensible. And, thirdly, it should introduce the title’s principals, preferably in a way that makes us care about them. Fourth, a first issue should include a complete “episode”—that is, something should happen, a crisis of some kind, which is resolved by the end of the issue, without, at the same time, detracting from the cliffhanger aspect of the effort that will compel us to buy the next issue.

The most remarkable thing about Black Widow No. 1 is the artwork by Daniel Acuna: the pages fairly shimmer with pristine sharp-edged colors that model in flat layers without feathering, chips of color highlighting, Acuna’s black solids and bold lines giving definition to the imagery, and other lines, hued in darker shades than the solid colors they embellish, flickering with final etching touches. 

The issue’s other remarkable thing is John Rhett Thomas’ six-page illustrated text history of Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff at the end, liberally laced with the names of her lovers — Bucky Barnes, Hawkeye, Daredevil (one of whom, Alexei Shostakov, she actually married but he died in an experimental rocket explosion; then surprised her by coming back to life in a later episode); here we find every twist in her convoluted biography, some of which illuminates the story that precedes it.

But some of the story, although needing illumination, remains darkly mysterious. The opening sequence, for instance — in which Natasha meets an old comrade, the former spy Black Rose, a brutish disfigured hulk of a man, and they celebrate their reunion by kick-boxing rather than with hand-shakes and hugs (“too boring,” writer Marjorie Liu tells us).

Their reunion seems pointless in the context of this issue’s narrative; perhaps it’ll make sense later, when we learn the import of the flower, a black rose, that crops up every half-dozen pages here.

As she leaves their tete-a-tete, Natasha is assaulted by a seeming old woman, who, assisted by an anonymous cohort in this central episode of the issue, knocks the Widow unconscious and then performs an insidious surgery, removing some unspecified part of her interior. When she’s discovered and taken to the hospital for some repair work (during which she remains somewhat conscious, musing painfully to herself all along about the terrible agonies she is experiencing under the surgeon’s knife), the doctors marvel that whoever assaulted her apparently “just wanted to open her up to see what she looked like on the inside.”

So what did her assailants find therein? Next issue, mayhap.

Meanwhile, in this issue’s penultimate episode, a year later, Natasha has dinner with James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, the erstwhile Winter Soldier, her current love life, leaving the table to follow a notorious wife-beater into the men’s room, where she beats him up. But before that — “last year” (the function of the back-and-forth in time is vague) — while she was recovering from the operation in the hospital, her buddy and one-time mentor Wolverine goes out and in this issue’s concluding scene finds the personage who engineered the assault — but we don’t see who he is. Next issue, mayhap.

Wolverine, unaccountably, walks away from this sinister entity without killing him. Next issue, mayhap. We learn enough about Natasha — her fortitude in dire circumstances (on the operating table), her combat skills (with Black Rose and the so-called “old woman”), and her compassion for her fellow females (in the men’s room with the wife-beater) — to admire her and to want to know what happens next.