Black Widow: The Finely Woven Thread (Vol 1)
Collecting Black Widow #1-6, and selections from All-New Marvel Now! Point One #1
Writing, Nathan Edmondson
Artist and Covers, Phil Noto
Letterer, VC's Clayton Cowles
ISBN: 9780785188193
Black Widow: The Tightly Tangled Web (Vol 2)
Collecting Black Widow #7-12, and Punisher #9
Writing, Nathan Edmondson
Artist and Covers, Phil Noto
Letterer, VC's Clayton Cowles
Punisher Artist and Covers, Mitch Gerads
Punisher Letterer, VC's Cory Petit
ISBN: 9780785188209
Black Widow: Last Days (Vol 3)
Collecting Black Widow #13-20
Writing, Nathan Edmondson
Artist and Covers, Phil Noto
Letterer, VC's Clayton Cowles
ISBN: 9780785192534
This is a hard one to review because I REAALLLLY WANTED TO LIKE IT SO MUCH!!! Black Widow deserves some good stories, and truly can be an engaging character, and OH MY GOD Phil Noto's artwork is freaking gorgeous with everyone's pale glassy eyes and slightly washed-out palette with sharp slices of black holding everything together. But the story just didn't hold up. I mean - it wasn't BAD, but it was just... eh?
Inspired by the riotous success of Fraction's "off-duty" Hawkeye run, Marvel tried to re-spark the lightning with Edmondson and Noto. And they knocked it out of the park with the artwork, but Edmondson is not quite Fraction, and the story and dialogue and character development just weren't there. Again, nothing objectionable, but it's very slim pickings. Nat is working for SHIELD now, and whenever she's not spying and assassinating (and also doing commando work, or running gun battles, or taking down helicopters... ?) for SHIELD, she's doing it on her own under false names, making money as a merc taking down "bad guys" (by a very tenuous definition of bad guy) for guilt money to send to the families and friends of the people she killed during her Red Room years. Why she doesn't feel the same about the people she ganks for SHIELD, or for herself while doing these "penance money" missions is frankly beyond me, because we never get to see enough of her character to wonder about it. Edmondson takes the "I'm alone and lonely and I WALK ALONE" vibe a bit too seriously, even to the point of including a feral cat slowly being adopted as a through-plot. A bit tooooo on the nose for me.
The over-arching plotline is supposed to be about this dread organization Chaos, but it's incoherent and muddled and the capstone issue that's supposed to clear everything up didn't do anything of the sort. A final set of codas - a flashback to an early hit in Cuba under the auspices of the Red Room, interspersed with scenes from a fill-in-the-blanks SHIELD (?) rescue op, does even less to satisfy - if we'd seen more flashes of that sort of cold-blooded past throughout, perhaps things might have acquired some depth?
Ah well. The art is bloody freaking gorgeous, and the story isn't painful so much as paint-by-numbers, so if you like Nat and like looking at beautiful scenes and people, definitely check it out.
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