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This is the second Black Widow hardcover we’ve seen. The first collected her early stories in Amazing Adventures and it looks like this wraps up her comic book career in the 80’s (besides her ventures in Daredevil). We start with a Ralph Macchio introduction from February 1999 and he talks about the first story that is included in this collection. Black Widow appeared in the pages of Marvel Fanfare, from issues 10-13 (Aug 1981 – March 1983). It was written by Ralph Macchio and illustrated by the great George Perez. It’s a four-issue series that is just a cool spy tale. Black Widow finds out that the man who saved her when she was a child in Russia has been kidnapped in the former motherland and SHIELD sends her out to find and rescue him. Along the way she encounters a big group of assassins and encounters an old villain the form of Damon Dran. It was a really cool four-issue mini-series that started off quickly and never let down. It was action-packed and told a good story.
We head from there to Bizarre Adventures # 25 from March of 1984. It is a black and white tale illustrated by Paul Gulacy and written by Ralph Macchio. It was very well-illustrated but was just your standard spy tale complete with double-crossing, people dying and Humphrey Bogart. Yeah, one of the characters looked like Humph. The real meat of this collection is the Black Widow Graphic Novel from 1990 called The Coldest War, by Gerry Conway and George Freeman (writer and artist respectively). This was a great long story where Natasha is blackmailed by Russian spies to steal SHIELD’s LMD matrix for Russian use. Of course, they use it on her former husband. Natasha must deal with the back stabbing of the Russian spies as well as her former husband before she can realize what freedom is.
-The Bottom Line- The really cool thing about this collection are the variety of stories involved. Sure they are all spy stories but all three were very different. The first has a fantastic pace that literally doesn’t stop over three issues and is more like the James Bond type spy stuff with tons of action and crazy villains. The black and white tale had a very noir feel, complete with dark and gritty action. It was a very ground-level spy tale that seems more like what actual spies may go through. The final was an epic tale that had plenty of length and room to breath and flesh out a story. I actually preferred that last story for how complete it was, something that graphic novels can do without needing a big cliffhanger ending every 20 pages. The one criticism I had with this was that there were SIX different inkers used and sometimes it led to a disjointed look on the book. Seriously, compare the first page to the last page and you’d think it was a different artist! I was really surprised by how great this collection reads. You have a cool character who really works in the shadows and this book really showcases that. It may be kind of difficult to assemble all these books in one place (you don’t see Bizarre Adventures or Marvel Fanfare on sale a lot on EBay and other comic stores) so this is a worthwhile collection just for the ease of having these stories together. I would definitely call this a recommended tome.
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Questions? Comments? Shoot me an email.
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