Black Widow 1, Iron Man 20

Black Widow 1
Edmondson (w) and Noto (a and c)

Black Widow kicks off her new solo book with a couple of quick missions and a sense of how the book is going to play out. We join her in the middle of a mission as she convinces a possible suicide bomber with a gun who is hiding out in a hotel room, ready to detonate if it comes to that, that she is working on his side and that she was hired by his employers to get him out of the tight spot. She relaxes him with a bit of a backstory and a shared heritage (the bomber is also Russian). When he inevitably opens the door to her, she cuts the detonation wire and takes the gun from him before strapping him up to a rope to rappel him down the building with and pushes him out the window to the cops waiting below. Twenty hours later, she's meeting in Central Park with her lawyer/manager Isaiah to get her next assignment. They talk about her reasons for taking jobs and why she's not in it for money beyond the money she needs to repay debts and live life and so on. There's a nice moment where Natasha seems to zone out and watches a woman play with her red-headed daughter and her son. Another 36 hours later and she's in Dubai trying to stop an assassination by taking out the target's bodyguards, as well as the bodyguards of the man with whom he's meeting. Once everyone is down and Natasha has breached the room, she explains the situation to him and puts a bulletproof vest on him before shoving him in front of a window. The sniper planed across the way fires at him, hitting the vest, and Natasha shoots a rocket back. Fifteen hours later back in New York, she tells a not-quite-adopted cat the story and wonders if she's too far gone to pay back her debts.

Obviously this comic is taking a lot of its cues from The Avengers and the "I've got red in my ledger" mentality of that Natasha. Not to say that she doesn't have those feelings in the comics throughout her history but it's being brought into focus here and it's hard not to feel like it's trying to match the movie. That, of course, doesn't mean it's not a compelling story to tell. The more important thing to it, though, is the way that Natasha carries and conducts herself in the midst of all of this and that's what Edmondson, already, is proving he can do. This Natasha is already proving to have everything I like about Natasha's character and, as yet, none of the weird psychotic sort of tendencies that are sometimes ascribed to her. Occasionally people will write her with a sort of psychopathic cold-blooded thing that I don't think is fair but I think comes from the idea that she has been an assassin and a mercenary and everything else. Certainly she's not entirely normalized but some writers can make that lean a little too far and make her almost bloodthirsty. That very clearly isn't Edmondson's intent and he gives her a couple of really human moments throughout the book, between watching the mother and her children and her conversation (which is simultaneously sweet and no-nonsense) with a cat and a couple of wistful stares (between this book and one of the Marvel previews books lurking around out there). Also, I'm ashamed that I've gone this far in analysis and not mentioned Phil Noto's frankly incredible art. The only thing I'd really heard about the book before I read it was that everyone was saying how great the art was. I assumed it would be very good; people's word and Phil Noto's reputation and history wouldn't lie to me. But I'm not lying when I say every person was absolutely right, the art is amazing in this book. Natasha looks stupendous and very real, the supporting characters all have real personality built in, and the set pieces are gorgeous. Great, great art. Very fun book and a great way to kick off the new series.

Iron Man 20
Gillen (w) and Bennett and Hanna (a) and Guru eFX (c)

The christening of Troy has been interrupted by one of the Mandarin's rings, specifically, as Tony realizes, the Remaker. Unwilling to sit by and let it happen without her, Abby Burns (just got that, "burns") jumps in with her newfound Mandarin ring, the Incinerator (see, burns). The ring and Abby talk back and forth about ways to further destroy Stark and about how she's using the ring and so on before a ring-caused solar flare shorts out all electronics in the area (of course, not including Stark's suit, he's beyond that) and Tony has to flee to check on Arno. Arno is safe, having taken his own precautions against this sort of thing in the past, but Burns escapes and tweets a video of herself next to a space satellite. Tony vows to find her and to find the Remaker but starts to understand just what all of this means; the Mandarin's rings are loose. He and Rhodey pay a visit to SHIELD's high-security weapons vault to check on the rings and see that they're all there, but Tony quickly realizes that one of the rings, the Liar ring, is actually creating a false image of all of them; it subsequently disappears, leaving Tony and Rhodey to wonder where the rings are, who has them, how long they've been gone, and how long they've been apparently sentient. The rings, meanwhile, have decided to escalate things now that Incinerator and Remaker have shown their hand.

There's a lot going on and a lot to like in this series. The idea of the rings as sentient and dead-set on destroying Stark is certainly something that changes the playing field a bit and makes Mandarin an exciting and almost entirely new foe. There's also an undercurrent of mild suspicion around Tony that is both warranted and unwarranted. Rhodey points out that everyone's a little worried about what Tony's up to with this city and these new ideas and locking himself in his lab for weeks at a time, but Tony counters it with his usual "whenever I'm up to something new, the military worries, even though I'm pretty definitively one of the good guys." There are valid points to each argument and it's clear that this debate is one that Gillen will shine light on as we keep pressing. The art looks good and fits the issue well, particularly the action of the issue. There are some bits of the issue that I had to re-read because I started to gloss over them, particularly with Abby. She's a tricky character to read because she's suddenly so at home with this ring and so quickly adapting to possible supervillainy. She's also somewhat irritating, which doesn't help matters. Still, the good easily outweighs the bad here and it's nice to see a re-imagination of one of Iron Man's classic foes. But, you know, not like the re-imagination in Iron Man 3. Which was garbage.