Black Widow By Kelly Thompson

The art is okay, not my favorite style but fine. The writing, however, is some of the laziest I've ever seen. I had such high hopes for this series but they were dashed pretty early on.Let me start off by saying that I have read every Black Widow titled comic that came before this series, so I know the character pretty well and all the angles at which she's been apprised. This series starts off with one of THE most terrible things that has ever been done to Natasha. It's so bad that a villain who has tried to kill her multiple times over the years, instead, saves her life and then drops to his knees and APOLOGIZES for how extremely effed up this is.After the dust settles, does she get revenge on the people who did this like she normally would? No. Why? "I've done the revenge thing before." Ridiculous. A Poor explanation for the writer not wanting to write that particular story. If you want to write a story about Nat trying to be the best version of herself, don't write something that should be guaranteed to set her off on a killing spree. Not only is this infuriating, but this issues raised by this plot are never addressed. It's apparently only meant to haunt Nat during quiet moments in her life, but does the reader receive any sort of catharsis or payoff for having to read something so horrible to a character we must assume they like? No. There's no payoff, no justice, no healing, not even the petty satisfaction of revenge on the bad guys, just quiet suffering while no one talks about anything meaningful. This plot also inadvertently destroys one of the best and most meaningful relationships in Nat's life so I hate it for that too.There are loose threads all over the place in this setup, questions that the narrative doesn't even bother to pose to the reader, though they're pretty important. After the initial plot is "finished" the writer moves on to a new costume, new "outlook" and new girl power team. While I love the Nat & Yelena team up, the rest of the girls felt like an unnecessary addition to entertain a younger audience.The series also ends abruptly, like they were suddenly cancelled without much warning. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case, it does beg the question of if they were ever going to return back to their initial setup and try to address/fix what they stared so poorly. I've given some stars for the fact that, honestly, maybe the writer WANTED to go circle back and address these issues; maybe it would have been better, maybe we could have had a payoff that made the terrible beginning of this series worth it. But now we'll never know.

It was entertaining enough to make me read everything in one sitting. Beautiful art too.Paper quality of this collection is better than what we're seeing from Marvel and DC lately.