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Today, we look into the interesting reason that Black Widow briefly stopped using her “Widow’s Bite” gauntlets.
In every installment of “If I Pass This Way Again,” we look at comic book plot points that were rarely (sometimes NEVER!) mentioned again after they were first introduced.
This time around, we’re looking at the evolution of Black Widow’s weapons and how they were briefly abandoned because a writer felt that they were sexist.
As I have written a few times recently, when the Black Widow debuted in the 1960s as a Soviet operative, she was basically a riff on Boris and Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle. Just an over-the-top Russian spy. You really couldn’t get more generic of a villain, frankly. The first sort of twist for the character was when she seduced the American archer known as Hawkeye and manipulated him into becoming a super-villain and trying to kill Iron Man. That failed a few times and so the Soviets forced her to become an ACTIVE operative rather than just someone who sent other people on missions and in Tales of Suspense #64 (by Stan Lee, Don Heck and Chic Stone) and they specifically gave her a bracelet style weapon that allowed her to shoot out a line (like a spider)….
By the way, the whole web-line is not a bad weapon in general, but, it’s like, dudes, you’re sending her out to fight IRON MAN! “Okay, so Iron Man has a powerful suit of armor and blasters. So let’s make it so that you can walk on walks and shoot out a line of rope that is attached to your wrist. That should do it.”
Anyhow, in Amazing Spider-Man #86 (by John Romita, Stan Lee and Jim Mooney), Black Widow got her iconic makeover, complete with a NEW bracelet-style weapon, as she maintained her rope line, but now her bracelets also work as blasters, her “Widow’s Bite”…
These new weapons basically became her signature weapon over the next decade, although it is worth noting that at the end of his run on Daredevil, Frank Miller introduced a new costume for Black Widow in Daredevil #186 (by Miller and Klaus Janson) (the so-called “pajama look”) and he abandoned the “Widow’s Bite,” as he turned her into strictly a physical hero, with her sort of using spider-like skills to parkour all over New York City. Here she is in Daredevil #187…
However, by Daredevil #201 (by Denny O’Neil, William Johnson and Danny Bulanadi), the Widow’s Bite bracelets were back and they were incorporated into the pajamas look for the next nearly two decades, before she reverted to the classic Romita design in the late 1990s…
In 2004, though, Richard K. Morgan took over writing Black Widow in a series of two miniseries. Morgan told CBR’s own Dave Richards (one of the very best comic book interviewers around!) “In my mind they symbolized everything that needed to change about the character – they were a hideous welding of cod-femininity (bracelets, jewelry) and kitsch James Bond weaponry. I didn’t want my Black Widow to be some cute sub-Bond girl who only lights up when the [male] hero happens by, I wanted her to cast her own shadow, and I wanted it to be a dark one. Put it this way – which Batman do you prefer the Adam West TV incarnation or Frank Miller’s ‘Dark Knight?’ Exactly. No contest. I wanted to apply the same logic to what I was doing with Black Widow, and that meant the girly shit had to go.”
And so in Black Widow #2 (by Morgan, Goran Parlov and Bill Sienkiewcz), she explains that it doesn’t make sense to wear so much explosive ammunition on her wrist…
Hey, it’s AN answer, right?
So she just used traditional weapons for the rest of Morgan’s two Black Widow miniseries, but then Morgan’s run on the character came to an end in 2006. So how long did her bracelet-less deal last?
In her very next appearance, in Marvel Team-Up #6 (by Robert Kirkman and Scott Kolins), the Widow’s Bite were back, as Kirkman and Kolins definitely leaned into the classic approach to the character…
She then showed up in Wolverine: Origins #8 by Daniel Way and the late, great Steve Dillon and she was wearing a sort of mixture between her Romita and Miller looks, but the the Widow’s Bite was there…
She next showed up in the final arc of Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s epic Daredevil run, and when she first shows up in Daredevil #77, she is not wearing the bracelets!
But it is soon evident that that was just because she wasn’t in action. Once she went into the field, she was wearing the Widow’s Bite gauntlet…
In general, it looks like Morgan just couldn’t compete with a classic design by John Romita. Morgan certainly has a point that Black Widow’s weapons obviously WERE gendered. Heck, the Tales of Suspense story is pretty much explicit in doing so. At the same time, comic book creators almost always default to the most classic design of any given character, but ESPECIALLY the relatively less famous characters like Black Widow (at least back then), so it makes sense that everyone defaulted to the design that they (and most of comic book fandom) were most familiar with, which is the Widow’s Bite design.
Plus, there’s something to be said for it being something that makes her stand out besides just using guns like every other S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, which I think also plays into the fact that people kept going back to the Widow’s Bite for her design. Still, Morgan certainly made a decent enough argument for dropping them!
Thanks to my pal, Tom A., for suggesting this one!
If YOU have a suggestion for a future edition of I Pass This Way Again, be sure to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!
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