As Black Widow adjusts to life as a Venom-style symbiote hero, her new powers make her not just one of Marvel’s creepiest heroes, but one of the coolest and most unique symbiote crime-fighters in the publisher’s universe. Currently, Natasha Romanova is going by the codename ‘Widow,’ having bonded with a young symbiote which budded off from Venom. While symbiotes have relatively uniform powers, Black Widow’s prior training and murderous imagination have made her especially creative.
In a preview of Black Widow & Hawkeye #1, Natasha pursues a killer across Siberia. Despite the man’s frantic escape, he’s quickly brought down by tiny symbiote spiders and crows, which infiltrate his body and consume his brain. The symbiote creatures then rejoin Natasha, passing on the memories they just gained from their horrifying feast.
While Natasha has always been a lethal hero, her grotesque new powers allow her to kill her enemies in a truly disturbing way. Rather than fashioning weapons like Venom and Carnage, the new Widow prefers to turn her symbiote matter into small predators, consuming her enemies’ brains to gather vital intel.
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Black Widow Uses an Army of Spiders to Eat Her Victims’ Brains
Will Natasha Be Corrupted by Her New Venom Symbiote?
Recently, Black Widow has been pursuing an anti-symbiote syndicate known as NoName. Working alongside Venom, Natasha inherited a new symbiote, which bonded with her to create the composite being ‘Widow.’ While Widow has been fighting alongside Dylan Brock’s Venom ever since, her symbiote powers have given her new access to previously unthinkable intel. As Hawkeye finds himself accused of a major political assassination in this new series, the two old partners will work together once again, but what will Clint Barton think of Natasha’s vicious new partner?
While there are many symbiote heroes and villains in Marvel reality, their biggest problem is their incredibly similar powers. Symbiotes are versatile shapeshifters, allowing their wearers to reshape their klyntar goo into any weapon or mechanism they can imagine. Some symbiotes combine this ability with weaponry (indeed, Punisher created a gun that fires symbiote teeth), while others have specific shapes like whips or blades they prefer to use. However, Black Widow has introduced a totally fresh approach – weaponizing her symbiote as a small army of creepy-crawlies and scavengers which literally eat her victims’ brains in order to gather information. It’s the perfect super-spy application for a symbiote, and it will be fun to see how Black Widow uses these abilities for infiltration and assassination while trying to clear Hawkeye’s name.
However, as powerful as symbiote are, they’re also often a corrupting force, bringing out the worst in their host and driving them to more and more brutal acts of violence. Black Widow is a true expert in the application of violence, however as she grows to trust in and rely on her Venom-spawned symbiote more and more, she may slowly go from being Hawkeye’s most trusted ally to his newest and most dangerous enemy.
Black Widow & Hawkeye #1 is available March 13 from Marvel Comics.
