Sorry y’all. This one’s my bad.
Y’see, 2/3 of the MCU Avengers had longrunning series already, hundreds of issues worth of comics to get relaunched with a new #1 whenever a movie threatens to come out. Clint and Natasha have both had runs before but nothing that would stick. Marvel looked at these characters, looked at their multi-million dollar blockbuster, and saw an opportunity to sell comics about one (1) of them.
Since Clint’s never hit the big time with his sales numbers despite his “fan favorite” status (“fan favorite” being a more tactful way of saying he doesn’t sell books) so they spent the months before the Avengers movie building him up in the comic book world. He got two minis, he became the leader of an Avengers squad, joined every other Avengers team, teamed up with Spider-man and Captain America, the works. And then when that was done and the movie had made one million gazillion dollars they launched a Hawkeye title and they did it right. They put a big name writer on with a buzzworthy artist and the creative team churned out a book people could talk about and love and so 2012 was maybe the best year for Clint Barton ever.
In 2012 Natasha appeared in probably less books than she did in 2011. Instead of a full-blown, fully thought out ongoing like Clint got, Natasha had a three-issue series originally published free for Russian readers of Maxim. The main premise: Natasha wears a lot of not-a-lot. The main sell: you, too, can fantasize about Scarlett Johansson not wearing any pants. This was not a book many people talked about, and when I did talk about it, sad violin music played in the background.
Conventional wisdom says that books about lady superheroes don’t sell because lady fans don’t exist, but Hawkeye and Black Widow have been equal on the sales charts since the turn of the century. Her minis sold a bit better, her ongoings lasted a bit longer, and she had twice the screen time in the Avengers film, so why did they go all out making Hawkeye a success and let Natasha just sort of exist blandly in the background, sometimes not wearing many clothes?
I thought about it a lot and decided with the sense of entitlement specific to comic book fans on the internet that it was because Marvel hates my money. They’d have to work at Natasha to make a book for her work, but same deal with Clint, same deal with Carol Danvers, and hell, same deal with Steve Rogers.
One of the things I love about operating here from tumblr is that I get to reach out to fans that maybe aren’t camped at comic book news sites 24/7, and I get to introduce people to a medium and genre that I love and help them find things to love about it too. I’ve gotten so many asks and messages from young women who loved Natasha in the Avengers film who are visiting a comic store for the first time and want to know what they should buy. I know I’ve personally sold dozens of TPBs to new fans and that warms the icy feminist cockles of my heart. Nothing would make me happier than a book I could tell my friends and my (thousands of!) readers to pre order and put on their pull list because here is a Black Widow book that’s going to be worth going to the store every month for, that won’t make them feel alienated or embarrassed by a genre that needs new readers to succeed, because baby if that book existed I can tell you I’d never shut up about it. I can’t do that with a three issue mini targeted at Maxim subscribers, or with scattered guest spots or one-issue cameos.
But yeah, Marvel thinks my money has cooties or something and that’s the perfectly logical conclusion conclusion I’ve drawn. The joke’s on them, though, I buy things from them every week, anyway. Suckers.
Thank you for expressing this so eloquently. Exactly how I felt after The Avengers movie came out.
