Today, we look at the abrupt and never really explained reason for Black Widow's break-up with Hawkeye.
This is a feature called "Beg Steal or Borrow," which is about when comic book characters are abruptly pulled from one book to another. I'm not talking about when comic book characters simply migrate from one title to another. I mean examples where a writer has a character taken out of the book against their wishes. It almost always happens in team books, but sometimes it occurs in solo titles, as well.
At the turn of the 1970s, Black Widow was in a very strange position at Marvel. She was clearly an Avengers supporting character, but her only role in that series was as Hawkeye's girlfriend. For whatever reason, despite teasing her as a possible member of the team for a number of issues, Roy Thomas decided to not really bring her into the actual team, despite this period of the Avengers only having a single female member (the Wasp). Her last appearance in ANY COMIC for a YEAR was in Avengers #64 (by Thomas, Gene Colan and George Klein) where she is rescued by Hawkeye, who had used one of Hank Pym's growth serums to become Goliath, after the villainous triumvarate of Egghead, Puppet Master and the Mad Thinker had fooled the Avengers into going to a whole other location to "rescue" Black Widow.
Black Widow even refers to herself as a "damsel-in-distress" here...
So that's it for the next year. Meanwhile, as I wrote about last week, Stan Lee and John Romita were discussing doing a revival of the Golden Age superhero, Miss Fury, when Lee recommended that they just use that costume design for the Black Widow, instead, as Romita explained in an interview with Jon B. Cooke in TwoMorrows' Comic Book Artist #6:
I did the costume on the Black Widow. One of my favorite strips from when I was a kid was Miss Fury. They had done a Miss Fury book at Marvel, and when I found out they had the rights to her, I said I’d love to do a Miss Fury book sometime. I had done an updated drawing of Miss Fury, and Stan said, “Why don’t we redesign the Black Widow costume based on Miss Fury?” So I took the mask off her face, and made the Black Widow the one in the patent leather jumpsuit. That was why the Black Widow changed.
As I mentioned last week, Widow got a brand-new Romita-designed costume in 1970's Amazing Spider-Man #86. That led into her first ongoing series a month or so later in Amazing Adventures #1. Okay, so that worked as THAT set-up, but a month or so before that Spider-Man issue, Widow had to be first written out of the Avengers! Thomas did so in Avengers #76 (by Thomas, John Buscema and Tom Palmer) and it is one weird write-off...
That sure makes it sound like there's some ominous reason behind her departure, right? And yet, in the aforementioned Amazing Spider-Man #86 (by Romita, Lee and Jim Mooney), Widow just mentions that she needed to get away from her Black Widow life entirely, but now that she's done with that (in just two months of our time), she has to go back into action as the new, redesigned Black Widow...
Sooo...now that she's ready to be Black Widow again, why can't she just go see Hawkeye again? There's no explanation ever given.
She even meets Hawkeye again in Avengers #83 (by Thomas, Buscema and Palmer), when she is one of the female superheroes who are enchanted by the Enchantress as part of her scheme to create an all-female super-team known as the Lady Liberators. Once the heroes are free from their mind control, though, Hawkeye and Black Widow don't even really share a scene, as Hawkeye is too busy yelling at the Scarlet Witch about how dumb women's liberation is (boy, Black Widow sure missed out on a prince)...
Hawkeye, in the meanwhile, decides to hit on Scarlet Witch a lot, and then get angry when Wanda prefers the Vision to him. He's just a total dick about it, which is really highlighted in Avengers #109 (by Steve Englehart, Don Heck and Frank McLaughlin) when he notes he really isn't even INTO the Scarlet Witch, he's just pissed about keeping on getting rejected by the Black Widow. He somehow knows that she is now dating Daredevil...
He then confronts her in Daredevil #99 (by Steve Gerber, Sam Kweskin and Syd Shores) and look, Hawkeye is obviously the dick in this situation (as he is in MOST situations - although here, Daredevil's jealousy also allows him to give Hawkeye a run for his money in this particular situation), but at the same time, it is also really weird that she never just resolved this whole thing with Hawkeye.
She broke up with by telling him it was some really important reason that she had to keep quiet, said important reason was that she just didn't want to be Black Widow any more and just wanted to be a socialite. She changed her mind about not wanting to be the Black Widow, but then decided to never contact Hawkeye again, even when they both crossed paths in the Avengers issue and now, she STILL doesn't have an answer for him years later when he shows up like a dick at her home with Daredevil. At the very least, she could tell him that she broke up with him BECAUSE he was a dick. That would be very easily to believe, after all.
It really seemed like Roy Thomas had something else planned and he just never got around to it. Perhaps had her solo series lasted longer in Amazing Adventures (instead of it ending and Gerry Conway bringing her to the pages of Daredevil as his new love interest/crimefighting partner).
If anyone else has a suggestion for an example of a comic book character being taken from a series, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!