Look who’s back!!!!!!

Hey, guys.

I want to thank those who read and sent their reviews for the last episode. I really appreciate the love and support so far.

If this is your first read in the miniseries, the links to the previous episodes will be attached at the end of this episode.

What do I have for you tonight?

A tale of two redheads; women who have been portrayed as both hero and villain in the Marvel cinematic universe.

A member of the Avengers and a member of the X-men.

Without further ado, I bring to you

BLACK WIDOW

AND

MYSTIQUE

BLACK WIDOW

Black Widow is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.
Created by editor and plotter Stan Lee, scripter Don Rico, and artist Don Heck, the character debuted in Tales of Suspense #52 (April 1964).
Alter ego: Natalia Alianovna Romanova (Natasha Romanoff)
Team affiliations

Avengers, Champions, Heroes for Hire, KGB, Marvel Knights, Mighty Avengers, Lady Liberators, Secret Avengers, S.H.I.E.L.D., Thunderbolts

Partnerships

Daredevil, Captain America, Hawkeye, Winter Soldier.

Notable aliases: Natalie Rushman, Laura Matthers, Mary Farrell, Natasha Romanoff, Oktober, Yelena Belova

Abilities

Expert tactician, hand-to-hand combatant and secret agent

Slowed aging, and enhanced immune system

Expert marksman and mastery of various other weapons

Equipment via gauntlets:

grappling hook
knock out gas
taser
explosives
tear gas pellets
radio transmitter

The character was introduced as a Russian spy, an antagonist of the superhero Iron Man. She later defected to the United States, becoming an agent of the fictional spy agency S.H.I.E.L.D. and a member of the superhero team the Avengers.

Fasten your seatbelts and let’s take off!

Black Widow was named after ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE: In the 1960s Stan Lee did a lot of stories about evil Russian Communist villains. At the time a popular TV show was the cartoon series Rocky and Bullwinkle by Jay Ward Productions. The main antagonist was the bumbling Russian spy Boris Badanov and his companion Natasha Fatale. In Tales of Suspense #52 strongman Boris Turgenov and his “sister”, Natasha are sent to kill Stark and Vanko. Marvel had their own “Boris and Natasha”. So, thank Moose and Squirrel for Black Widow.
Black Widow’s costume has become so iconic that it’s strange to see how different she was upon her debut. She first appeared in Tales of Suspense #52 in 1964 and she wasn’t wearing a slinky catsuit. Instead, Natasha was sporting an evening gown and veil. The character was revamped in the ‘70s, given a costume inspired by Marla Drake, aka Miss Fury. Marla was created by June Tarpé Mills in the ‘40s. She was the first female superhero to come from the mind of a woman.

In Iron Man 2, Black Widow is working for Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) but in her first comic appearance, she’s trying to kill him. Black Widow was created by Stan Lee, Don Rico and Don Heck, and first appeared in Tales of Suspense #52 (1964). She was a Russian assassin and would become a recurring villain for many years. Black Widow tried to kill him a bunch of times. She defects from Russia and begins freelancing with S.H.I.E.L.D. Natasha later becomes an ally of the Avengers before becoming its sixteenth member.

One reason that it is difficult to know Black Widow’s real age is that she has been involved in time travel endeavors like the one described in the last entry. Another is that she has taken a biochemical serum that slowed her aging process. Natasha was born in Stalingrad when the city was part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, an independent socialist state that existed from 1917 to 1922 before being absorbed into the USSR. In other words, she could very easily be more than a century old.

The Red Room Academy took in orphans and trained them to become spies and assassins. This program was run by a severe instructor known as the Headmistress who trained Natasha and the other girls, having been created by Department X (the Soviet program designed to create super soldiers). All things come to an end, and so was the case with the Red Room. But after it was shut down, a new program and facility emerged called the Black Room, which was essentially the same thing. Run by the Headmistress and her daughter, the Black Room continued to train orphaned girls in black ops work. Natasha managed to shut it down. Twice. She even helped to rehabilitate the children who had been enrolled in the program.
Scarlett Johansson wasn’t yet the household name that she is today when she was cast as Black Widow and so no one really knew what to expect from her in an action role. Fans were excited to see the character when she initially appeared in the lackluster Iron Man 2, but it wasn’t until Avengers that Johansson was really given the opportunity to prove that she was perfectly cast. Johansson is excellent as Black Widow, completely embodying the character. Yet, there is one very small difference from page to screen: their height. Natasha is a actually pretty tall at 5’7”, while the actress who plays her is on the shorter side at only 5’3”.

Although one of the Black Widow’s defining characteristics is her striking red hair, that wasn’t always the case. Initially, Nat had hair that matched her code name. It was eventually revealed that her locks were only dyed black and that she was actually a natural-born redhead. This decision was made when the character got a makeover in the ‘70s, so perhaps it was meant to contrast her new black costume. Whatever the reason, Nat has been a redhead ever since.
Bucky (Winter soldier) isn’t the only hero that Natasha has been romantically involved with. She also has a long history with both Hawkeye and Daredevil. Aside from that, she was once married to the Red Guardian. It was losing him – or at least thinking she had – that drove her deeper into the Red Room program. While those are the most well known of Black Widow’s relationships, she has had some more surprising romances as well. She and Hercules were a couple, but only for a short while. Her strangest connection was perhaps the one she shared with Count Otto Von Doom in Marvel 1602. It ended with her losing her life, but that’s probably how most of Doctor Doom’s relationships are wrapped up.
It is no secret that Black Widow and Hawkeye have a lot of shared history together. In fact, the entire reason she stopped working for the Soviet Union and came to work for S.H.I.E.L.D. (and the United States) was that she was in love with arrow-loving Avenger. While the relationship didn’t last, she managed to remain her strong and independent self throughout her changing relationship with Hawkeye. She also ultimately remained on the side of good, even after her feelings had faded, meaning things worked out for the best in the end.

In the Marvel comics, What If? Age of Ultron imagines a world in which the God of Thunder and other super-powered beings lost their lives in Ragnarok. In Thor’s absence, the one to carry his trusted hammer, Mjolnir, is none other than Natasha. During a battle with the Frost Giants, Black Widow picked up the hammer and was transformed into the Goddess of Thunder.
Scarlett Johansson wears a skin-tight leather one-piece catsuit for her Black Widow costume. The costume looks great on film, but it’s very uncomfortable. While filming in New Mexico she said it got to about “800 degrees”. So, to make it easier, she said: “I have nothing underneath it!” As soon as filming is over she and the other co-stars head for the air conditioning and everything comes off.
Scarlett Johansson really wanted to play Natalia Romanova in Iron Man 2. She even dyed her hair red for the audition. She lost the role to Emily Blunt. But Blunt dropped out of the role to co-star in Gulliver’s Travels. After Eliza Dushku, Angelina Jolie, and Natalie Portman turned down the role Johansson was cast instead. Blunt later said women in superhero movies “feel thankless” but is open to playing another superhero movie.

from L to R : Emily blunt and Scarlett Johansson

Did you know that Romanoff has a son? She has a boy from her marriage with Steve Rogers named James Rogers. This is proven on Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow comic book series released in September 2008 and S.H.I.E.L.D Vol 2 #4 animated series aired in February 2012.

Maybe you only know that Romanoff is the only person to take the mantle as Black Widow. It turns out that other people take the same title. For example, Claire Voyant, an antihero who killed a villain, then sold the victim’s soul to Satan, followed by Yelena Belova, a spy trained by Pyotr Vasilievich Starkovsky, the same man who trained Romanoff. Later, another Black Widow is the ex-director of S.H.I.E.L.D as well as Nick Fury’s ex-wife, and the last one is Jessica Drew, a young superhero who continues The Avenger’s legacy.

Wanna see Black Widow in action?

Check these out:

Iron Man 2 (2010)
The Avengers (2012)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Captain Marvel (2019)
Avengers: Endgame (2019).

Scarlett Johansson will reprise the role in the prequel film Black Widow (2020).

MYSTIQUE

Mystique (Raven Darkhölme) is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics, commonly in association with the X-Men.
Created by artist David Cockrum and writer Chris Claremont, she first appeared in the comic book Ms. Marvel #16 (April 1978).
Full appearance: Ms. Marvel #18 (July 1978)
Alter ego:Raven Darkhölme
Species: Human Mutant
Team affiliations: Brotherhood of Mutants, X-Men, Astonishing Avengers, Chevaliers training squad, Dark X-Men, DARPA, Freedom Force, Marauders, Mutant Task Force, Magneto’s X-Men

Abilities

Shapeshifting

Enhanced strength, speed, stamina, durability, flexibility, agility and reflexes

Slowed aging

Regenerative healing factor

A member of a subspecies of humanity known as mutants who are born with superhuman abilities, she is a shapeshifter who can mimic the appearance and voice of any person with exquisite precision; her natural appearance includes blue skin and yellow eyes.

What’s to know about the sometimes good guy, sometimes bad guy (and usually somewhere in-between) shapeshifting mutant?

In the movies, Raven is portrayed as a child when she first encounters a young Charles Xavier. The two grow up together and Xavier sees her as something of a little sister. However, the comic-book origin of the character is vastly different. In issue #17 of her solo series, she says: “I wasn’t born last night, or even last century, for that matter…” and has been seen as an adult at the dawn of the 20th century several times. This makes her one of the first mutants on Earth, much older than either Xavier or Magneto. In fact, there are only a handful that pre-date her, including Exodus, Selene, and Apocalypse. Due to the nature of her shape-shifting cells, they are not inhibited by the Telomeres that are an essential part of how human cells age. Because of this, and the way her body constantly morphs and adapts, she can heal much faster than a regular human, too, albeit not as fast as Wolverine or Sabretooth. Therefore, she maintains the physical advantages of a woman in her prime, despite being well over a century old.
In X-Men: First Class we go back in time, before the time Professor X was referred to as such–when he was just Charles Xavier, a young man who recently graduated from college and who lives with his best friend, Mystique–then referred to by her given name, Raven. Raven is a well-rounded character, and when she meets Eric–Magneto–they are friends. When he breaks away from Charles (Professor X), she joins him as a comrade. This differs from the first X-Men film, where we only know her as Mystique, someone who does Magneto’s dirty work and scarcely speaks a word in the whole film.

Mystique was drawn to joining Magneto’s ranks because he was the first person to value her for exactly how she was born. Charles loved her as a person, but he always dealt with her looks awkwardly, imparting her with a feeling of shame even if he didn’t mean to. Because she has the power of controlling how she looks at any given moment, people don’t seem to consider that it matters to her if they don’t like her when she’s in her natural, blue form. But to her, changing her appearance is a constant effort in hiding who she is.
The make-up to look like Mystique takes hours: When Rebecca Romijn initially took the role of Mystique, the make-up and prosthetics took over ten hours to apply to her entire body. She couldn’t afford to be modest either, as the prosthetics literally had to be glued on by hand. By the time Jennifer Lawrence took the role for X-Men: First Class, the production team could apply the make-up in just under eight hours, with J-Law straddling a bicycle seat for hours at a time, wearing little to protect her modesty. Nevertheless, Lawrence reportedly hates the process, which might explain why her version of the characters spends much more time looking like Jennifer Lawrence than like Mystique.

As Magneto points out in X-Men: First Class, while Mystique is using her energy to maintain her appearance as anything other than her blue state, she is unable to give anything else her total focus. This offers the viewer a view into the fact that Mystique’s state of being is not a relaxed one–conforming to societal standards of “normal” takes constant effort and jeopardizes her attention to other aspects of her life, not to mention the toll it would take on one’s mental health–explaining why she gets more and more irritable and depressive before she finally decides to quit hiding.
When Mystique and Beast first meet they bond over the fact that they are both insecure about their mutations. Mystique doesn’t like how she looks when she isn’t working to disguise herself as a blonde, traditional beauty. Beast doesn’t like that he has huge, hand-like feet. Being a scientist, Beast uses his skills to try and make a cure for them. But by the time he’s done with it, Mystique, having been told by Magneto that she’s beautiful the way she is, has changed her mind. She tells Beast that he is beautiful too and that he should be himself. He declines, however, to return the compliment, and she looks shattered.

Mystique is Bisexual: When Mystique was first introduced in the comics, she was rarely seen without her companion, the elderly “Precog” Destiny. Destiny’s mutation allowed her to foresee events ahead of time, often years into the future. The two women used their powers to manipulate events in order to secure the most favorable future for both mutant-kind and themselves. Writer Chris Claremont originally intended for the two women to be in a sexual relationship. With Mystique taking the form of a man to father a child with Destiny. Given the Comics Code Authority guidelines of the era, and Marvel editors dislike for the idea, it was scrapped. In the comics, she has had several children, both in the regular timeline and in various alternate futures.

A brief look at Mystique’s children: Nightcrawler, Grayson Creed and Rogue.

When Mystique first crossed paths with the X-Men, the heroic Nightcrawler noted their similarities when he first saw her true form. Before he could question her, she made her escape and he was left wondering as to what their connection might be. Eventually, he discovered that Mystique was his birth mother and had abandoned him as a small child. He initially believed himself to be the son of a wealthy aristocrat, Baron Christian Wagner, hence the use of his “father’s” last name “Wagner”. Later he discovered that his father was in fact the demon “Azazel” with whom he shares many characteristics, such as his tail and ability to teleport through an alternate dimension.

Despite having several biological children, she appears to have the strongest feelings of loyalty and maternal love towards her adopted daughter, Rogue. Shortly after abandoning Kurt to his fate, and consumed by a degree of guilt for not saving her child, Mystique comes across a four-year-old runaway girl, Rogue. The child had been foreseen by Destiny as being important to their future, so the two women raised her for many years. The two have a complicated relationship, but Mystique remains fiercely protective of Rogue.

Before either Nightcrawler or Rogue, Mystique had a child with the mutant supervillain Sabretooth (Victor Creed). Raven had adopted the identity of a dead East-German secret agent Leni Zauber. She and Creed were tasked with the assassination of a scientist. After the mission is successful, the two engage in a brief but passionate affair. Mystique abandons Sabretooth fairly quickly, unaware that she carried his child. The child, Graydon Creed, is swiftly given up for adoption. Despite his parentage, he was born human, with no mutant genes whatsoever. Mystique keeps tabs on him, but is disappointed that he isn’t a mutant, and has no involvement with him until he is an adult. Graydon, learning the identities of his parents, develops a strong hatred of all mutants. He forms the human anti-mutant group known as “The Friends of Humanity” and later runs for president on an anti-mutant platform. Despite being a frontrunner, he is assassinated before he can win.

She was married to Xavier: Due to a retcon, most likely influenced by the on-screen closeness of Xavier and Mystique, writer Brian Michael Bendis changed the status-quo between the two characters in the pages of the comics as well. In a bizarre plot-twist, the last will and testament of Xavier leaves his estate to his wife, Mystique, in a marriage that none of them knew about. The X-Men are shocked, as this had seemingly been kept from them. It turned out that the time-traveller Tempus had caused significant ripples through time when she averted the birth of a powerful mutant, Matthew Malloy. A temporal-side-effect of this was the marriage of Xavier and Mystique in the past.
Despite being one of the X-Men’s most famous enemies, Mystique actually first appeared as an enemy of Carol Danvers, then known as Miss Marvel. The two had an intense rivalry from the outset, although it was unclear as to why Mystique hated her so much to begin with. The series was cancelled before the story was resolved, but writer Chris Claremont had intended it to be linked to Destiny’s predictions about the future. It would appear that Destiny foretold that Miss Marvel was to cause great harm to Rogue. Mystique then sought to destroy Miss Marvel to prevent this from coming to pass. Ironically, this led to Rogue absorbing Miss Marvel’s psyche and causing the harm that Destiny had predicted. The prophecy became self-fulfilling as Rogue would suffer for years, and later leave Mystique, costing her the one thing she treasured above all else.

Typically portrayed as a foe of the X-Men, Mystique has been a supervillain, founding her own Brotherhood of Mutants and assassinating several important people involved in mutant affairs. She hasn’t always been wholly seen as a villain, or even an anti-hero. Sometimes she’s been seen to try to go straight and act as an outright hero. During the 1980s, she reformed The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants into the US-sanctioned federal super-team known as Freedom Force.
In 2009, Mystique was ranked as IGN’s 18th Greatest Comic Book Villain of All Time.

Mystique appears in seven of the X-Men films:

The character was portrayed by Rebecca Romijn in X-Men (2000), X2 (2003) and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)

Jennifer Lawrence portrayed a younger version in X-Men: First Class (2011), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) and Dark Phoenix (2019).