62 Years Ago Today, an Important Marvel Character Made Their Debut (The MCU Is Totally Different Without Them)

When the Marvel Cinematic Universe first appeared, Marvel didn’t have access to their most popular characters and had to depend on B and C-list heroes and villains. In 2010’s Iron Man 2, fans got to introduced to one of the most interesting characters in the publisher’s history: Black Widow. Natasha Romanoff first appeared as a SHIELD agent and quickly became a popular character, thanks to actress Scarlet Johansson’s great performance. She became integral to the first decade of the MCU, the fan-favorite character having a very important effect on the overall story of the films. A lot of fans were actually very angry with the way Marvel Studios treated the character, which shows just how popular and important she was.

62 years ago, this character that had such a huge effect on pop culture, debuted in the comics and she was very, very different from the one that fans met on the big screen. Tales of Suspense #52, by Stan Lee, Don Rico, and Don Heck, began the saga of the Soviet superspy. Much like in the MCU, she was introduced in an Iron Man story, although instead of as an ally of ol’ Shellhead, she was an enemy. The early years in the comics for Black Widow were completely different from the movies, and led the character down a twisted road to superstardom.

Tales of Suspense #52 Introduced Black Widow as a KGB Agent

The MCU is often praised for how well it adapted the early years of the Marvel Universe and brought it into the 21st century on the big screen. However, one thing that was very different from movies is the way American Cold War exceptionalism played in the ’60s Marvel Universe. Characters like the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and Iron Man all were crusading defenders of capitalism and the American way, their enemies often portrayed as Soviets, communists, and the like. Iron Man stories were especially like this; Stark was the intrepid Cold Warrior, a wealthy genius whose knowledge and ingenuity made the USA the best.

This led to Iron Man battling against many enemies from the communist East. For example, he was injured in a Vietnam-coded location, the Mandarin was a Chinese communist who wanted to rule his own empire, and he battled several armored Soviet villains. Black Widow was yet another human weapon that the USSR threw at Iron Man, except instead of brute force, she would use subterfuge and sex appeal to steal Stark and Iron Man’s technology to give to the Soviet Union.

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Tales of Suspense #52 saw Iron Man fighting the Crimson Dynamo in a Stark factory, giving readers a fun old school battle of armored rivals. Over in Moscow, ’60s Russian premiere Nikita Kruschev sent two of the Soviet Union’s greatest agents to go after Tony Stark and Iron Man’s weapons: Boris and Black Widow. The two of them are able to fool Tony, with Black Widow seducing him and allowing Boris to take Crimson Dynamo, who stole his armor from the Soviet military, prisoner. This eventually leads to all of them battling it out with Widow escaping Iron Man.

This is quite different from the movie, although there were similarities. In both cases, she charmed Tony with her feminine wiles and was spying on him. However, we soon learned that she wasn’t actually there to hurt him in the movie, which is quite different from the comics. She’d return in the pages of the funny books not long after, except this time with Hawkeye working with her. They would battle Iron Man several more times and then Hawkeye would join the Avengers, leading to Black Widow also getting her shot at redemption, becoming one of Marvel’s greatest female superheroes. She even led the Avengers more than once. Not bad for a character that was a spy story cliche when she started out.

Black Widow’s Road to the Big Screen Was a Circuitous One

Black Widow could have been a relic of Marvel’s Cold War era comics, a cliche that readers would see many times over the decades. She might have had a small bit of popularity by some lovers of the old school, but without her change in morality, she never would have caught on. She’s transformed over the years, going from a villain to everyone’s superhero girlfriend to the awesome secret agent superhero that plays a massive role in the history of the Marvel Universe. While she wasn’t the most popular character right away, she was great enough that her getting a chance to shine on the big screen made her an icon.

’60s Marvel comics are a great little time capsule of a bygone era at the publisher. Realism played a major role in the Marvel Universe from the beginning, and Black Widow, while fantastical in the extreme, was an important part of that. She’s grown into an icon, and her history is one of the more fascinating in the history of the House of Ideas.

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