written by Chris Samnee and Mark Waid
drawn by Samnee
colored by Matt Wilson
After conquering her antagonist at the end of the last story arc, the Weeping Lion, Natasha sets her sights on the headmistress of the new Red Room, which is churning out and deploying new child assassins. Helping her out is the psychic who was the real brains behind the Lion. She confronts ghosts from her past, but much remains to be done. Revealed here, for the first time, is the Lion's "secret origin" which reveals that he was, in fact, the nephew and cousin of one of her victims many years before.
While I'm not generally a fan of retcons, any excuse to see Chris Samnee drawing characters in 50's or 60's style is worth seeing him (aided by Mark Waid) tinker with history a little bit. This one features Natasha as a child assassin making her first kill, and it just so happens that the telepath who was effectively the brains of the "Weeping Lion" was in the back seat of the car where the murder took place, also as a child.
The story raises questions, of course, given that Natasha is actually very old but looks young courtesy of the Infinity Formula or its Soviet equivalent, and makes one wonder how this similarly-youthful looking telepath preserved his looks over the years, making his own back story, as unthinkable as this may seem, even more interesting than Natasha's adventures. It's also disappointing when one realizes that, as a bad guy with an axe to grind against the titular anti-heroine, the Lion is inevitably going to come off worse. But it should be interesting to see how they'll get there. This issue also bears the relatively rare distinction of being effective kick-off point for a new story-line and a "done-in-one" issue.
As always, Samnee's art is the main draw here (pardon the pun). There's minimal action, save for the flashback sequence in which Natasha murders the Weeping Lion's uncle, but it's utterly riveting just the same, particularly as Samnee gets to flex his "retro" muscles once more.
I really like that Samnee and Waid are getting to tell the kind of stories they want to tell, but the market being as fickle as it is, I doubt this series will last too much longer, especially considering that it isn't tied into any major event, like Civil War II. I will continue to enjoy it for what it is, though, for as long as it lasts.
8/10
