black widow vol 1 the finely woven thread nathan edmondson

The settings are nice, the plot’s streamlined enough for most to follow, and the page layouts during fight scenes are, without hyperbole, the best I’ve seen since Frank Miller’s work on that Wolverine miniseries.

Edmondson does a great job bringing the Widow to life as a character and a badass simultaneously, with reason and motivation between the two fuelling each other nicely. Thread is a decent book, maybe even an OK book, but I’m left feeling like something’s missing afterwards.

From there we get the beginnings of what I imagine is a story with further reach than Edmondson’s originally clued us in to, which is exciting if a little belated. Everything up until the halfway point of Thread is a standard job-of-the-week narrative until we start to hit the arc-based stuff when a dude with a very personal grudge against the Widow shows up, literally, as an agent of chaos (seriously, the arc words beginning here are all the do with “chaos”, which gets a little on the nose). Tl dr – art is pretty, but needs to choose a style and stick with it.īut I guess the switch-footing artwork goes a little hand-in-hand with the story itself, which seems like an attempt at the Marvel Universe as written by John le Carre as it follows the eponymous Black Widow’s moonlighting as an assassin when she’s not saving the world with SHIELD. One part of Thread resembles a beautiful fever dream, the other’s a 60s throwback that could only be complete with giant dots and its protagonist in a go-go dress. The Finely Woven Thread is definitely a pretty book, but artist Phil Noto can’t seem to decide whether to go with the barebones approach with minimal colour and heavy emphasis on what’s on the panel rather than how pretty it is – a la Aja – or to stick with the flourishing, gorgeous watercolours (I think?) and sweeping combat layouts that evoke David Mack’s work on Daredevil with Brian Bendis. I wouldn’t normally bring it up this early in the review, but it’s worth noting up front. My thoughts on reading the first volume of Nathan Edmondson’s current Black Widow series began and ended with the artwork – namely, that it seemed to be trying a little too hard and wasn’t quite confident in its approach. Ok, so art off the beaten track doesn’t always work, but at least it’s an attempt at something that breaks the mold a little. Rios goes for off-beat pencils, Aja is a stripped-back ‘acoustic’ illustrator, and Soy makes everyone look like Skrulls. Names like Emma Rios, Dexter Soy and David Aja are putting best feet forward for those books by veering towards artistry that’s a far cry from the stereophonic colourfest that is most of superhero comics’ main go-to. One of the things that really separates the current Captain Marvel and Hawkeye ongoings from the rest of Marvel’s current comic crop is the artwork.

Black widow vol 1 the finely woven thread nathan edmondson