Web Of Black Widow #4 - Marvel Comics

WEB OF BLACK WIDOW No. 4, February 2020

It’s not hard to envisage that some within this twenty page periodical’s audience were secretly wishing for someone to shoot Clint Barton well before this comic reached its cliff-hanger ending. For whilst the former chairman of Earth's Mightiest Heroes has arguably always been portrayed as being a somewhat imprudent and frustratingly headstrong individual, it’s difficult to imagine him ever disbelieving his ‘old flame’ Natasha Romanoff to the point where he’d actually straight-up shoot her with an arrow; “You know you’re supposed to stop when someone fire’s a warning shot, right?”

Sadly however, that is precisely what Jody Houser’s cocksure version of the “golden archer” does in Issue Four of “Web Of Black Widow”, having surreptitiously snuck up upon the ex-KGB assassin so as to blindside her on a deserted rooftop. Of course, those readers well-versed in Barton’s separation from his ex-wife, "Bobbi" Morse, following her role in the death of Lincoln Slade’s Phantom Rider, will know of his supposed ‘unswerving’ belief that heroes don’t ever kill in cold blood. Yet even so, it’s still disconcerting to watch the misinformed Avenger resort to such a catastrophic choice without at least a final warning or an attempt to fire a second disabling net arrow.

In addition, Romanoff makes it pretty clear to Hawkeye that she is being set-up by a woman who “was wearing my face”, and that her duplicate “has taken my list of targets and is pushing my mission further than I ever planned to.” Despite this ‘plausible’ explanation of events though, the non-super powered “dude with a bow” infuriatingly still decides he’s entirely in the right and therefore gets to tell the femme fatale precisely how she can (and can’t) behave, even after Stephen Mooney’s dynamic artwork makes it abundantly clear that Natasha could have eradicated him rather than simply knock him cold in their all-too brief fist-fight.  

Resultantly, Clint arguably comes across as an utterly arrogant and unlikeable individual, who despite having all the facts at his disposal, makes a disastrously dire decision which not only causes him to be shot in the stomach by the Black Widow’s murderous doppelganger, but momentarily also seems to place the ‘hapless’ Alla Zolotov in mortal danger. That’s hardly the sort of popular behaviour which made Barton be ranked by “Imagine Games Network” at number forty-four in their Top 100 Comic Book Heroes list…

Writer: Jody Houser, Artist: Stephen Mooney, and Color Artist: Triona Farrell