White Widow # 4

 By Mark Rodriguez

Yelena Belova moved to the small town of Idylhaven to live a more normal life and leave her past as an assassin behind. Several suspicious events have been happening all over town, which led to a new company called Armament. Yelena snuck into the building and tried to kill the CEO, but it turned out to be a fake robot. After some assassins were sent after one of Yelena's neighbors, Rowan, Yelena finds out that the real owner of the company is Renata Best. Now the White Widow has a target....

The issue starts with a flashback as Yelena and Natasha spar in an empty arena. Natasha lands a kick to the face, which Yelena manages to block in time. Yelena then knees Natasha in the face and knocks her down. Natasha asks her to teach her that move. Yelena refuses because then she will use it against her. Natasha asks why she keeps refusing the texts she sent about becoming a teacher at Avengers Annex. Yelena says she hates texts and she hates the Avengers. She remembers Natasha once saying that mentoring was a terrible idea.

Natasha tells Yelena that she is her own person, no matter what the Red Room taught her and she needs to find her own passion. Yelena says she has a passion. Natasha says that killing doesn't count. She says that Yelena has a million things to kill for, but she needs something to live for. Natasha says she needs a fight she can put her heart into and asks her to think about. Yelena says their break is over and she wants go again and see if she can beat Nastasha faster. Natasha sets her hand on her forehead and rolls her eyes.

Currently, Yelena is sneaking into the real Armament compound. Thanks to her hacker friend Griffin, she found the address on an old tax form Armament Industries filed when the company was incorporated. Even though the address was erased and written over, Griffin was able to recognize the indentations of what was written before and find the original address.

Suddenly Renata Best catches her at gunpoint, asking who she is. Yelena says she looks different than she does in the billboards. Renata wants to know who sent her. Yelena says she gave her no choice but to come to her. She pulls out the Hamish's head and asks what the plan was involving the robot CEO.

Several women arrive and they start to fight with Yelena. As she struggles against them, Reneta says that Hamish serves as the face of the company. He's the name on the paperwork and the face shown on the social media profiles. Renata says the same thing that inspired her to create Armament also taught her to not be the face of the company. She says for all she knows, Yelena was the one that killed her father. 

Renata explains that Maxissimo Best was murdered by assassins in his penthouse. Reneta left New York because the tragedy was too much to bear. She says her father's only crime was being the best of the best. Yelena says he also committed other crimes.

As Renata saw her father dying, she noticed there was a gap in the market. She realized that the best of the best was leaving out a market that was still untapped, spies and assassins. She created the sister company Armament. She can't take the credit publically due to being popular, but it's better for her to stay untouchable and never become a target.

At this point, Yelena defeated Renata's forces and says she has become a target today. Reneta doubts she can take down Armament and Yelena says she doesn't see anything original. As Yelena explains that she has seen shadowy organizations with fake figureheads before, one of the fallen women, Asp, manages to grab onto her leg and paralyze her. Renata tells Asp not to kill her since she seems familiar. She recognizes Yelena as the White Widow. 

Renata tells Yelena to not bother moving, as she will remain paralyzed until Asp's Venom Bolt wears off. Renata says she heard that Yelena is good. Yelena says she's the best and has beaten everyone that she sent after her. Renata agrees and says that is exactly why she wanted to reach out to her.

Since Yelena can't move, Renata says they can discuss her future with Armament. Yelena is not interested. Renata says she heard she had started some sort of mentorship and she should take things to the next level. Renata comments that Asp was only capable of a short fight and one Venom Bolt, she needs better training. Yelena asks if she wants her to train her assassins so they can work for her. Renata says she can't think of anyone better for the job.

Yelena says they'll be sent to die. Renata says a few of them might die in the short term but that's an acceptable loss margin. In the long term, no assassins would ever have to die again. She tells Yelena that if she helps her, they can keep the assassins safe. Yelena asks how and Renata offers to show her.

Renata helps Yelena walk towards her underground lab which is below the entire town. Renata shows the White Widow an entire army of soldiers. Renata says she will provide the assassins with their cybernetics while Yelena will equip them with her skills. Everything they learn from their missions will get sent back to their bank of automated ambassadors. They will train with low-stakes low-threat targets. Yelena notices that she's referring to the innocent people that live in Idylhaven. 

Yelena says Idlehaven isn't a training facility, people live there. Renata says Idylhaven is whatever she says it is, and asks when Yelena started caring about people dying. Renata says  all of her killing machines will know everything Yelena knows and they will do the killing for her. For a reasonable fee they can send an automatic armament ambassador to handle any job.

Yelena figures out the kill switch on the armament equipment serves to dispose of assassins once they finished using them to train their software. Yelena says Renata can use her money to give assassins fair pay and health coverage, but instead she plans to con the world's greatest assassins into using her technology. The assassins will end up destroying Idylhaven while they either get killed or become obsolete. Renata says a small community like Idylhaven is a small to pay for innovation. Yelena says that assassins are a community too and her plan will at best cut them out of the craft they spent their lives protecting, and at worst this is killing them. Renata says that Armament is the future and she should get used to it.

Renata says as long as a single automated ambassador remains, Armament will remain in business, and she is offering Yelena and chance to join them. The White Widow says she will not take part in her plans, and now that Asp's poison wore off, she will finish what she started. Renata steps out as all of the ambassadors activate and start to attack Yelena. 

Yelena fights the robots and says they might mimic the moves of a killer but they don't have the mind of an assassin. She says she'll see how well they get along with Black Mamba's armament glove. She purposely called out Renata Best's name, which sets off the NDA violation that makes them all self-destruct. Yelena smirks as all of the ambassadors explode.

Renata walks off, talking to someone named Mr. Agger about how she tried to recruit White Widow but she refused. She assures him that White Widow won't be a problem as Mr. Agger asks about the noise caused by the explosion. Yelena emerges from the lab with a fire blazing behind her. Renata asks what she's doing and says she's destroying everything. Yelena pins her down and grabs her by the throat, saying that she should worry more about she's about to do.

Afterwards at Sharpsweets, Yelena is with her friend Zelda and the others. Griffin says the venture capital guys that were backing Armament vanished after Renata's disappearance. Yelena asks who owns all the property that Armament bought up and if everyone gets their building back. Zelda says it's never that easy and a company is never dead until they see a body. Zelda says Yelena blew up their merchandise and tanked their funding but it doesn't mean that Armament is finished. 

Rowan says he got an email saying there's an all-hands meeting at Armament HQ first thing on Monday. Sabine says the school sent a similar email, and they're delaying the charter announcement. She points out that 'delaying' isn't the same as 'cancelled'. Zelda wants to know if Yelena killed Renata, but she gives a vague answer. 

Zelda says as long as there's a future, there's someone fighting to make it better. Yelena flips over the counter and says she loves fighting. Zelda says she'll be fighting with a team. Yelena is confused but Sabine adds she needs someone with eyes and ears on the ground. Sabine can be the person in her earpiece. Rowan can be the man on the inside. Zelda can patch her up after a job. Yelena says she accepts and she will spill blood for them. Zelda says that's what a community is all about. They agree to fight together. Yelena adds that killing isn't a crime if you can get away with it. Sabine asks what she just said and Yelena tells her not to worry about it. It seems Yelena now loves being part of a team.

My Thoughts-

This was a fun read, but it's another one of those series where I wish it was an on-going rather than a mini-series. The story even ends with what looks like a promising beginning and new status quo. Instead of the classic 'The End', it ends with 'The End (Unless it's not!) as if maybe there were supposed to be more issues and they weren't sure if there would be an issue 5 at the time. It kind of sucks because I was getting into the premise and was starting to get used to Yelena's status quo.

The overall story was a good read as we see Yelena try to adjust to a more regular life. Each issue started with flashbacks as she worked either with or against Captain America, Wolverine and She-Hulk. They all had the same theme where they considered that Yelena should become a mentor, or start teaching, or even become part of a team. In this case Natasha told her she should find something worth living for.

The story also had these little 'emotion bars' where it would show if Yelena likes, dislikes or flat out hates something or someone at any given moment, which was a cute insight in what she was thinking. I liked the parts where random unexpected things would happen and her emotion bar would just say '????' because it would be too soon if she liked or disliked what was about to happen.

Yelena sure romanticizes being an assassin. While Black Widow is proud of being a superspy, Yelena, at least in this story, loves being an assassin and only seeks another life after constantly being told to. Throughout the story she's mentioned 'the art of being an assassin', and lamenting how Armament was killing 'perfectly good assassins for no good reason' and so forth. It might be part of the joke, but Yelena goes on and on about assassins after if it was a noble profession. I also like the fact that she hides the fact that she's assassin from her neighbors as often as she drops little hints that she is one. 

The only nitpicks I have is a lot of fights either had weird panels or it was difficult to tell what the hell was going on. This happened at least once in the first three issues, but luckily the fighting with the henchwomen and ambassadors didn't have that problem this time. The only other nitpick were sometimes the faces would look weird. Yelena herself is almost always drawn kinda odd-looking and that's the main character. It's a big contrast because she is not drawn that way in any of the covers.

Overall I did enjoy the story as a whole, though knowing now that this was just a mini-series put a damper on the ending which ended with promises of more adventures with the Idylhaven cast. I mean, part of the point of this was to get Yelena used to working with a team and becoming a mentor of sorts, and now that she has, the story ends. Imagine if there was a 4-part story of how the Avengers were formed, and once they did become a team in the 4th issue, the story just ends.

The comic advertises that Yelena's adventures with Thunderbolts # 4, and currently she is a member of the Blood Hunters and their (maybe) ongoing series. I'll get to the Blood Hunters one eventually, though seeing that the comic will obviously also focus on the other team members... I'm not sure if there will be references to Yelena either living in or having lived in Idylhaven. Such is the nature of modern day comics sadly.