Black Widow

Natasha Romanoff
Natasha was born in Stalingrad (now Volgograd), Russia. The first and best-known Black Widow is a Soviet agent trained as a spy, martial artist, and sniper, and outfitted with an arsenal of high-tech weaponry, including a pair of wrist-mounted energy weapons dubbed her "Widow's Bite". She wears no costume during her first few appearances but simply evening wear and a veil. Romanova eventually defects to the U.S. for reasons that include her love for the reluctant-criminal-turned-superhero archer Hawkeye.

Romanova's parents were killed in a fire when Romanova was a child. She was saved from death herself by Ivan Petrovitch, who raised her as a surrogate father. He first appears in Marvel continuity in the Widow's 1970s Amazing Adventures feature, in which he is introduced as her chauffeur and confidant, without this back-story revealed. Romanova as a child appears in a flashback[3] to 1941, in which Petrovitch, the superhero Captain America, and the mutant Logan who would become the superhero Wolverine, rescue her from Nazis on the fictional island principality of Madripoor.

A revised, retconned origin[4] establishes her as being raised from early childhood by the U.S.S.R.'s "Black Widow Ops" program, rather than solely by Ivan Petrovitch. With other young female orphans, she is trained in combat and espionage at the covert "Red Room" facility. There, she is biotechnologically and psycho technologically enhanced — an accounting that provides a rationale for her unusually long and youthful lifespan. While there, she was trained by, and a lover of, the Winter Soldier.[5] Each Black Widow is deployed with false memories to help ensure her loyalty. Romanova eventually discovers this, including the fact that she had never, as she'd believed, been a ballerina. She further discovers that the Red Room was still active as "2R".