EXCLUSIVE | 'Black Widow: Bad Blood' writer Lindsay Smith on how her team brainstormed a new Natasha universe
Spoilers for 'Black Widow: Bad Blood'
After an undercover operation in Chicago, the Black Widow finds that she's been targeted — and now it's up to her to find out by whom and why. 'Black Widow: Bad Blood' sees Natasha Romanoff undertake a personal mission that will see her traveling across the world, as well as teaming up with an old friend of hers — Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier. In an exclusive interview, one of the series' writers, Lindsay Smith, talks about the audiobook/novel, and just what makes Natasha Romanoff tick.
Tell us a little bit about 'Black Widow: Bad Blood' for those who haven't had a chance to read it or listen to it yet.
It's an episodic story from www.serialbox.com. We're taking a Black Widow story and we're telling it across 14 episodes for the season. You can both read them, as prose, or listen to it as an audiobook with Sarah Natochenny as the narrator. We really are just getting to celebrate Natasha Romanov, the Black Widow, letting her star in her own story as she has to draw on all of her skills and resources to tackle a threat that nobody else can handle except her.
How did you decide what parts of Black Widow's continuity to focus on?
Our writing team wanted to really focus on what we personally love about Black Widow as a character. So we all kind of brainstormed together what those strengths were, what elements of her backstory, relationships and so on that we wanted to draw from, and really focus on those to kind of make our own Black Widow universe. [It's] centered on her really, just because she's such a fascinating character. Up until now, there hasn't really been that much of a focus on her outside of the comics... so we got to really make her our own — make Natasha really come to life.
Can you tell us more about that? What makes the Black Widow, the Black Widow?
To me, it's the fact that while a lot of people she works with mostly rely on their superpower strength, or their financial resources, things like that, her skills come from within. She can rely on her smarts, her strength and agility as well as her spy skills to get out of any situation. That's good, because that means that she doesn't have to count on other people, but that's also bad because she tends to be a loner because of that, and that makes for really interesting character drama with her — and the fact that to some extent she kind of resents these skills that she has because of the way that she got them. She didn't choose to join the Red Room or become this super spy. It's a little bit of an inner conflict every time that she's doing that.
You mentioned that she hasn't liked relying on other people, but the disease that she's been given puts her in a bit more of a vulnerable position, one that forces her to depend on her allies. What can you tell us about that?
We really wanted to see what she would end up doing when she was put in that kind of situation. Where her loner style just could not be feasible for her. For the first couple of episodes, she ends up relying on the help of both Bruce Banner and Bucky Barnes to some extent, but also these normal people that she has met while she was undercover in Chicago. So seeing how she comes to grudgingly accept that she has to accept aid, that she can't do everything for herself, and even feeling a bit of a relief or bittersweet emotion about those relationships — that was really great to be able to explore.
Keisha, Sora and Maria have a distinctive presence in this book so far despite only having a brief appearance in it at the beginning. What about them make them so important to the series?
For Natasha, they really represented this cover that she has that let her get a lot closer to a totally normal life than she's ever had. She's always been a super spy. She's always been on assignments, working for somebody else and here, she was undercover, basically acting for herself, but it was still a job. And yet, the longer she had to draw out this cover, the more she really kind of played the role of this totally normal character, with normal friends, and normal groups with their own concerns — talking about baby showers and vacation and things like that.
In a lot of ways, she was almost looking through the frosted window at this warm family on the other side of the glass that she couldn't really be a part of, even though she was starting to feel why people feel strongly about having that sort of connection, and that's never something she's really had for herself. So, it gives her a great touchstone. A sense of longing too, for what she might have been had she not been made into the Black Widow.
Natasha seems to have a bit more history with Bucky Barnes in this continuity. Can you tell us a bit more about that shared history?
It really differs from universe to universe. There's a great series of comics run, where Bucky was made into the Winter Soldier by the same group that Natasha grew up working for, that trained her — the Red Room and the KGB, alongside Hydra.The fact that they're both there against their will - only Natasha still is cognizant, she's in control over self to some extent, whereas he's completely not — really made for such great storytelling, and we wanted to tap into that. Several years down the line where he is no longer brainwashed, he's no longer having to carry out someone else's orders, he's also trying to find his own life — self-reliance — and figure out what that means for him. Having them kind of thrown together now that they're both free people and trying to define who they are at the same time, we really wanted to bounce them off of each other for that.
'Black Widow: Bad Blood' is available to purchase at www.serialbox.com. The next episode airs on June 30. You can find Lindsay Smith at www.lindsaysmith.net or on Twitter @LindsaySmithDC.