black widow

Looks like ScreenCrush and ComicsAlliance are teaming up to do another Funko Pop giveaway. Can you believe it? As if we haven't already given away enough Pops to fill up a living room, we're actually ending summer with yet another contest. We'd say it's because we like you and want you to have nice things, but honestly, it's because we just can't keep this many Pops in the house all the staffers of ComicsAlliance and ScreenCrush live in and make it to the kitchen unabated. This time, we've got a few of the most popular leading ladies in the Marvel Universe, as well as the big bad Darkseid and a classic Batman in honor of the 1966 series. Those guys are nice and all, but it's really about the Agent Carter, Black Widow and Storm Pops. That's a trifecta that would put nearly any other trio to shame, in both ass-kickingness and costume amazingness. Those are totally real words, too. Look 'em up in Roget's next time you visit 1987.

In honor of the caped crusaders of the convention scene, ComicsAlliance has created Best Cosplay Ever (This Week), an ongoing collection of some of the most impeccable, creative, and clever costumes that we’ve discovered and assembled into a super-showcase of pure fan-devoted talent.

I'll admit, when Square Enix hinted the Black Widow would be joining its Marvel Variants line, I was a bit concerned. The Variants line is filled with some fairly radical redesigns of familiar characters, and some of the artistic choices made for the DC Variants line's female figures left little to the imagination. However, once I saw the prototype at SDCC this year, I was actually excited to see the final version. The Black Widow on display there wasn't quite as massive a departure as some previous Variants figures had been, and showed a lot of unpainted promise for the final release. This week, Square revealed the fully-painted prototype, and the images (courtesy of ToyArk) show off a Black Widow that's actually really close to her comic book counterpart. Only Iron Man, Spider-Man, Venom and Thor have been shown off in this form to this point. Each of those is still immediately recognizable, but share some influences that are instantly noticeable as Play Arts style. The new Black Widow, while proportionately rocking some Taylor Swift legs, doesn't appear to look that drastically different from iterations of her design that we've seen in her comic book past.

It’s funny, fitting, and sort of cruel that Ant-Man’s version of the Wasp is named Hope. The comic-book version of the Wasp is named Janet van Dyne, the longtime romantic and crime-fighting associate of Hank Pym’s Ant-Man. The film’s Ant-Man is Scott Lang (Paul Rudd); its Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) is an older man who retired many years earlier. Hope (Evangeline Lilly) is his daughter, grown to adulthood and desperate for the opportunity to be a hero. Her father, though, has other ideas.

Though Square Enix had more than a fair share of existing product on display at SDCC '15, the company still managed to bring a few new pieces to the show, too. The Variant line has been a fairly big hit for Square, allowing for some more radical takes on familiar characters like Batman, Superman, Iron Man and Spider-Man. Though a tad pricier than most other collectibles featuring your favorite comic heroes, there's an undeniable personality in Square's products that you just don't see anywhere else. Though the DC version of the Variant line didn't have much new, beyond yet another look at the incredibly divisive Tetsuya Nomura Catwoman, the Marvel line saw two Avengers leap into the fray. Black Widow joins Iron Man and Thor in the Play Arts series first, with Captain America coming some time after Natasha. Both are easily identifiable as the characters you've grown familiar with over their published lifespan, but feature that hallmark Squeenix style. Widow has a lot of detailing in her uniform, which makes up for how she's traditionally not outrageously outfitted. She's buttoned-up pretty well, too, and it's nice to see a Widow figure that isn't letting it all (or most of it anyway) hang out.

Marvel’s TV universe has long-proven rocky to chart against the cinematic ventures, crossovers often occurring at face value, if at all. Now, a new report suggests that the TV branch may court a larger presence in the next few years, including new series outside of ABC and Netflix, a Doctor Strange crossover with The Defenders, and perhaps even a long-awaited Black Widow project.

The Avengers are very famous indeed. After the success of their second movie as a team — and the tenth movie to feature any of the members — the Marvel heroes have a presence and profile in our culture like never before. It's a strange new reality to adjust to for those of us who remembers when co-workers, cousins and schoolmates had no knowledge of Iron Man or Black Widow, and perhaps only the vaguest idea about Captain America, and they thought of the Hulk as a sad man named David with flared trousers and a haunting piano theme. Now millions know these characters and could probably pick them out of a line-up. But the non-comics audience knows slightly different versions of the characters than the ones we might be used to. Sometimes the changes made from page to screen are for the better, sometimes for the worse, and sometimes they're... just different. In the best cases, the movies offer brilliant new takes on the characters that inform and refresh their comic book counterparts. So with that in mind, where does Avengers: Age of Ultron leave the best-known versions of these heroes? This article contains extensive spoilers for Avengers: Age of Ultron. It's been out for almost two weeks; you should have seen it by now.

Those devils at CineFix are at it again, this time taking their retro-inspired gaming talents to the greatest Marvel movie ever made in the history of the universe, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. We're big fans of CineFix's 8-bit remakes of classic films, and though Winter Soldier isn't quite as classic as Scarface or Titanic (yet), it's definitely one of the most memorable Marvel movies since the heroes started making the leap from the panel to the screen. Seeing many of the big moments from the feature film revisited here in a style reminiscent of Mega Man only served to remind us just how amazing Winter Soldier was, and still is today.

Although cosplay has been present for decades within the comics, anime, and sci-fi/fantasy fandoms, social media has played an integral role in the thriving communities of costuming that exist, such as Cosplay.com and the Superhero Costuming Forum. Over the years, the cosplay community has evolved into a creative outlet for many fans to establish and showcase some impressive feats of homemade disguise, craftsmanship, and sartorial superheroics at conventions. In honor of the caped crusaders of the convention scene, ComicsAlliance has created Best Cosplay Ever (This Week), an ongoing collection of some of the most impeccable, creative, and clever costumes that we’ve discovered and assembled into a super-showcase of pure fan-devoted talent.

In a leaked email between Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter and Sony CEO Michael Lynton, Perlmutter offered up three examples of terrible female-led super hero films - Elektra, Catwoman, and Supergirl - as part of what some have theorized was a conversation about why not to do more female-led super hero films. There's a lot of speculation involved, but nonetheless it's an interesting email from Perlmutter that has a few possible interpretations.