Yelena has reached the end of her rope and is ready to take the fight straight to the top.  Your Major Spoilers review of White Widow #4 from Marvel Comics, awaits!

WHITE WIDOW #4

Writer: Sarah Gailey
Artist: Alessandro Miracolo
Colorist: Matt Milla
Letterer: VC’s Travis Lanham
Editor: Alanna Smith
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: February 28th, 2024

Previously in White Widow: Yelena had settled into the suburban life, only to discover that it was secretly a testing ground for assassins employed by the shady company, Armament, headed up by Renata Best.

ASSASSINS ARE ARTISTS

White Widow #4 starts with a flashback to a sparring match between Yelena and her sister Natasha, they go back and forth with Yelena eventually coming out on top.  Things then shift to the present with Yelena confronting Renata at her headquarters.  She’s ambushed but manages to fight off her attackers but is ultimately hit with venom that leaves her paralyzed.  Renata uses this as an opportunity to unveil what she’s been doing and why.  It turns out that she’s using assassins to gather battle data that she then is implanting into an army of A.I.-powered robots that will eventually be able to take the place of real assassins.  She then offers Yelena a position where she’ll train the real assassins to make the data even more valuable.  Yelena turns her down, so Renata takes the opportunity to test out her machines on her.

A LITTLE BORING, WITH A NOT-SO-SUBTLE BIT OF SOCIAL COMMENTARY

This issue is kind of all over the place.  For starters, it’s a little unclear what the purpose of the opening flashback is, other than to reinforce this idea that Yelena was destined to be a mentor of some sort, which is fine except that this same point has already been a pretty consistent thread throughout this series.  Also, there’s no way around this, a majority of this issue is just a Bond villain monologue about their evil plan and it’s not even a particularly interesting one.  But there is a bit in this issue that almost justifies the price of admission on its own and that is the brief debate that Renata and Yelena have about the moral implications of replacing human assassins with robots.  It’s pretty clear that what this is supposed to be is a thinly veiled reference to the real-life issues regarding A.I. generated art and the practice of using human-created art to teach the A.I.  Now, some of the poignancy of this is diluted based on the fact that in the comic they’re talking about robots taking over the jobs of people who murder people, but it’s still an entertaining section of this issue.  The ending of this issue and the series as a whole is fine, it’s a little cheesy, but it feels like the right ending for this miniseries.

FINALLY GETTING THE ART RIGHT

The art in this series has been iffy, to say the least.  Yet, in White Widow #4, it feels like they’ve settled into this sort of Aeon Flux-inspired look that works well here.  There are still a few moments of strange body contortion, but it doesn’t stick out as much as it did in some of the previous issues.

BOTTOM LINE:  NOT THE BEST FINALE IT COULD’VE BEEN BUT, FINE NONETHELESS

White Widow #4 keeps the same cheeky tone that the rest of the series had and firmly establishes Yelena’s characterization going forward.  It also possibly establishes a new gang of side characters that could have future appearances in the Marvel Universe.  A few moments really stand out in this issue like the debate over A.I. assassins, but that’s only because the rest of it is disappointing and plays it by the book. 2.5 out of 5.

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