The Black Widow is one of Marvel's deadliest heroes, but Natasha Romanoff was not always a force for good. The Soviet-born spy lost her parents at a young age and was found by a Soviet soldier who trained her. Natasha became so skilled that she gained the attention of Soviet government agencies. She eventually became part of The Black Widow Program, home to the infamous Red Room training facility that toyed with Natasha's mind and memories. The program put Natasha through strenuous training and reprogramming, molding the malleable young girl into the lethal secret agent fans know today.
The program pushed and enhanced Natasha to become an unrivaled master of espionage with no regard for anything but the mission at hand. After completing the program's training, she successfully ascended to the top rank of The Black Widow. Natasha, after finally coming to with the fact that her motherland had used and abused her, defects from the Russian government and s The Avengers. With a childhood so traumatic and no solid roots to fall back on - not to mention having her brain tinkered with by the Black Widow Program - the super spy is plagued by fleeting memories of her past. Many memories are untrustworthy due to her programming. But in a 1998 book, Black Widow came face to face with a seriously unpleasant blast from the past.
In Marvel Shadows & Light #1 by Gerard Jones and Gene Ha, The Black Widow ventures back to Russia to retrieve a relic from her previous life: her mother's diary. In her quest to retrieve the book she is confronted by a living reminder of her past - her brother, who had apparently survived the fire that killed their parents. In this issue, it is revealed that he went on to become The Vindiktor, an armored villain obsessed with destroying The Black Widow. The Avenger uses her training and cunning to trick The Vindiktor into falling to his death, landing impaled by a steel beam through the chest.
Natasha Romanoff is far from sentimental after being groomed all her childhood to be a spy and assassin. Every government organization she has worked for has used her skill set for wet work and espionage. She was manipulated her entire life and used as a tool. Objective driven, The Black Widow has learned to kill without remorse. Now she has proven that if the choice is between her survival and someone else's, they are going down, no matter who they are.
The Black Widow Program and the Red Room training facility have essentially erased Natasha Romanoff's identity and rebuilt her as the ultimate spy: unyielding, unwavering, and unfeeling, and never is that made more clear than in Shadows & Light. All she has left of her former life before tragedy struck her family are fragments of memories. Programmed to survive, Marvel's Black Widow has shown that no matter the opponent, she lives to fight and will fight to live.
