#mapone romanova

Got married and had a kid with daredevil who later trains the new daredevil after he dies

Earth 15142 - apocalyptic natasha with a scar

Earth 16191 - a-force nat with sharon and bobbi

So we’re all very familiar with San Fransokyo, the city that Big Hero 6 calls home.  But how much does the actual city that it’s based off of (San Francisco) come into play? Turns out...quite a bit, actually.

The 1906 earthquake in San Francisco is still a thing, but there’s a couple different alternate explanations for the cause, on of which I found very interesting. 1.) A bunch of Mole Men were planning on invading the surface, but they wrecked the whole city and then retreated back down to their own world.

That’s not the one.

2.) In a one-off story in Uncanny X-Men back in 2009, a few of the X-Men traveled back in time to understand their origins.  It turns out that the Hellfire Club was blackmailing two scientists (Nicola and Catherine Bradley) into making a new energy source that ended up powering a prototype Sentinel. A new energy source? Now where the chuff have I heard that before?

Oh right.  Because that’s what Lenore Shimamoto was doing.

Now, Shimamoto wasn’t powering up a Sentinel (as far as we know).  She was just trying to make the world a better place.  Then again, that’s what Nicola thought he was doing to for the Hellfire Club.

Of course, that didn’t end up going very well. But the similarity is very eerie, at the least.

San Francisco was also the home of the X-Men for a brief period of time during that same run in 2009.  They needed a place to stay because of the Civil War that was going on between them and the Avengers, so the mayor, Sadie Sinclair...

(Who we’re not even going to talk about how it sounds similar to Saito...)

Gave them sanctuary off their coast.

San Francisco was also an invasion target of the Skrulls during the Secret Invasion, a Marvel event that just so happens to be getting a mini-series as part of Phase 4.

Several prominent superheroes also called the city home at one point, including Daredevil, his law firm, Electro, Ant-Man, and the person who I had been reading on for the day.

In her current run, Black Widow returns to her apartment in New York, gets kidnapped, and three months later she ends up in San Francisco brainwashed and with a husband and child. Long story.

But she does eventually pull herself out of it, and then we get greeted with the end page of the comic with her in a new uniform and a new tagline...

What is the point that I’m trying to get to?

San Francisco has had its own events in the Marvel mythos, and I do wonder how much they could fit into a BH6 universe. But back to Nat.

Natalia Romanova/Natasha Romanoff is one of my favorite Marvel characters, and I have been asked more than once if I plan on adding her in some capacity to my Big Hero 6 stories.

The short answer is...not really?

Nat used to be one of those Untouchables for me.  It’s those heroes that don’t need to be in the story because they’ll overshadow everything around them.  The irony, as I’m sure you’ve figured out, is that Nat’s whole schtick is to not be in the spotlight.  So maybe she’d fit right into this world more than I would think. Now gradually, the idea of the Untouchables has waned over time, because I had no intentions of putting any of the Avengers in when I started writing BH6 stories.  With all of the shoutouts to Marvel that I’ve sort of sussed out, it pretty much became an afterthought.  That’s what happened when Clint showed up to talk to Kate in “The Straight and Arrow”.

As of right now, there’s really only one person who is never going to show up in any of my stories.  And that’s Tony Stark.  I can say with 100% confidence that he is never going to be in a story of mine.  Because whatever he can do...Hiro can do better.  XD But what of Natasha?  I’m sure you’re asking if I’ve figured out how to smush Nat into a story. To that, I say...

Have you ever met the alternate continuity daughter of Matt Murdock and Natasha, aka Mapone from the Daredevil: End of Days comic?

Redhead.  Blind.  The same powers as her dad.  The same badassness of her father?

So apparently in addition to Natasha having a biological baby named Steve in 616, we now have an alternate universe where Natasha has a blind daughter with Matt, Mapone Romanova.

What's up with his weird insistence that it’s canon? Canon is already such a vague concept for marvel comics.

Also nice to see any female character Matt's ever interacted with become accessories to his life. Elektra retiring to raise her son very originally called Matthew and preaching about Matt not leaving his violent life behind. Elektra.

Sorry for the rant. What do you think about that minicomic?

(Never apologize for a good rant!)

Yeah, you can't really do a "canon" this-is-how-this-character-will-die-someday story as far as I'm concerned. It's all subject to change, and we all know that Matt is never going to die permanently in the 616 continuity anyway.

I thought End of Days was just alright. It's not my favorite, and yeah, I really dislike the weird choice for Matt to have kids with every living woman he's ever dated. But I don't hate it either (it not being canon helps, since that makes it easier to ignore); it's a hypothetical vision of Matt's future, and we have a whole bunch of those, and I'm interested in seeing what that vision is for different creative teams even if I don't always agree with it.

I thought Daredevil: End of Days was ambitious, beautifully illustrated, and also ridiculous and self-indulgent. It’s Bendis’s kidfic AU, so, um, there you go. But there are two Natasha situations worth talking about. There’s this situation:

Fury: Natasha died four years ago.Ben: Dead?Fury: Died. Dead.Ben: How?Fury: The Avengers. A skrull thing. We kept it quiet. Her request.

Natasha dying off-panel is never my favorite thing, but this sort of thing is the bread and butter of grim future AUs. In this scenario, Natasha a) doesn’t die alone and b) isn’t killed by fucking Bullseye, so I’ll call this a win, at least on the grading scale of the Daredevil franchise. I could believe, to reference Bendis’s earlier run, that Natasha got to go out when she wanted to. Since this is a future AU where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter, it’ll do.

But you probably meant this situation:

Ben: Natasha Romanova? Huh.

In Daredevil: End of Days, spoiler, Natasha and Matt have a daughter. Also, this daughter is the new incarnation ninja master Stick, because reasons.

The wank that followed Bendis making Matt/Natasha his “endgame” was pretty enjoyable for me, not least because I got a question about the relative superpowers of Matt and Bucky’s sperm. I don’t have any trouble believing Natasha would sleep with Matt again, at some point, even though that might be a Terrible Idea. Once she lets someone in, I think it’s hard for her to get them out, completely, and there have been a few missed attempts at getting back together.

Now, Natasha having a child with Matt Murdock is less realistic, because canonically she can’t have children. I’m not super invested in the part of her canon where she was sterilized against her will, though, so I’m okay with ignoring it.

I don’t think much in the story implies that Matt and Natasha ended up together. Their daughter is a last-second twist, and both are dead, so it’s not like we see the specifics of their family. Only a few photographs of them together and their daughter, Mapone Romanova. Mapone uses her mother’s name and not her father’s— and the way she talks about her mother implies that mom didn’t hold the highest opinion of dad. The story also implies that Matt had a lot more kids with all his other ex-girlfriends, because footagenotfound.jpg. They could have had a daughter and tried their best to raise her together, even if their relationship just kept falling apart. That is not so far out there. Apart from the whole reincarnation-of-Stick thing.

Maybe they did finally find a way to make it work, though. Maybe Matt only slept with all of his exes after Natasha died, or maybe those aren’t his kids at all. Certainly the story implies he changed drastically after the Kingpin’s death, maybe he couldn’t be so righteous, maybe he and Natasha fit together, afterword. I don’t know, everything is made up and the points don’t matter: you can draw in whatever shapes you like. It’s only as canon as you want it to be.

I will say that Mapone Romanova is eons cooler than James Rogers, because even with two pages of screentime she manages to come off as the child of two superheroes, instead of just her dad. Also because she says both “jeez” and “it’s like watching snails hump in slow motion,” possibly unironically.

Mapone: And you have some serious blind spots. And you’re welcome.