Black Widow and the Punisher crossover this August

Two of Marvel’s biggest guns draw down this August in Punisher and Black Widow #9’s.

Circling the same sinister syndicate put the Punisher and Black Widow on a collision course with each other. A collision course that will lead them to an oil tanker full of dangerous explosives and even more dangerous information! Not to mention deadly mercenary Crossbones and his Skull Squad are just waiting for their chance to strike!

Frank and Natalia are interesting enough in a ‘team-up’ book, but add in Crossbones and you’ve got a seriously cool tale with a ton and a half of potential. I actually like all the characters in this one, but ‘bones is a sinfully overlooked villain and it’s particularly good to see him in the limelight again.

His third tier status might be changing now that his alter ego has been featured in the Captain America: The Winter Soldier feature film (Brock Rumlow), and that would be a very good thing indeed as the character has gone toe-to-toe with Cap and a whole bunch of other Marvel heroes over the years with little to no fanfare. If Marvel is looking for a ‘new’ flavor of the month baddie, they could do a heck of a lot worse than Mr. Rumlow.

As for the crossover event itself (writer of both books) Nathan Edmondson says its one whose time has come.

“Both stories led us to a place where a crossover was possible at just about the same time,” say series writer Nathan Edmondson in an interview with Marvel.com. “We knew fans were clamoring for it from the beginning, but we didn’t want to rush into it – when it was a natural time, we came up with a really unique way to launch into it.

“Frank and Natasha are a really interesting pair to combine together,” continued Edmondson. “On the one hand, they seem to exist in the same kind of heroic/antiheroic space in the Marvel Universe, but at some point the similarities stop and the disparity begins, and the tug and pull between those two ends will be at play here.”

Catch up with the gunslinging duo when both Punisher #9 and Black Widow #9 hit the racks in August.