Captain America and Black Widow’s Son

If you are a fan of Marvel, you might be aware of the sexual tension between Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanov, Romanoff, Romanova, or whatever her actual last name is. And of course Natasha would choose Steve as he is literally the strongest “normal” man on the planet, not to mention a real goody-two-shoes. He was even able to lift Thor’s hammer in Avengers: Endgame. So it should be no surprise when we see Captain America and Black Window’s son in the comics.

The best place to find James Rogers is in Avengers World (Affiliate Link) issues 9, 10 and 11. (Because his last name is Rogers, I guess Steve and Natasha got married at some point.) In summary the story is that an enemy had gone into the future using some sort of time machine and came back with a lot of advanced technology. So the good guys go into the future to get some help to battle the enemy. They come back with the children of superheroes from the present. By then, they are all teenagers. One of them happens to be Captain America and Black Widow’s son James Rogers.

So what are his powers? Based off of Avengers World alone, it is not clear. His shield is glowing as if it has a force field or some sort of power.

Excited about reading the comic? Unfortunately there is a sudden shift in art style between Avengers World issues 10 and 11. In issue 11 and only this issue, the artwork was done by Raffaele Lenco. After some time trying to understand why the artwork looks so strange to me, I suddenly realized why: he used dolls and action figures as drawing aids. All the faces and gestures look stiff. The women have long necks and the men have their fingers all connected. The line-work looks all feathery, like when an amateur artist makes a lot of tiny lines because he lacks the confidence to make broad solid lines.

I did an internet search to see what other work this artist had done and it turns out that Raffaele Lenco did Epic Kill, which I talked about seven years ago. This is the same comic that looked like every character was traced from Poser 3D. Someone should tell him that if he wants to trace 3D models, the software Clip Studio Paint has that feature built into it.

But the best place to see Captain America and Black Widow’s son James Rogers on television is in the cartoon animated movie Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow. It is rated PG for all of your hard-core Marvel fans who want to force your children into liking the same things you do. It is also pretty short, less than an hour and a half long running time.

The Irony

Based on how much they’ve had to give up for the cause, the last thing you’d expect is that they have a child together. The level of commitment and integrity they exhibit in their work, one cannot even envision them ever doing such a thing.

Furthermore, the birth of their son is even more ironic. In the comics, they had an unnatural child called James Rogers, since Black Widow was sterilized as a child. Therefore, their son was not conceived out of love or a natural union but through scientific intervention. This action contradicts everything that the two characters are fighting for – freedom of choice and independence. It seems that the writers intentionally made the situation go against all these characters stand for in every possible way.

Furthermore, the idea that Captain America and Black Widow had a child can be seen as another example of their own personal tragedy. In their lives, both characters have experienced so much loss – Captain America lost his love, Peggy Carter, and was trapped in a glacier for decades, whereas Black Widow had her life changed by the Secret Service and lost her chances of a normal existence. The realization that they might have been happy and contented as a family unit but were denied this through force adds an element of irony to this already layered situation.