Yelena Belova

Yelena Belova graduated top of her Red Room class and spent years furious that the title of Black Widow already belonged to someone else. Where Natasha Romanoff defected and rebuilt herself, Yelena believed. She was the true product of the programme, the one who did not run, and her entire early career was a campaign to prove that the traitor's reputation should have been hers.

Then she learned what the Red Room actually was. The discovery that she had been shaped, dosed and lied to by the people whose approval she craved broke something loose, and Yelena's arc since has been the messiest and most interesting redemption track in Marvel's spy corner. She has been a Hydra asset, an unwilling Super-Adaptoid, a Dark Avenger, a rescuer of the girls still in the programme, and a Thunderbolt.

She is also, unexpectedly, funny. The MCU version leaned hard into a deadpan that the comics have since adopted: a woman raised as a weapon who is genuinely delighted by pockets, sarcasm and mac and cheese. That combination of lethality and dryness is why Yelena moved from continuity footnote to one of the most popular characters of Marvel's current era in barely five years.

Yelena debuted in Inhumans #5 in 1999, created by Devin Grayson and J.G. Jones, and immediately became the antagonist of Grayson's Black Widow limited series that same year, where she and Natasha impersonated each other and Yelena's certainty about her own superiority was systematically dismantled.

Greg Rucka and Scott Hampton's follow-up Black Widow: Pale Little Spider pushed her into MAX-imprint territory, then Devin Grayson's Breakdown left her disfigured and desperate, which set up her recruitment by Hydra.

Warren Ellis' Thunderbolts run used her as the Super-Adaptoid, a Hydra experiment that turned her into a shapeshifting weapon capable of copying superhuman powers. She later appeared as one of Norman Osborn's Dark Avengers during Dark Reign, wearing the Black Widow costume he issued her.

Marvel rehabilitated her in the 2010s, first in Web of Black Widow and then across Hawkeye and Black Widow titles, where she and Natasha finally reached something like sisterhood. The MCU's Florence Pugh version accelerated that shift, and modern comics now write Yelena much closer to the screen incarnation.