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pettytiredandjewish · 6 months

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The Rouge Avengers Chronicles

Book 1- The Shadow Soldier

Chapter 1

The File

Natasha Romanoff was tired. She was so tired- no scratch that, she was exhausted. She was exhausted and in pain. She was in so much pain. The gunshot wound in her shoulder was throbbing and burning with pain. However, she would need to change the dressing very soon to prevent it from getting infected. Her right ankle was swollen. She didn’t think it was broken, probably a sprain. She’ll ice it later when she gets the chance. Her ribs- g-d they felt like they were on fire, with every move she made. Natasha carefully lifted her shirt and saw that her left side was littered with red and dark purple splotches. Starting from under her breast down to her hip. She winced at the sight. She carefully pulled off her dirty and torn shirt and sports bra and threw it off to the side of her room.

Natasha limped over to her bed, pulled out the first aid kit that she had stashed under her bed, and headed towards the bathroom to start patching up her wounds. Cuts, scrapes, and bruises littered across her body and face. She grabbed a clean washcloth, wet it, and started to wipe away the sweat, dirt, and blood from her skin. Once her skin was sweat, dirt, and blood-free, Natasha grabbed some alcohol wipes and started cleaning the cuts and scrapes as best as she could. She put ointment on her superficial wounds and then bandaged them up. The deeper cuts would require stitches, which she didn’t have on her. She would have to wait until she got home to take care of them. After cleaning and changing the dressings of her gunshot wound, she picked up her mess and put everything back into the first aid kit, making a mental note to restock her kit the next time she uses this safe house.

Natasha turned on the shower and stripped out of the rest of her clothes. She carefully stepped into the shower and let out a sigh of relief as warm water poured down on her. She leaned against the tiled wall and let the warm water ease her sore muscles. She was exhausted and in pain. All she wanted to do was go home to her loving wife and kid. She wanted to hug them close to her and never let them go. She was hungry. She wanted a home-cooked meal, and while eating she wanted to hear all about her wife and kid’s day. And after dinner, Natasha wanted a very hot bath filled with lavender-scented bubbles. She wanted to sink into the bubbly hot water, with her wife holding her from behind. After her bath, she would let her wife help her re-patch her wounds, and then get changed into some comfy pj’s- one of her wife's old baggy sleep shirts and a pair of men's boxers. Then she would lay down in their queen-sized bed, curled up between her wife and kid, and sleep. She wanted to forget about what had happened at least for the night. She would worry about everything later, but tonight she just wanted to pretend that everything was okay. But all of that would have to wait. She had things to do first before heading back home.

Natasha stayed in the shower for a couple more minutes. She would worry about washing her body and hair later. She turned off the water and carefully stepped out of the shower. She grabbed her fluffy blue bathrobe and put it on. She grabbed the first aid kit and headed back towards her room. She stashed the first aid kit back under her bed and headed towards her closet to get some clean clothes. As she limped over to her closet, she noticed that something was off- the window was open. “Fuck…” Natasha said as she started to scan her room. She had been so distracted that she had forgotten to do a security check in the safehouse. She walked over to her couch, pulled out a handgun from between the cushions, and clicked off the safety. She moved around the whole room, her eyes darting everywhere, when she got to the window, she peeked her head out but saw no one. There was no one inside her apartment and she saw no sign of anyone who could have potently broken into her apartment. She cursed again and closed the window. She made sure that it was locked and then walked back to the couch. She sat down and tucked the gun back in the cushions. She leaned back against the cushions and let out a tired sigh. G-d she was so done for the day.

Natasha opened up her eyes and did another scan. Her eyes stopped at her messy desk. There was a thick package wrapped in brown paper on her desk. She got up and walked over to her desk. She looked at the package for a couple of minutes and then picked it up. Normal people wouldn’t dare open a mysterious package that appeared out of nowhere. Normal people would have either disposed of it right away or even called the police to get it checked out, but she wasn’t normal. Besides it’s not like she could die anyway- the Red Room made sure of that. Natasha chuckled darkly at that thought. With the package in her hand, she walked back over to the couch and sat back down. She peeled off the tape and carefully opened up the package. What she saw surprised her. It was a thick file with the SHIELD logo stamped on the bottom left corner. The word CLASSIFIED was stamped in big letters across the whole file. The file was old and had coffee-ringed stains all over it. “What the…” Said Natasha “Who the hell would break into my apartment just to give me a file?”

Natasha stared at the file. She wanted to open it and read it, but at the same time, she was just too fucking exhausted and in pain. She wanted to get some things done before going home. Curiosity won though and she opened the file. Her eyes widened with shock when she read the name on the file- Judah L. Sachs AKA The Shadow Soldier. Paperclipped underneath the name was a small grainy black and white photo of a familiar-looking kid with buzzed-cut hair and cold hard eyes. Natasha closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and opened her eyes slowly. Maybe she misread it. She’s sleep-deprived and in pain. There’s no way- but she looked down at the file that sat in her lap and read the name again. There was no mistake. This was Judah’s file, but why the hell would SHIELD have a file on Judah- that’s when she noticed that besides Judah’s name were the words The Shadow Soldier. It took a couple of minutes for it all to click and when she realized that Judah was The Shadow Soldier, she let out a scream and threw down the file.

Memories flashed in Natasha’s mind as she screwed her eyes shut. Memories of a shy, timid small kid- g-d the kid was so tiny, being led by Red Room guards to the basements. Memories of a kid in a water-filled tub, restrained and screaming in pain. Memories of being left to die in a dark alleyway and a small black-clad figure standing over her with a look of unsureness in their eyes as if they were trying to figure out if they should finish her off once and for all… It was Judah all along. Judah was The Shadow Soldier. Natasha curled into herself and let out a broken sob. She sobbed and sobbed. She sobbed over the kid that she thought was dead. Dead by her hands when she destroyed the Red Room. She sobbed over the kid who was turned into the Red Room's favorite experimental toy. She sobbed over the kid who was forced to become a killer. Judah wasn’t dead like they all thought, they were still alive, and they all failed them.

#marvel #marvel fanfiction #fanfiction #crossover #crossover fanfiction #ouat #devil wears prada #the walking dead #supergirl #pitch perfect #victorious #wynonna earp #resident evil village #captain america the winter soldier #black widow #natasha romanoff #original character #my fanfiction

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davidmariottecomics · 4 months

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Goodbye IDW! Hello Something New!

Hi there!

After seven years and some change, today, 12/22/2023, is my last day at IDW Publishing. It's for good reasons. Things just timed out that my last day could be the last work day of the year for IDW and in the new year, I'll be starting a new job elsewhere. I'll still be in comics and once I can talk about the new gig, I'm really stoked to be letting you all know. So, today, I want to say my goodbye to IDW.

But first, before I get to that, I did have something else notable happen this week. I sent my last tweet! I'm officially shutting down my Twitter at the end of the year and if you see a Twitter account claiming to be me after January 1st, it's an imposter. If you'd like to keep up with me, however, I've got good news! There are lots of other ways to find me still. Here are a few!

Check out and bookmark my website! Get access to my blog, plus lots of behind the scenes stuff and new projects at my Patreon! Subscribe to a newsletter version of my blog for free at Buttondown! Follow my blog on Tumblr! Keep up with my main socials: Bluesky and Instagram (I'm @davidmariotte at both)!

Okay, with that out of the way, let's talk about it. This is not my first time saying goodbye. In fact, almost exactly a year ago, I said my farewells to Transformers, one of the hallmarks of my IDW run. I don't want to revisit that too much, so if you want to read about my early days at IDW or that part of my career or a big list of thank yous to my collaborators, you can! And while I've had significant runs with other books, most notably Sonic the Hedgehog which with January's Sonic: Fang the Hunter #1 will mark 100 issues of Sonic at IDW under my editorial eye, or my personally exciting, if shorter runs on stuff like Godzilla, Samurai Jack, the Hasbro Action books, Canto, Scarenthood, The Kill Lock, The October Faction, Wynonna Earp, Brynmore, Atomic Robo, or literally so many other books, I don't want this to just be a retrospective on the work. In fact, I'm largely not interested in talking about the past when I say goodbye this time.

IDW has afforded me a lot. They've helped me find my place in the industry. They let me do some writing. They let me do a lot of editing. I learned various other skills both through directly on the course of the job and through my own interest because of what I was doing and seeing there. I have made true lifelong friendships. And I have made comics. So leaving feels weird. I'm very bummed to be leaving a place that really has been my home (and for the past couple of years, has quite literally been mostly at my home) for so long. But I am even more excited about what's to come. On my side, I can't announce it just yet, but watch this space for some big news soon (after a couple weeks of much needed vacation).

Talking about the future I actually can say a little more about, I wanna tell you how excited I am for IDW. Yes, I'm leaving, but IDW remains home to so many people--both at the company and our freelance creators--and so many projects that are close to my heart. Next year is their 25th anniversary. That is an impressive feat in not just the world of comics, but any industry. For the milestone, they've got a lot of cool stuff planned.

I'm not going to blow up IDW's spot and say anything about what's coming up too early. Just to talk about the things that are already public knowledge, you've got things like the new TMNT: The Last Ronin sequel! The TMNT ongoing on it's road to issue #150! There are cool new originals like Golgotha Motor Mountain! There's the launch of the aforementioned Fang the Hunter which is IDW's first Classic Sonic mini-series and sees 100 unique issues of Sonic at IDW and is just laugh-out-loud funny and full of such good action! And I'll tease this, when the Sonic ongoing is back with issue #69 in May, you'll be in for an absolute treat as that series runs up to #75!

I know some readers of this blog don't read a ton of American direct market comics. You aren't "Wednesday Warriors" who go to the comic shop every week. You like the comics you like and I've been graced to be a person working on those comics. If you aren't as familiar with how these comics work, let me assure you of a couple things. The books I was editing and many unannounced projects that I set up will still be happening. Because of the timelines of comic production, you'll still see my name in IDW books for a few more months and, at the same time, you'll see new credits creeping in. And if we've done everything right, that'll be about the only thing you'll notice is different, at least at first. As the editors really take the reins and take over, we'll both be in for the treat of the unknown! I'll be reading them with a good sense of professional jealousy.

Now, there's one other book that has been announced for next year and I wanted to do a special call out for. Godzilla: Valentine's Day Special went to press this week. It's the last IDW book I saw all the way from inception to completion. And, in many ways, it's kind of a really good analogy of a comics editorial career. I think, genuinely, this may be the book that went from conception to reality the fastest in my career. I think it took... less than a week from a half-joking suggestion of doing a Godzilla Valentine's Day book to getting Zoe Tunnell's pitch in and approved by Toho and getting it on the publishing schedule. Usually these things take a bit--people are working on other projects, licensors need time to review things, whatever other bumps happen along the way--but this was like lightning. Everyone just got it instantly. And then Zoe turned in the script and it was great! Things continued, as they do, and then... we got a curveball or two. I won't go into too much detail, but major thanks to Sebastian Piriz and Rebecca Nalty for getting it done and having a book that we were all so proud of that I could send to press this week. And it struck me on that final press day that despite the curveballs we had been thrown, when it came to actually getting it approved, everything was so easy, straightforward, and smooth. When you read it in February, if I've done my job right, maybe you'll remember seeing somewhere that there were some curveballs. But mostly, you'll just have a really good book in your hands. (BTW, you did JUST MISS the final order cutoff on that, so do check in with your shop about still trying to get you a copy!)

Most of the time, after a book like that goes to press, an editor gets ready to do it again--maybe in a few minutes or days or the next week. For the first time in a long time, I won't be getting ready to do it again at IDW. That's a complicated feeling, but I'm so excited for the future.

The best metaphor I've been able to come up with for what is happening is it's like I've been working in a one room office constantly for the past seven years. It's got that dull office lighting, you know the kind. Each day, projects come and go across my desk, and as they otherwise disappear into the world, I put up one of those glow-in-the-dark stars as a memory of it. And each day, I work with so many people--my coworkers at IDW who've helped foster my growth, my collaborators as both a writer and editor who have made so many stories with me, all the folks where things never quite lined up but we kept trying, and the readers who are an inherent part of the ecosystem, the reason we make what we do. And so, for each of those people, I put up a little glow in the dark toy.

Now, for the first time, I'm going to get up and leave the office. As I flick the switch behind me, everything in there that has been soaking up light for years now glows. Some of the glows are slight. Some are so fantastically bright, it feels like they're drawing attention through the walls of the room. Together, they make the room brighter than it was when I left. Now, sometimes, I might sneak in to borrow a toy--make a copy of it for the new office I'm doing the same thing in. Other people will certainly do the same and make they've got their Evan Stanley figure on their shelf. If I ever return for a longer time, I'll be so glad to flick the light back on and let them all absorb even more light to glow an even longer time. If I don't, I rest happy that the glow goes on and forever people will be able to come back and discover some part of it. And I'll start working on a new office soon.

If I keep going, I'm a little afraid that I won't be able to stop. So, for now, I'll just say again, thank you. The future is about to be very exciting. Next year is for the creators you love or don't know you love yet, the books that are going to light you up that you've come to expect and the ones that will catch you by total surprise. While there are a lot of things I'm going to miss deeply and books that I'm going to wish I had gotten to do more on, I also have the really exciting experience of getting to see this stuff as a fan of IDW, just like you. And, hey, I hope you'll be a fan of the stuff I do next too!

As for next steps, like I've said, I'm not going far. I'll still be in comics. I'll share the news when I can.

Before that, I'm getting a little break. Not too long, just a few weeks, and obviously the holidays are part of those, but in my time between my jobs, I'm going to be working on some personal projects. I put together a little tracking list recently and I have something like 40 projects in various stages of gestation right now. Obviously, I'm not going to be working on all of those at once, and chances are, some of them will never see the light of day, but I'm going to be working on trying to bring a couple of them to you in the new year (and beyond). If you're an artist that I've had the pleasure of working with in the past and you think you might be interested in peeping the list and seeing what we could do together, let me know. You can reach me on my website contact page, through my email, or through Discord (feel free to ask if you don't have it!).

And if you read this blog, you'll see me hyping my last IDW projects up until we run out of what I left behind. Simultaneously, once I've got stuff to start hyping up for my personal projects and for the new gig, you'll see those start to pop up here too! I'll also keep talking about making comics and my thoughts on the state of the world and whatever else it is I blog about here on a regular basis!

Thanks for reading. Bye-DW! Next week, I'll be doing a little Best of 2023. But for now, onto our regular features.

What I enjoyed this week: Dungeons & Daddies (Podcast), Reverse 1999 (Video Game), Nancy (Comic), Lego Masters (TV show), Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror (Short story collection), Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links (Video Game), Cunk on Earth (TV show), I'm a Virgo (TV show), The Boy and the Heron (Movie), an easy last week at IDW, all the well-wishes that've already poured in, leaving today to celebrate Christmas with my family and then have some downtime to work on my stuff, signing the paperwork for the new job, not being on Twitter anymore, getting all of our mail out in a timely fashion for the holidays, Chainsaw Man (Manga), I picked up Superman and Hawkgirl, so excited to get caught up on those, and knowing that in leaving this job, there are certain folks I just get to deepen my relationships with as friends, instead of co-workers.

New Releases this week (12/20/2023): Godzilla: The War for Humanity #3 (Editor) Godzilla Rivals: Jet Jaguar vs. Megalon (Editor)

Announcements: The Cartoonist Cooperative is still doing E-Sim cards for Gaza. You can donate a digital sim card so that residents can get access to the internet and have more functional phones and, in exchange, get some comics or a drawing or whatever else is available from the many participating artists. Additionally, the CC is hosting their mini-comic awards! It's a cool way to maybe get your mini-comic recognized and make some scratch!

You can also give more directly. If you don't have money, and I get it, you can call or fax or email or show up at the offices of your representatives. Keep your eyes open for actions too, whether they're another general strike or demonstrations and marches in your area. Given the nature of the things, they often come together fairly quickly, so do exercise your due diligence. Also, of course, being informed and just giving your time to Palestinian journalists and writers is incredibly valuable.

While Becca has got some things brewing for next year (and now on a schedule), you should reach out if you'd like to work on comics with them! You can find their gallery on their website and also, y'know, maybe pick up a few things for belated gifts while you're there!

Finally, I called out my Patreon earlier. You can support me (and boy, that would be cool during the time between paychecks because vacation is nice, but living is still expensive) and get not just this blog, but a lot of cool special features like extra posts, comics, infographics, and more! At the $10+ levels, you can also access stuff like a holiday gift guide I made, a podcast pilot for a spicy show with Becca, and a ton more!

Pic of the Week: Happy holidays from Becca and me! If you wanna full card in your inbox, lemme know!

#comics #godzilla idw #sonic idw #transformers idw #goodbye idw #comics news #david mariotte

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