Black Widow Fact — November 2, 2026

Today's Fact

Before the Avengers defined her, Natasha Romanova took her leadership skills west — to a god, a biker, two X-Men and a campus.

BLACK WIDOW'S OTHER TEAM WAS IN LOS ANGELES — SHE LED THE CHAMPIONS, MARVEL'S STRANGEST LINEUP EVER!

The Featured Fact

In August 1975 Natasha left the pages of Daredevil with issue #124, where she had shared the title billing for nearly four years, to headline a team of her own. Two months later Champions Vol. 1 #1 (1975) opened at UCLA, where the Olympian god Pluto attacked the campus to force Hercules and Venus into marriages that would help him overthrow Zeus.

The five heroes who stopped him could hardly have been less alike: Black Widow, Hercules, the demonic cyclist Ghost Rider, and the original X-Men Angel and Iceman. They voted to stay together as the Champions of Los Angeles — and when Angel nominated Natasha as leader, the rest endorsed the choice on the spot. The spy with no powers chaired a team containing an actual god.

Wealthy Angel bankrolled the experiment through a company, Champions, Inc., complete with a skyscraper headquarters and a custom aircraft, the Champscraft — both plagued by defective materials. Natasha's old friend and chauffeur Ivan Petrovich assisted the group throughout. Money trouble and shoddy hardware won in the end: the Champions folded after just seventeen issues, and the repaired Champscraft was later donated to the Thunderbolts.

Why It's Obscure

A Soviet defector, an Olympian, a hellfire biker and two teenage mutants walk onto a college campus — and the spy ends up in charge.

October 1975

First team on the coast — the Champions debuted as Marvel's first major Los Angeles super-team, years before the West Coast Avengers made the idea fashionable.

The ballot

Leadership, unanimous — Angel proposed Natasha and Hercules, Ghost Rider and Iceman all agreed; raw power was on the roster, but command went to the tactician.

Champions, Inc.

A team run like a startup — corporate financing, a business manager, a lawyer, a branded tower and a branded jet, decades before superhero franchising became the genre's default joke.

17 issues

Gone by 1978 — bankruptcy and faulty Stark-supplied materials dissolved the group, leaving Natasha's Los Angeles chapter as one of the great footnotes of her career.

Gallery

Comic art of Black Widow and the teammates she once commanded in Los Angeles.

Cover of Champions #1 showing Hercules, Black Widow, Angel, Ghost Rider and Iceman — **The whole impossible lineup**The cover of Champions Vol. 1 #1 (1975) assembles all five founders at once — Hercules leading the charge, Black Widow swinging in overhead, Angel, Ghost Rider and Iceman in support. Every teammate named in today's fact is on this one cover.

Black Widow in her black costume with gold bracelets, holding two pistols — **The chairwoman**Natasha in her classic black suit and gold Widow's Bite bracelets, guns drawn — the least powerful Champion on paper, and the one the others unanimously put in command.

Black Widow in Marvel's official character art lunging forward — **Marvel's own portrait**Marvel's official character art of Natasha mid-lunge, red hourglass at her chest — the Avenger the world remembers, from the years after her Los Angeles detour had already been forgotten.

Sources

Every claim here was verified against at least two independent sources before this page was published.

Bullpen Bulletins

Champions of Los Angeles — Marvel DirectoryThe team's full history: Pluto's UCLA attack, the five founders, Angel's nomination of Black Widow as leader, Champions, Inc., and the eventual disbanding.
The Iron Manual: Black Widow — CBRCBR's career survey noting Natasha left Daredevil in August 1975 with issue #124 to lead her own team in The Champions, launched October 1975.