BLACK WIDOW

Natasha Romanoff's most persistent companion of the last decade has four legs and no clearance: Liho is a black stray who haunted Little Ukraine because Natasha kept feeding her, in Nathan Edmondson and Phil Noto's Black Widow run that began in 2014. Natasha named her Liho — Russian for misfortune, a one-word joke about a black cat crossing a spy's path — and insisted, repeatedly and on the record, that Liho was not her cat.

The cat did not accept the ruling. Natasha let her into the apartment anyway, caught herself telling the animal stories about her missions the way other people talk to a confessor, and admitted that taking the cat in was a mistake she would not make twice — while making it. When Natasha later went on the run and holed up in a borrowed cabin belonging to her lawyer Isaiah Ross's brother, she did not leave Liho behind in New York. She took the cat with her.

For a woman whose biography is a museum of erased memories, faked deaths and burned identities, Liho is a genuinely radical detail: a relationship with no handler, no mission and no exit strategy. Marvel's own character history, in the middle of the wars and resurrections, pauses to list the stray among Natasha's small circle of true allies — the assassin's most honest attachment is to an animal she still formally denies owning.