In «Follow the Path,» I spotlight changes made to comic book characters that are based on outside media, as well as characters who entirely came from outside media. Today, we look at how Marvel Cinematic Universe take on Valentina Allegra de Fontaine was brought into the Marvel Universe.
A funny thing that happens to me sometimes is that I will start to write an article when I realize that I want to reference something that I haven’t actually written about yet, and so I have to go out and write that other article first so that I can finish this article. In this instance, it was the Agatha Harkness Ratio, where I discuss how you compare how prominent a character is in the original comic books, and then compare them to how prominent they are in the adapted film or TV show, and if their prominence is much higher in the adaptation, then you are both A. more likely to see the adapted version show up in the comics and B. more likely to have fans be okay with the changes.
I wanted to reference that to explain how the Marvel Cinematic Universe take on Valentina Allegra de Fontaine has been adapted into the Marvel Universe version of the character in an interesting way recently.
What was the Contessa like before the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
Nick Fury was Marvel’s answer to James Bond, or, I guess you could say, he was Marvel’s answer to the TV answer to James Bond, Napoleon Solo (from Man From U.N.C.L.E.). As I’ve written before, while Fury was Marvel’s Bond/Solo, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee really only adapted the spy element (and the gadgets) of Bond and U.N.C.L.E. One of the prominent aspects of both series, though, was the love interests for their heroes. Bond’s love interests had already gained the term «Bond girls,» like Ursella Andress as Honey Ryder in Dr. No.It wasn’t until Jim Steranko had taken over writing and art duties on the series that he introduced his own version of the «Bond Girl» with La Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine.
Nick Fury was literally head-over-heels for the Contessa, but Steranko would soon push the boundaries of what the Comics Code would allow him to do in the series. The longer Steranko was on the series, the more he tried to play up the sex appeal for the Contessa. This led to an amusing piece of censorship in Strange Tales #168. Here is the Contessa in the issue:
However, here is how Steranko originally drew her…
As he later noted, «There was a page-tall figure of Val seen from the back, and I put a lot of shine on the outfit, particularly on her buttocks. I defined the form on satin material — and they eliminated the shine. Blacked it all in because it was too hot!»
For many years, that was really Contessa’s only role, Fury’s girlfriend. Later, when Fury was off the board for a while, the Contessa fell into role of the generic top-level SHIELD agent, sometimes SHIELD director, sometimes second-in-command. Honestly, I have a soft spot for the «generic good agent» character. It’s a thankless role, but I think it’s an important one, as you often NEED a «good agent» for stories, and the «good agents» tend to be the ones who get killed off in stories the most for dramatic effect, so the reliably good «good agents» are valuable characters in a shared universe. Here she is in Cable #34 (by Jeph Loeb, Ian Churchill, Scott Hanna, and Art Thibert), as the head of SHIELD during Onslaught…
When Nick Fury returned to SHIELD, Contessa went back to being basically «Nick Fury’s girlfriend» until Secret Warriors, a series written by Jonathan Hickman that revealed (in Secret Warriors #6, by Hickman, Brian Michael Bendis, and Stefano Caselli), that Contessa was secretly now working for Hydra as Madame Hydra…
However, she LATER revealed in Secret Warriors #14 (by Hickman and Casselli) that this entire time, she had been betraying both SHIELD and Hydra, and was actually part of the Soviet organization known as Leviation, something she was part of her whole life…
At the end of the series (in Secret Warriors #28 by Hickman and Allesandro Vitti), however, she admitted to Nick Fury that, all things considered, the only thing she ended up REALLY caring about was him…
The series ends with Fury about to bust her out of prison. Okay, so Contessa showed up in a couple of places since then, but pretty much, since Nick Fury SR. has been mostly written out of the Marvel Universe (which, of course, is ITSELF a case of Follow the Path), Contessa went into character limbo.
A few years back, though, the character was introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, a mysterious black ops lady, who was collecting agents from the MCU, including Yelena Belova and USAgent…
So how was this change worked into the Marvel Universe?
How has the Contessa been altered in the Marvel Universe?
First, when all anyone knew was that Valentina Allegra de Fontaine was going to be involved with the Thunderbolts SOMEHOW, writers Jackson Lanzing and Colin Kelly and artist Geraldo Borges worked her into the new Thunderbolts team. The team was based on a long storyline in the pages of Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty, where Kelly and Lanzing had introduced a mysterious organization known as the Outer Circle, which had been controlling the world for a century. They also had a member known as «The Revolution,» as the idea was that he was to keep them from ever getting too out of hand. Bucky Barnes eventually became the new Revolution, as he and Captain America took down the Outer Circle once and for all. Bucky, though, now had all of their century’s worth of intelligence, so he formed a new team known as the Thunderbolts that would use the intel he had to take down the world’s biggest bad guys.
He recruited Val…
In a major twist, it is revealed that the REAL Val died in a Soviet gulag, and that Val had uploaded her mind into a Life-Model-Decoy…
Okay, but since it became clear that Val was actually the ANTAGONIST of the Thunderbolts* movie, Kelly and Lanzing shifted again, and in the current series, Thunderbolts: Doomstrike (by artists Tomasso Bianchi and Yen Nitro), they reveal that the REAL Contessa IS alive, and she has become the new Citizen V, and she wants revenge on the LMD that took over her life (and Bucky for helping her)…
She is working with Doctor Doom, and in the second issue, she manipulates USAgent to help take down Bucky (who has been framed for a terrorist attack that destroyed Bucky’s hometown in Indiana, launched by Doom to punish Bucky for refusing to work with Doom), but he escapes…
Lanzing and Kelly have cleverly worked in the Julia Louis-Dreyfus style of Valentina without OUTRIGHT copying it, and doing their own thing with it. It’s clever stuff.
Okay, that’s it for this installment! If anyone else has an idea for a future edition of Follow Your Path, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!
