Like the poisonous plant she’s named for, Nightshade is beautiful and easy to underestimate, but extremely deadly. Although a relatively minor villain, Nightshade’s scientific and criminal genius have made her a thorn in the side of many Marvel heroes – including Captain America, whom she once turned into a werewolf! Nightshade premiered in 1973, during the “Blaxploitation” phase that sparked a surge of black heroes, villains, and storylines. This trend was a great leap forward in terms of representation and diversity (giving us Falcon and Luke Cage, for example), but it also often relied on negative stereotypes of black culture as lower-class, urban, and criminal (both Falcon and Cage emerge from this kind of environment). The story of Nightshade parallels these trends as well. Created by writer Steve Engelhart and artist Alan Weiss, she was Marvel’s first major black female villain, and from her very first appearance in Captain America #174, Nightshade was a force
Custom Marvel figurines based on the Eaglemoss collection