Review of Black Canary series (New 52)

In the past, I would occasionally lag behind in my weekly reading of the comics I had bought.  By the time that Wednesday arrived, there were still a few issues still left on my read pile.  The temptation for the comic reader is to submit to the lure of the new comics, there covers suggesting so much that you betray those comics from the week before.  They can wait; there’s time; the next issue doesn’t come out for another thirty days.

But reading comics is like running on a treadmill stuck on one speed.  If you don’t maintain the speed that your reading, you can trip up and fall off.  Comics build up in small piles and then larger piles.

To avoid the clutter of having one or two books laying out, I bought a short box in which to keep the unread issues.  And after I filled that short box with unread comics, I bought a second one as well.  Now, at the side of my bed, I have two short boxes with multiple issues of runs that I have not read.

One of the comics I let build was DC’s New 52 Black Canary.  I admittedly liked the start of the series.  My initial interest in the book found its root in the books “punk rock” style, the limited use of color, the pattern printed backgrounds reminiscent of diy concert posters. 

I liked the love story of Green Arrow and Black Canary I discovered first through Justice League Unlimited, the animated series, and then in through back issues.  Of course, a blond woman with fishnet tights and leather features didn’t hurt either. 

The series had promise.  I had heard of the name of Annie Wu and appreciated her art.  It also promised to take the character in a new direction as much of DC’s New 52 promised to do. 
The problem, however, like a lot of DC’s most promising properties, was that the series failed to maintain consistency.  The prime example of this is how the series moved from artist to artist, starting with Annie Wu to Sandy Jarrell to Moritat and then back to Jarrell.
 
Each of these artists are good artists in their own right, capable of carrying a book, but their art is just similar enough to one another to suggest that the subsequent artist was placed on the book to try to retain the look and feel of the last artist.  Accordingly, the art is burdened by the power of the previous artist’s feats instead of succeeding in its own. 

The other issue with the art is that it sometimes it fails to adequately carry its end of the story telling role, especially when the panel contain no dialogue.  At the heart of the problem is the nature of the art, with more emphasis on abstraction than realism, with more emphasis on impressionism than on realism.  For story to rise out of such art, the artist has to be more deliberate and obvious.  Sometimes, the artist failed to hit this mark.

As for Brenden Fletcher’s writing, the story is often convoluted going in many directions at once and sometimes not ending up anywhere.  At points in the story, characters appear out of nowhere to save Dinah Lance and her band of misfits only to disappear a few panels later with no apparent context.  This includes the appearance of “Aunt Rena” when Black Canary battles the Quietus and Ditto who appears to save Dinah from the effects of Izak Orato’s mind control.  (Ironically, immediately after the rescue, Bo Maeve demands to know “What happened to us? And where’s Ditto?”)

So much is going on, it’s a little distracting.  It doesn’t help either that the story seems to be told at breakneck speed so that the reader never grows to appreciate the villains or the conflict that Dinah has with them.  It would have been nice to see a relationship have developed between Dinah and “Aunt Rena” which would have made Rena’s betrayal all that more powerful.  It would have been nice to see the development of backstory with Dinah's parents and Orato.

(I have not read issue #12 yet, but there seems to be a suggested connection between Ditto and Orato.  However, I cannot see how Fletcher could possibly develop such a connection to it justice in the last issue remaining.)

The plot seems to rely heavily on a certain expectation of “coolness.”  Ditto is a abandoned child with a beanie on her head and who can play a mean guitar.  Black Canary, the band, fights its battles by playing music.  Dinah knows kung-fu.  The book almost tries too hard to be and look cool so that sometimes things feel forced and behind a trend instead of making them.

But for all the small faults, the overall story is a good one.  It involves an ancient evil who was responsible for the death of Dinah’s parents but was injured in the deed and who is now after Dinah to obtain from her the only cure for the injury.  It is Harry Potter or Star Wars if Harry Potter or Star Wars became disillusioned and loud.  There is a nugget of an epic battle here, something on a universal scale and yet personal. 

I can’t help but think that this okay book with so much potential could have been a great book had it been given the time and space it needed.