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New Killer Star just isn't as good as Kicking and Screaming. Part of this is that it's kind of a hodgepodge: one four-issue story arc, one side story of the band visiting Gotham Academy, one flashback story (set before Kicking and Screaming), and one part of a story about Dinah being (re)united with Batgirl and Huntress to (re)form the Birds of Prey.

And part of that is that none of these components are particularly satisfying. The main four-part story is about Dinah being kidnapped by a ninja clan or something who want to know the martial art secret previously known only to Dinah's mother. There's a lot of backstory invoked here, some of it new (I don't think the New 52 Birds of Prey ever said a thing about Dinah's parents) and some of it old, but all of it isn't very illuminating to the Dinah of the present. I want to read about the band having wacky martial arts adventures on the road! But mostly the band is separated from Dinah during this adventure, and the story feels like it's ignoring the premise of the book more than it's using it.

The art, too, is disappointing. Sandy Jarrell isn't a bad artist, and neither is Moritat, but neither of their work compares to that of Annie Wu, the primary artist on volume 1 of Black Canary, who only draws two issues here-- they just lack the dynamism, fun, and sexiness that Wu brings. I know Wu did some well-received Kate Bishop Hawkeye comics for Marvel, but I don't know what else. She's clearly an up-and-coming dynamo (or ought to be), so I'll have to keep on top of her work.

The side stories are okay. I feel like the Gotham Academy one stops abruptly in a weird way; I look forward to reading Gotham Academy in full some day and getting a feel for this in context. (Black Canary's manager Heathcliff was a Gotham Academy student, and his girlfriend a member of the Gotham Academy cast.) The flashback issue is a solid but unremarkable story; I did love how the attendees of the Gotham deubtante's birthday party the band is hired to play at include obvious supervillains like Hugo Strange, but the band isn't allowed to be rude to them. An old comrade of Dinah's from Team 7 shows up, too. It turns out he's 100% a retcon, never actually appeared in Team 7, but that book's characters were so forgettable I didn't even suspect!

Finally, there's the first issue of the new Batgirl and the Birds of Prey series. I feel like DC is learning the wrong lessons from the way the New 52 was received, which is probably because the fans don't understand their own opinions. The problem (as I've said before) isn't that the backstories/premises of DC characters were rewritten, it's that they were rewritten badly. The New 52 incarnations of Dinah and the Birds of Prey were more boring than the post-Crisis one. So now DC is "fixing" that by reuniting Dinah, Barbara, and Helena. The problem I have with this is that the New 52 was finally managing to accumulate an interesting history of its own!

These Black Canary comics are great in conception if not always in execution, and the Fletcher/Stewart/Tarr Batgirl of Burnside books were clearly building up a female super-team that would have been the basis for a new Birds of Prey book, with Batgirl, Spoiler, and Bluebird as field agents (plus sometimes Black Canary), and Frankie as their Operator. But that history, which grew up organically, is just being tossed aside in favor of nostalgically bringing back a team from fifteen years ago... even though in the new continuity, Helena is a government agent and not a vigilante, and has no association with Dinah and Babs. It's just weird and sort of frustrating that once DC gets a viable premise for a new Black Canary book and a new Birds of Prey one, they clumsily toss it all aside in favor of nostalgia. The idea that Barbara actually was Oracle at some point in this new history, something someone never mentioned in the 52 issues of Batgirl or 34 issues of Birds of Prey is particularly retrograde. Yes, I think it was a mistake to toss away Oracle, but bringing her back in a weird way that makes the New 52's complicated history even more complicated isn't the answer.

Um, so as to the actual issue, it's fine. Mostly set-up. I guess I'll see what is done with it when I pick up the trade from the library someday in the far future. It's just a real shame that a premise with as much potential as Dinah-Drake-leads-a-rock-band-that-fights-crime-with-martial-arts is tossed away after just two thin volumes.

Green Arrow and Black Canary: « Previous in sequence

As I’m sure you all remember, I am a big Dinah Lance, aka Black Canary, fan. There’s something about her carefree and badass attitude that I really enjoy, and I was excited to find that she had her own “New 52” arc in the DC Comics world. While I love her in the supergroup Birds of Prey, it was nice seeing her get some time to shine all for herself in “Kicking and Screaming”, the first in the “Black Canary New 52” series. We also got to see a new group of awesome kick butt women in the form of her band: Paloma, Lord Byron, Ditto, and Bo Maeve. So when I finally grabbed “New Killer Star”, I was thinking that I would get more adventures of this group of awesome ladies.

But….. Unfortunately, that was not to be.

We pick up with our poor Dinah Lance being held captive in a strange prison-like setting. Her bandmates don’t know where she is, and the fate of the band hangs in the balance. It was a little hard seeing the group separated, as I feel like they only make each other stronger. I was also a bit frustrated that we kind of found ourselves in a situation that I wasn’t totally on board with, as Dinah being held in a strange prison by strange demon cultists perhaps because of who her mother was seems so old hat to me. I appreciated seeing a bit of the mother/daughter drama and baggage regarding Dinah, but it kind of felt like it came out of nowhere, as I don’t THINK that there was all that much in “Kicking and Screaming” (I could be wrong, I just don’t remember any)? By the time Dinah and her bandmates were reunited for a final showdown with the demon cult, we get taken into a completely DIFFERENT direction with a speculative arc that takes Black Canary into a potential future-scape of her life. And when the story does eventually get wrapped up, we still have a couple of side stories that have nothing to do with the original story arc, some of which aren’t even “Black Canary” titles. It felt like a bit of a mess, to be honest, which was such a disappointment because I so enjoyed “Kicking and Screaming”. I’ve looked around and it looks like one of the problems is that the DC “Rebirth” event happened, in which the titles in DC were rebooted yet again. So of course this was going to interrupt this fairly new series. The wrap up came fast and it was hard to swallow.

But there were things that I did like in “New Killer Star”. We got a fun side story in the “Gotham Academy” storyline involving the band’s tour manager Heathcliff, who was a former student at that boarding school. So we did get to see the band in action in that story, as well as my favorites from “Gotham Academy” like Maps and Olive. It turns out that he and Pomeline may have had a thing!!! I’m super down for all that, so that was a fun little crossover story. There is a stand alone story with just the Band that doesn’t involve aliens or demon cults, which gave me the girl power camaraderie that I felt the actual arc didn’t have. We also got a nice little insight into the new “Birds of Prey” arc, which brings Batgirl and Black Canary together again, as well as bringing back Huntress to round out the group. I highly enjoy “Birds of Prey”, and while it was a bit disappointing to see that yes, indeed, Oracle is a thing of the distant past, it was also good to see her recognized not just as something negative. But my praise for these things ultimately goes to show that the actual final arc for Dinah in her main comic series was a bit too weak to stand on it’s own two feet.

So while the stand alone stories were good fun and everything I was looking for, the actual finale to the “Black Canary New 52” arc fell kind of flat. And it worries me that some of the “New 52” series I’ve been following will end just as abruptly. All that said, I will look back fondly on “Black Canary” and her band as a whole, because when it was strong it was super fun. It will be interesting to see where “Rebirth” takes all of these characters. But for now I bid adieu to my girl Dinah, and hope that when we meet again she’ll be everything she was in this. ( )