Birds of Prey #6 (June 1999)

Previously in Birds of Prey...

Deep in Lake Mackachitahoo in Minnesota is a lost soviet satellite leaking neutrinos that play havoc with time and space.  First Black Canary was attacked by a prehistoric amphibious monster, then Cheshire and the Ravens traveled thousands if not millions of years into the past.  Amidst this chaos, the terrorist group known as Kobra has come to the lake to retrieve the satellite and kill Black Canary.  Also, the Pentagon's Counter-Cyberwarfare Division has backtracked the hacker stealing their bandwidth to somewhere in Gotham City.

Birds of Prey #6: "Time's Rainbow" is written by Chuck Dixon with pencils by Greg Land, inks by Drew Geraci, and colors by Gloria Vasquez.  The cover was penciled by Land over a Brian Stelfreeze sketch, who then inked over Land's pencils.  Figure that out!

For the last couple issues, someone has been spying on Oracle through a network of hidden cameras installed in her apartment.  In this issue, we discover the identity of the voyeur is none other than... Batman!  The Dark Knight tells Alfred that he's been surveilling Oracle to ensure that she is mentally sound enough to handle the enormous responsibility on her shoulder.  He can't afford for someone in her delicate position to have any kind of breakdown.

Just as Batman discontinues the surveillance, telling Alfred, he has no doubts about her faculties, Oracle one-ups him by hacking the Batcomputer and revealing that she's known all along that he's been watching her.  She let him do it for his peace of mind, but she's still hella pissed at the audacity.

Meanwhile, in a stretch of prehistoric land that will someday be Lake Mackachitahoo, the Ravens argue about their dire circumstances.  While Vicious and Pistolera bicker about the when and where they are, their leader, Cheshire, tells them she intends to swim back down to the bottom of the lake and find the wrecked satellite.  She figures that their time travel has to do with the neutrinos around the satellite, so by finding the satellite again, they can ride the effect back to their present.

Speaking of the present time, remember how last issue ended with Black Canary freaking out about something we couldn't see so we had no idea how to feel about her situation?  Well that's finally explained as Dinah tells Oracle that a Kobra submarine is in the Lake, along with a squad of Kobra divers rigging the satellite to the sub for towing.

How cute is it that Kobra divers look just like Aquaman?!!

Anyway, Kobra Prime explains to one of his underlings that the satellite, called Solaris II, was a solar orbiter that the Soviets forgot about decades ago, but that Kobra had been monitoring all along.  The satellite passed through and collected some neutrinos in its revolution around the sun, and then Kobra directed it back to Earth, but accidentally lost it in Minnesota.

As the satellite is being hauled up to the submarine, the squad of Kobra divers are brutally attacked by the Ravens who have swum back to the right timeline.  Black Canary doesn't recognize the Ravens and asks Oracle for some intel, but Oracle is distracted.

At that moment, Major Van Lewton orders his special ops team into action.  They bust into the phantom hacker's headquarters... which isn't Oracle's hideout, as a matter of fact.  It turns out, the hacker they've been tracking all along was Blockbuster.

He beats the crap out of the special ops guys and gets on their radio frequency.  He threatens Van Lewton and tells him he can have the men back as long as he never interferes--illegally--with his business again.  Van Lewton is appropriately terrified, and his aide is appropriately satisfied.

Oracle, as it happens, was only distracted by a bird in her apartment.  When she finally gets back to her computer, Dinah has tired of waiting for her.  Black Canary is already engaging the Ravens as Oracle protests and tells her who they are.  Babs has quite a warning regarding Cheshire, as if Black Canary doesn't already know plenty about Roy Harper's baby mama.

However badass Oracle thought Cheshire and the Ravens were, Black Canary takes them out in about thirty seconds.  Oracle tells her she can't let Kobra get their hands on the satellite, but that doesn't look like it's going to be a problem as the plesiosaurus returns and slams into the Kobra sub.

In the aftermath of Kobra Prime's cowardly retreat and the sinking of the submarine, the authorities round up the surviving members of Kobra.  S.T.A.R. Labs technicians show up to deal with the funky satellite.  The lake monster, it seems, is going to be sticking around for a while, so Dinah tells her new friend Gary and his uncle to paint signs and market the crap out of it for tourists.

The Ravens, Black Canary believes, got away clean.  In truth, they did slip away, but they passed through the neutrino time wave again and wound up trapped in an era of early human civilization.  Hey, maybe Vandal Savage can help them!

Here we have another one of Dixon's comics that took about two minutes to read.  The only benefit to that is it didn't take very long to write this recap.  There were certainly some enjoyable moments to this story.  There's a lot of action, first with the Ravens slaughtering the Kobras, and then with Black Canary trouncing the Ravens.  Dixon did a fine job setting up how formidable they should have been with Oracle's running commentary even as Black Canary handles them effortlessly.  It shows how much better she is and how she really ought to be considered one of the best fighters in the DC Universe.

On the other hand, the pacing, particularly with those action beats, goes by way too quickly.  And Land's art isn't memorable enough to capture the eye for extra time, especially in the underwater sequences that all look kind of the same.

The greatest affront, though, is the first scene with Batman spying on Oracle.  I'm not complaining about the content of the scene, but the presentation.  The scene is four pages long and only seven panels.  Four pages, seven panels.  Do the math and it adds up to less than two panels per page on average.  And these aren't exciting, visually dynamic pages.  It's just Batman talking to Alfred and Barbara's face on some cameras.  There isn't even much dialogue.  The scene could have been two pages--or one page--but Dixon and Land stretch it out to four.  That's a criminal use of real estate in a comic that's only twenty-one pages already.

Overall, this was a cute little story arc that should have been two issues instead of three.  The decompression of Dixon's writing is starting to hinder the momentum and enjoyment of the story.  Greg Land's art still looks good most of the time, but cracks are showing.

Come back next Tuesday for a review of Birds of Prey #7.

Birds of Prey #5 (May 1999)

Previously in Birds of Prey...

The Ravens, a trio of female mercenaries led by Cheshire, accepted a job from Kobra to retrieve a cryptic piece of technology sunken in Lake Mackichitahoo in Minnesota.  Dinah Lance just happens to be vacationing in the same place, where she learns about the Lake Mackichitahoo Monster, a local legend designed to both scare and entice tourists.

Birds of Prey #5: "Monster" is written by Chuck Dixon with pencils by Greg Land, inks by Drew Geraci, and colors by Gloria Vasquez.  This issue's cover is much simpler, with Black Canary lounging on a beach in the footprint of a massive, prehistoric creature.

Picking up right where last issue ended, Dinah Lance is attacked by the Lake Mackichitahoo Monster,  which looks a lot like a prehistoric plesiosaurus.  The giant creature smashes the wooden pier, forcing Dinah to dive into the water.  As she swims back to the surface, the monster comes around, opening its fearsome jaws and preparing to eat her.  Then suddenly, the lake water is pierced by gunfire from the surface, turning the monster away.

Dinah gives Gary a kiss on the cheek for his timely save and tells him she needs to make a call.  He mentions his concern about the "other three ladies" who went into the lake that night.  Dinah wants to know about these ladies.

Elsewhere, underwater, the Ravens--Cheshire, Pistolera, and Vicious--swim away from their target, a hunk of metal that looks like a crashed satellite.  The ladies believe it's a former Russian satellite, and Cheshire notes the massive radiation amounts surrounding the target.  But that's not all they notice.

At the Pentagon, Major Van Lewton has unleashed his internet security team on tracking down the phantom hacker that's been poaching the U.S. government's memory banks for bandwidth and power.  One his techie's confirms that that phantom hacker is operating from somewhere around Gotham.  Van Lewton tells his aide, Lieutenant Providence, that he has appropriated funds to assemble a covert strike team and he wants them in the air and ready to engage as soon as they have the target located.

Back in her cabin, Black Canary has changed into her work clothes while briefing Oracle on the situation.  Oracle is naturally skeptical about the monster's existence, but entertain's Dinah's story.  At that moment, two gunmen kick in Dinah's door.  They recognize her as Black Canary and open fire, but she leaps behind the bed.  They don't know if they killed her and agree to make certain.

Then Chuck Dixon and Greg Land show us something ridiculous... and that's acknowledging the dinosaur in the first three pages of the issue.

Oh.  Oh, gentlemen, no.  You can't grab someone's legs and fling yourself out from under a bed at the speed to pass them before they can shoot.  First of all, Black Canary would have no momentum behind this move, so she's relying entirely on her upper body strength.  Okay, she might be really strong, but given the resistance, if she was strong enough to do this, she would have pulled the gunmen to the ground or literally snapped their legs in half.  There's also matters like friction.  She's sliding across a hard wood floor in what's effectively a bathing suit bottom and bare legs.  She would never, ever stop pulling splinters out of her legs and ass if she did a move like this.

Superhero comics demand a suspension of disbelief, and we can accept a rampaging dinosaur in Minnesota because there is a science fiction/fantasy explanation in the works.  But Black Canary's fighting ability is grounded in real training and athleticism.  This little action beat was ridiculous and took me out of the suspense of the story.

But anyway, Black Canary takes out the gunmen and tells Oracle that Kobra has a presence here and that it must be connected to the monster that tried to eat her.

Then Greg Land pisses me off again.  Here below we have one of the earliest examples of Land's tracing instead of really drawing characters.  Greg Land was obviously photo-referencing the below picture of Black Canary because her pose, her face, the whole direction of her body are disassociated from her surroundings.  She's not looking at the bodies on the floor or Gary coming in through the door.  She's looking forward at the Sports Illustrated photographer or whoever took the original pic that Greg Land stole for this image.

Meanwhile, the Ravens swim back to land and Pistolera and Vicious are a little unnerved by the presence of a volcano.  Cheshire berates them for not being professional and not handling the situation like the badass ladies she thought they were.  Then some woolly mammoths come out of the trees.

Someone unseen is still spying on Oracle even as she tells Black Canary to be careful.  If Kobra is operating at Lake Mackichitahoo, they think Black Canary is there to bust them and they're going to respond.

In the sky above Gotham, Major Van Lewton awaits the location of his phantom hacker from a Blackhawk helicopter loaded with the strike team.  Providence tries to talk him out of this decision, but he refuses to listen.  They get the coordinates for the hacker and move in for the attack.

After seeing the woolly mammoths, Cheshire deduces that the satellite they found in the lake was surrounded by neutrinos, and that they caused some kind of temporal rift.  The Ravens have traveled back to prehistoric Minnesota.  That's when they get attacked by sabertooth tigers.  Killing the ancient animals, however, is kind of a thrill for Vicious and Pistolera.

Black Canary gets the scuba gear and a raft from Gary and patrols the lake until she finds the Ravens' rented boat.

Black Canary dives down and finds the object.  She tells Oracle she thinks it's a Russian satellite, but Oracle hasn't heard anything about a satellite going down in the midwest.

The issue ends with Cheshire trying to figure out how the ladies can get back to their real time; Oracle hears a helicopter over her apartment building; and Black Canary seems to be in trouble, but it's an extreme close up of her breathing out a lot of bubbles and there's no real context for what her problem is.

I guess this issue is better than the last one.  Black Canary has more to do and more action, but I still don't care about the Pentagon guys tracking the phantom hacker.  And I don't care about the Ravens going back in time.  This feels way, waaay too sci-fi/fantasy for the kind of espionage thriller that Birds of Prey has been so far.  And Dixon's scripts take about two minutes to read; the action scenes are more spread out and decompressed than they need to be.  The first three pages could have been one page.

Greg Land's art is usually nice to look at, but I can already see his devolution from someone who draws characters to someone who holds a pencil over a lightbox.

Come back next Tuesday for a review of Birds of Prey #6.

Birds of Prey #4 (Apr 1999)

Previously in Birds of Prey...

Oracle sent Black Canary to investigate a kidnapping and ransom cartel in the nation of Rheelasia.  Black Canary was captured, but eventually escaped and helped bring down the kidnappers with the help of Jason Bard, a former boyfriend of Oracle's.  Meanwhile, the beautiful and deadly assassin called Cheshire has put together a team of female mercenaries and killers called The Ravens.

Birds of Prey #4: "The Ravens Strike" is written by Chuck Dixon with pencils by Greg Land, inks by Drew Geraci, and colors by Gloria Vasquez.  Land's cover looks fittingly like a poster for a James Bond movie, but it leaves me with a few questions.  Is that supposed to be Black Canary in the scuba gear?  If so, why does she look like a red head?  If not, who is she?  And why is the series title "Birds of Prey" printed twice on the cover along different edges?

The issue begins with some animal-on-animal action as the Ravens--the team comprised of Cheshire, Vicious, and Pistolera--launch a merciless attack against the forces of Kobra.  Vicious and Pistolera are catty and joke about killing each other off to collect the other's share of the score, which happens to be half a billion dollars for killing Kobra Prime.  Cheshire reprimands her partners for their unprofessional conduct while leading them on a killer rampage.

Kobra Prime doesn't seem too worried about the attack, though.  More intrigued than anything.  Is that because he's not their true target, but their employer?

Yes, the entire attack was merely a test of the Ravens' abilities and Kobra Prime approves of their talents, so he hires them to retrieve something for him.  The what is unknown for now.  The why is that whatever it is is valuable as a weapon of terror.  And the where is Lake Mackichitahoo, Minnesota.

And would you believe it, that's exactly where Dinah Laurel Lance is heading to recuperate after her captivity in Rheelasia.

Every week I'm reminded that for the first couple years of their operation, Black Canary didn't know with whom she was working or from whom she was taking orders.  Their "partnership" was one-side blind; so despite the friendliness of of their chats, it's hard to see them as true friends when Oracle doesn't trust Dinah enough to reveal her secret identity.

Dinah arrives at the Lutefisk Lounge at Lake Mackichitahoo, drawing lots of attention from the men at the resort.  Almost as much attention as the Ravens attract when they arrive.

Meanwhile, Barbara rolls around her apartment, chewing on the anger over Black Canary asking for a date with Nightwing.  Of course, that wouldn't happen if Babs told Dinah who she is and what her real connection to Nightwing is.  But that's not the important part of this scene; what's of greater concern are the people spying on Oracle.

At the same time Oracle is continuing her anonymous internet flirtation with someone named Beeb, Dinah flirts with the concierge of her resort, a nerd named Gary.  Gary shows Dinah to her cabin and tells her about the local tourism boom that has accompanied sightings of the "Lake Mackichitahoo Monster".

At the Pentagon, the Air Force division assigned to electronics security may have finally traced the hacker who has been piggybacking on the military's memory and data.  Is it Oracle they're tracing, or someone/something else?  We ought to find out soon because the Air Force is getting closer to their target.

Back at the lake, the Ravens wait until nightfall and don scuba gear before diving into the water and finding their own target.

On the surface, Dinah walks the dock taking in the night air and enjoying the peace and tranquility of Lake Mackichitahoo when something stirs beneath the wooden planks.  She glances down, catching the faint outline of something monstrous... Then she gets a closer look.

I could give this issue the benefit of the doubt and call it a transitional issue that's used to set up a new story arc, but that would feel too generous.  The fact is, this hardly seems like a Birds of Prey comic at all.  Dixon devotes twelve out of twenty-two pages to the Ravens, who I don't care about.  He spends another page on the Pentagon, and a page on whoever is spying on Oracle.  That leaves only a third of the book for Black Canary and Oracle, and all they really do is flirt with boys and gab about dating Batman and Robin.  It's hardly stimulating stuff.

Land's art is inoffensive but unremarkable.  He likes big, splashy panels, but the characters always seem so posed and lifeless, like they're not really part of their environment.  All told, this was mostly a boring issue.  I liked Dinah and Barbara's early conversation, but that was all I enjoyed in the whole chapter.

Come back next Tuesday for a review of Birds of Prey #5.

Birds of Prey: The Ravens (June 1998)

In June of 1998, DC Comics did something fun and creative, albeit with a slightly patronizing vibe.  They christened the fifth week of the month GirlFrenzy! and published seven standalone female-driven comics derived from their ongoing books.  From the pages of the Superman comics, for example, came a Lois Lane one-shot.  From the Batman books came a Batgirl special, from Wonder Woman came Donna Troy, and from JLA came Tomorrow Woman.  There were a few others, and then there was The Ravens, supposedly spinning out of the pages of Birds of Prey.

The thing is... Birds of Prey wasn't an ongoing series yet, and wouldn't be for another six months.  And this team had never appeared anywhere before this comic.  Also, and perhaps most obvious, Birds of Prey was already a female-led title.  Why did DC create an off-shoot comic staring female characters we didn't know for a quarterly publication starring female characters we did know?

Well, whatever.  Birds of Prey: The Ravens: "S.I.M.O.N. Says...Armageddon" is written by Chuck Dixon and drawn by new artist Nelson DeCastro.  That completeS the set of putting a different artist on every Birds of Prey story up to this point, but for the first time we get a cover by someone other than Gary Frank.  This time, Leonard Kirk and Karl Story provide the chromatic cover art.

The story opens with a splash page of some mercenary soldier holding a detonator threatening to press the button and potentially rule the world.  Then there's a double-page splash of the so-called Ravens, a team of four deadly ladies led by Cheshire, who seems pretty confident that the merc won't press the button, activating whatever it is he's threatening.  Then we see another sort-of splash panel showcasing Cheshire and her history as an assassin, squaring off against the Teen Titans, and surrendering her daughter, Lian.

That's a lot of big splashy images in the first four pages without a lot of story.  What's happening?  Cheshire explains that her mission--which we don't yet know--was in preparation for months before tonight when her crew goes into operation.

By my reckoning, Cheshire and Pistolera are the only established characters in the quartet.  Pistolera was created by Chuck Dixon in one of his Batman stories.  Vicious and Termina were created for this issue.

The Ravens jetski to the coast of Rheelasia, which had some trouble back in the first Birds of Prey special.  Dixon establishes tension in the team by having Vicious make fun of Pistolera's name.  I guess this is like characterization, because they're like villains, so they're nasty to each other, and Vicious is the "wild one".

Cheshire hired them to help her do a job but she hasn't told them what the job is.  I guess the advance she offered was pretty tantalizing because they're in the middle of the operation and don't have the foggiest clue what the objective is.  And Cheshire ain't telling them either.  The Ravens climb up the coastal bluffs and march through the jungle where they discover an unsettling fact about Termina.

Yeah, anything that touches her dies.  Damn.

As they approach the target, which again, only Cheshire knows, they find a soldier and kill him.  Cheshire identifies him as S.I.M.O.N., part of an international crime cartel that's been trying to take over Rheelasia in the two years since everyone in power got blown up by a nuclear power plant explosion.

The Ravens continue their mysterious mission with Cheshire choosing to think about the nuclear destruction of Qurac and giving up her love child with Roy Harper instead of focusing on the mission or even telling her teammates what they're up against or what they're looking for.  Along the way, they kill some more S.I.M.O.N. soldiers.  Cheshire reveals to the readers but not to her teammates that Termina is dying of the same disease she secretes to poison her victims.

When they get close to a heavily fortified facility, the ladies steal an armored assault vehicle and blast their way inside.

This is about where we catch up to the issue's opening scene.  This S.I.M.O.N. soldier grabs the detonator and threatens to push the button.  It's not a nuclear bomb, however, but a neutron generator. Apparently, activating a neutron generator in any given location would create deadly levels of radiation without the destructive capability of a normal bomb.  So, if you wanted to take over an entire city, the neutron generator would disperse the population in one way or another without causing structural damage.  Cheshire's plan all along was to steal the thing, although why that needed to be a secret I don't know.

Termina walks up to the mercenary and kills him by sheer proximity, but before Cheshire can prepare the generator for transportation, Termina threatens to do exactly what the soldier planned.

So Termina turns on the neutron generator to bombard herself with the kind of radiation that will kill her disease, and likely herself.  Cheshire tells her that if she does survive, she'll kill her for this betrayal.

Then we have a sighting of our heroines as Oracle makes Black Canary aware of the radiation spike in Rheelasia.

After that, Cheshire leads Vicious and Pistolera away from the facility as the neutron generator goes off.  Also, Cheshire says she doesn't know what S.I.M.O.N. stands for.

Okay, so this comic sucked.

I can't prove that Dixon wrote this comic in twenty minutes, either during his lunch break on on the toilet, but that's about how much thought went into the plot and characterization.  I'm convinced the reason Cheshire didn't reveal what the mission was about until the end of the story was because Dixon hadn't thought of it when he scripted the earlier pages.  Since we don't know what the mission is, we don't know what the stakes are, and without that, we have no tension or drama.

There is nothing worthwhile about the characters.  Cheshire could have been replaced by anyone and the story wouldn't have changed much.  Pistolera and Vicious' feuding isn't catty or interesting.  The only kind of intriguing character is Termina, who I'm pretty sure dies off-panel.

After the Batgirl one-shot that came out a few months earlier, we were promised another story called "Siege", but instead we get this.  A month later, however, Oracle and Black Canary would pop up in the Green Arrow/Batman crossover story, "Brotherhood of the Fist".  And a few months after that, the first issue of Birds of Prey, the ongoing series, would debut.  Come back next Tuesday for that review!

Back in Action: ACTION COMICS #614

Previously...

Every Wednesday, I review an issue of Action Comics Weekly featuring a backup story starring Black Canary among others.  Each installment of Back in Action will look at Dinah's story and touch on my favorite or least favorite moments from the rest of the strips in these issues.

Black Canary's sixth appearance in ACW was issue #614, which features one of my favorite covers of this series.  Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, shows Green Lantern in a way that accents the hero's cosmic dimensions with a dash of the gothic mystery Mignola does better than anyone.

Black Canary

"Bitter Fruit" Part 6: written by Sharon Wright, pencilled by Randy Duburke, inked by Pablo Marcos, lettered by Steve Haynie, colored by Tom Ziuko, and edited by Mike Gold.  There is a misprint on the title page, saying this chapter is Part 4 when it's actually the sixth of eight.

This chapter begins with William MacDonald, an Immigration & Naturalization Service official calling a hit on another INS agent named Ellen Waverly.  Why?  Because Ellen is unknowingly close to discovering that MacDonald is corrupt and preventing immigrants from gaining legal status at the behest of...somebody with power.  Maybe a guy named Scales who has his own company.

At the same time, Ellen receives a phone call from a man calling himself Barry Neiman, and he is the mysterious man with the goatee who has been following several characters around throughout the story.  He was turned away from Hector Librado's hospital room at some point before Hector was attacked and put in a coma; is this "Barry" the man who tried to kill him?  Is "Barry Neiman" this man's real name?  We'll have to see.  After that call, Ellen informs Hector's family that she is awaiting documents from another office that will finalize their citizenship.

Meanwhile, in the alley behind Hank Beecham's shop, the forger is getting threatened by two familiar goons.  Dinah rushes the goons with a broken bottle and kicks their asses.  She threatens one with the bottle while demanding answers.  She reveals, perhaps accidentally, that she was the woman with the cowboy who the goons jumped in an earlier part of the story, even though she was in her Black Canary costume then.  The guys say they weren't the ones who knocked her upside the head, and then run away without telling her who they work for.

After the rescue, Hank Beecham takes Dinah inside his store and fills in some useful gaps in the story.  He says that he forged work history documents for Hector to help get him citizenship, and every job he did was paid for, so he had no reason to attack Hector.  But someone else has been muscling in on Beecham's business, trying to get him to retire.  He says the two goons Dinah just fought worked for the Cowboy, who Dinah thinks is named Doug Vallines but is probably named Gary, and Doug Vallines is another guy.

At the Scales building, Vincent Scales gets word that MacDonald is coming to Seattle for some business.  Scales tells Cowboy Gary to prepare the boat so they can go out to an island.

Down in California, the real Doug Vallines is spying on a piece of land that is owned by Scales, but fenced in by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and patrolled by government security forces.

That night, Dinah is sitting alone in her apartment above Sherwood Florist.  She has a sudden idea and dials for Information to connect with Doug Vallines.  She leaves a message--calling herself Bonnie Cardinal again--and says she knows who attacked Hector Librado.

I continue to have the same problems with this story week after week, namely the unwieldiness of the plot and supporting characters, and how the art fails to distinguish different people we barely recognize from page to page.  However, this chapter was a little better and things seem to be picking up steam.  They had better; after all, there are only two chapters left after this.

The highlight, as always, is seeing Dinah in action.  She gets the drop on the goons and gets some valuable information out of them and their target.  I wish we could see her do this in her Black Canary costume--that's kind of the point--but something is better than nothing, I guess.  Revealing her past involvement with them in a different costume seemed like a mistake, though, like a dumb non-blonde thing where she forgot she was supposed to have a dual identity, even if she's "out".

I have mixed feelings about Dinah's phone call at the end.  On one hand, it's nice to see her be proactive, especially if she's formulating a plan or putting the pieces together.  On the other hand, does she really know who she's calling?  Is this message an intentional trick?  A trap?  Is she leaving a message for the real Doug or the fake one she knows?  If this is a trap, will it succeed if the wrong man gets the message?  I guess hope we'll find that out next time.

The Rest

In the Green Lantern chapter, Peter David and Tod Smith treat us to a GL retcon worthy of Geoff Johns.  The ring reveals to Hal Jordan that the reason he is a man utterly without fear is because Abin Sur's ring sort of lobotomized him.  We see the moment where the ring identified the two most worthy candidates for stewardship of the ring: Hal and Guy Gardner, but Hal was closer geographically to where Abin crashed.  But Hal still had some basic fears that the ring erased by rearranging part of his brain.  So in this issue, Hal has the ring reverse that process.  Now Hal Jordan has fears that he must overcome through will power.  "You don't have to be a man without fear," Hal tells himself.  "Just a man."

Writer Paul Kupperberg and artist Tom Grindberg conclude their short Phantom Stranger adventure with the titular character being captured by Ah Puch, the Mayan death god.  I'm a big fan of Kupperberg's writing, and Grindberg creates some gruesome and horrific images in these panels, but somehow, this story didn't really grab me.  Maybe it needed more time to breathe, more pages, or maybe it wasn't right for the Phantom Stranger, whom I have always had difficulty viewing as a protagonist in his own stories.

In the second part of the Nightwing story written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by Chuck Patton, Nightwing and Roy Harper have traveled to London to prevent Cheshire, the mother of Roy's child, from killing a member of British government.  They save the target, but Jade kills an innocent bystander.  In combat, Cheshire proves more than a match for her former lover.  Against Dick Grayson, though, Cheshire must resort to trickery in order to escape.  Later, Roy tells Dick the story of how he hooked up with Jade and got her pregnant.  Even later, Cheshire murders her target by pumping lethal gas into his shower.  Later still, Jade taunts Roy in an alleyway, scoffing at his threats.

This is a really enjoyable story, though I'm not sure why Roy Harper or Speedy doesn't get equal billing with Nightwing, since it's as much his story as Dick's.  I'm a big fan of Marv Wolfman's work at Marvel, particularly in the horror titles.  I never had the same fondness for his DC work.  I didn't like Crisis on Infinite Earths, and I couldn't get into New Teen Titans, though I concede that nobody wrote Dick Grayson better than Marv, and that's why this story works for me.

In the Superman strip by Roger Stern and Curt Swan, the Man of Steel races to the hospital to question the man who tried to kill the other man who told Clark Kent that he--the man--is part of a cult that worships him--Superman--like a god!  Superman arrives at the hospital just in time to find another man attempting to smother the first attempted murderer man.  Fun.

Finally, Mindy Newell and Barry Kitson wrap up Catwoman's adventure in "The Tin Roof Club" part 4.  Previously, Selina Kyle stole an Egyptian cat brooch and hid it with her friend Holly.  Then Holly's husband got the brooch and blew up his wife.  When Catwoman came for the brooch and some revenge, Holly's husband, Arthur, threw Catwoman out the window of his penthouse apartment.  As this chapter begins, Catwoman saves herself from the fall and scales the side of the building, going back up to Arthur's room.  Two security guards come to the room after Arthur's mistress called for help.  The guards act shifty, pretty much demanding a bribe... and then Catwoman straight up murders the guards by pulling them over the ledge and dropping them off the side of the building.  She leaves the brooch there, so when the cops arrive to investigate the two dead men, they find the stolen property in Arthur's room.  Arthur is arrested, and Selina feels justified in avenging her dead friend.  But still.  She freaking murdered two security guards.  They weren't even a danger to her.  They were completely incidental, and while not the most noble of people, I don't think they deserved what they got.

Catwoman is a tricky character.  I will always categorize her as a villain, no matter how many times Batman screws her and then lets her go with a warning.  Catwoman is a criminal.  She doesn't break the law to make society better like a vigilante.  She breaks the law to make herself happy.  She's a villain.  That doesn't mean she's a psycho killer like Joker or Two-Face.  This last chapter felt really unsettling with her killing two people as a means to punish someone else.  Also, her story only got seven pages instead of the usual eight.

Next week, I'll look at Action Comics Weekly #615, which kicks off two brand new features starring Wild Dog and Blackhawk, as well as continuing the sagas of Black Canary, Superman, Green Lantern and Nightwing.