Episode 19: Murphy Anderson Tribute

Ryan Daly and guest Chris Franklin honor the passing of Murphy Anderson by reviewing The Brave and the Bold #61 and #62 where Black Canary partners with the original Starman.

Flowers & Fishnets is available for download on iTunes by clicking here, or you can check out the show's RSS feed right here.

Find Chris over at the Super Mates Podcast: http://supermatescomic.blogspot.com

Sample covers from The Brave and the Bold #61 and #62 written by Gardner Fox and illustrated by Murphy Anderson.

Click here to read my review of issue #61 and here for issue #62 with samples of Anderson's interior artwork.

Music this episode:
"When the Stars Go Blue"
The Corrs (featuring Bono)
Atlantic Records, 2002.

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Black Canary & Zatanna: Bloodspell Part 1

Know what sucks?  Knee surgery.  Know what else?  Back spasms.

The best remedy (other than Percocet and muscle relaxers) is good comics, and last month I got a very good comic.

If you search for Black Canary on Amazon or InStockTrades, you used to only find the Archive collection of her Golden Age stories from Flash Comics and a handful of trades collecting some less than awesome Green Arrow books from the time when she co-headlined the title.  Her original miniseries and the year-long ongoing that followed it in the 1990s have yet to be collected.  The Tony Bedard-written mini from 2007 that led to her eventual marriage to Oliver Queen was collected, but Green Arrow's name got top billing on the trade (and honestly, I can't fault that since that miniseries was as much about him as it was her).  Black Canary wouldn't take up much space at the local comic store's trades and hardcovers shelves.  But now, at least, she gets an original graphic novel to pad the shelf.  True, she shares the title yet again, but this time she gets top billing.

That book?  That balm for a post-operative leg and a bad back?

Black Canary and Zatanna: Bloodspell written by Paul Dini with art by Joe Quinones.

The book impressed me before I even got to the story.  DC didn't go cheap on this book.  The fact that they published it as a hardcover is one thing, but beneath the dust jacket, the front cover is embossed with a raised fishnet pattern around the title.

Rounding out Quinones' art are Dave McCaig and Sal Cipriano on colors and letters respectively.  The title page credits Zatanna's creators, Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson, but not Black Canary's.  I'm not sure why, exactly, as she originally debuted in a Hawkman comic in 1964 so there oughtn't be any copyright or publication dispute.

Anyway, onto the story...

We open up fifteen years ago in the Himalayas with a young, short-haired Zatanna Zatara comparing her coming of age ritual to that of so-called normal kids.  Zatanna is ferried up Mount Everest in a carriage borne by figures in orange cloaks.  These are members of the Homo Magi, the innate magic-users of the DC Universe, and they count Zatanna's parents among them.

Zatanna utters the backwards spell, "Esir," and begins to rise up toward the summit of the mountain while musing about how different her childhood would be if she were, say, at a ballet recital.  Zatara and his wife bask in what I assume is pride--that's something parents feel, right?  Meanwhile, despite some hiccups, Young Zatanna levitates all the way up to the summit of Mount Everest.

If the magic and the heights hadn't unnerved her enough, she discovers she's not the first teenage girl to reach the mountain top that day.

Zatanna asks how this other girl got up there, to which Dinah replies simply that she climbed.  Dinah then mocks Zatanna's explanation of her magic.  When Zatanna defends the legitimate mental and physical exertion her spells require, Dinah hits her in the head with a snowball.

In retaliation, Z casts a spell that flips Dinah upside down and drops her on her butt.  And then they're friends, 'cuz that's how teenage girls do.

Dinah rolls over the subject of her parents and starts climbing back down the mountain, offering Zatanna use of her camp and teasingly warning her about yetis and snow leopards.

Alone, Zatanna begins to use her magic to descend back toward her parents.  But her brief encounter with the precocious Dinah has changed her.  Or perhaps challenged her is the more appropriate term.  Zatanna shucks her magic spells and decides to climb down the mountain using Dinah's ropes and rigging.  Doing it the hard way.

This prologue is as much as we get of Black Canary's backstory before the main story kicks off.  Paul Dini establishes that Dinah has been feisty and combative from the get-go.  There's obviously baggage between Dinah and her parents, but no mention of a previous Blonde Bombshell, so it's unclear whether this Dinah is the classic Dinah Drake or her daughter, Dinah Laurel Lance.  I'm inclined to believe the latter, but Dini never introduces the legacy hero concept, and I think that's a good idea.  This graphic novel could be some young (or old) reader's first exposure to Black Canary; why overwhelm him or her with the senseless and complex backstory that is Dinah's history?  All we need to know is that she's scrappy and she's willful.

Jump forward in time to last year in Las Vegas:

A thief named Tina Spettro leads a gang of five other women into the sewers beneath a new casino called Xanadu.  Before the job she pricks all of their fingers and makes them recite a loyalty oath in blood.  One of the girls in her gang isn't wild about this part of the plan, but goes along with it at Tina's insistence/threat.

While Xanadu's owner, a rich gangster named Dale Hollister addresses the crowd during the casino's grand opening, Tina Spettro moves herself into position...

Which includes tipping off casino security about the five ladies about to blow their way into the casino's vault from the sewer.  Tina doesn't care about the women in her gang; they were always sacrificial misdirection for the guards while she planned to steal some valuable Asian treasures on the main floor.  Tina's narration reveals her past connection to Hollister; this heist is less about the profit and more about hurting her ex-lover.

What Tina didn't count on, though, was being "triple-crossed" by a member of her own gang.  "Joy" shows up in the treasure room and removes a ginger-haired wig, revealing she was Black Canary in disguise (Note: Dinah, in this tale, is a natural blonde).  The real Joy, and the other members of the gang, predicted Tina's ambush and called in some help.

Tina recognizes Black Canary from the Justice League, but figures she's no Wonder Woman and takes her chance fighting her way out.

It's almost impossible to look at this page of fight choreography and not think Quinones was paying homage to this page from Adventure Comics #418 by Alex Toth.

Tina throws a knife that Black Canary dodges.  Knowing she can't win the fight, Tina makes use of her getaway plan: a jetpack stored in the ventilation system.

Tina detonates a set of explosive on Xanadu's roof, giving her an exit to the Las Vegas night.  She flies past hotels and casinos, trying to shake Black Canary off her back.  Canary, meanwhile, is trying to get them to the ground without so much velocity that it kills them both.

There's a fun little Easter Egg in this scene as Tina's jetpack carries them past Prosciutto's Casino, and there's a big neon clown lit up outside.  In the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Be A Clown" the Joker tells a hostage that he learned a trick from his mentor, the Great Prosciutto ("Now there was a ham! Hah!").

As Black Canary struggles to gain control of the jetpack, Tina Spettro makes it more and more obvious how perfectly fine she is with the prospect of dying.

At last Tina knocks Black Canary off her back.  As Dinah plummets to the street, Tina swears that she'll have revenge on Canary and the other treacherous women from her gang.  She recites the loyalty oath in Latin... and then crashes into the wall of a hotel, dying in a fiery explosion.

Black Canary, on the other hand, drops into the hotel's swimming pool and manages to survive the fall.  A little banged up but otherwise okay, she climbs out of the pool, towels herself off and takes somebody's margarita.  All in a day's work.

The next part of the story brings us to today, but I'll save that for tomorrow's installment.  This is a 90-something page story, so I'm breaking my review into three parts.  As such, I can't review much of the story since it's not complete at this point and it wasn't divided into chapters like a serialized story.

I will say that Paul Dini knows these character front ways and back.  He wrote Zatanna for a year in her own series, and before that he wrote both of these women marvelously in various incarnations of the DC Animated Universe.  The tone he sets is playful but too cartoonish.  There is a seriousness to the subject manner, but a loftiness, too, that feels not part of any particular era.  This isn't the modern New 52 but it's not the Bronze Age either.  This is the nostalgic era that never really existed but that comics fans look back on as the halcyon days of comics.

It's interesting that the best stories published by DC in the last year or so have been out-of-continuity tales like the digital first Batman '66, Legends of the Dark Knight, and Adventures of Superman, and now Black Canary and Zatanna: Bloodspell.  It certainly says something about how DC is managing its universe, but the fact is they are still putting out material that would appeal to fans who can no longer distinguish between the mainstream books and their dystopian video game tie-ins.

Continued in Part 2

Team-Up: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #62 (Nov 1965)

I know that last Tuesday I promised a review of the first issue of the Birds of Prey ongoing series, but  I'm pushing my coverage of that series back until at least the second week of April.  In the meantime, I've got a Black Canary team-up I've been sitting on for a while.

The Brave and the Bold #62 pairs Black Canary with Starman for the second consecutive issue in "The Big Super-Hero Hunt" written by Gardner Fox with art by Murphy Anderson.  Click here to check out my review of their previous team-up.

Boy, the upper half of this cover is really, really busy.  There's a whole lot of text up there contrasting with the rest of the cover, depicting relatively small characters in battle against a pretty stark background.  As we can see, Starman and Black Canary are confronted by the villainous coupling of Sportsmaster and The Huntress (who would later be known as Tigress).  And the other great thing about this issue, as advertised on the cover, is it features another one of my favorite Golden Age heroes: Wildcat.

As with the last issue, we get a teaser page divided into two columns, but this time Starman and Black Canary are on one side and their adversaries on the other.

The story begins in Federal City where the upper crust of society has come to view wax mannequins of ancient sports figures.  Suddenly, the statue of Discobulus cracks and falls away from a living man dressed as a fisherman.  Using a fishing rod, the stranger snares a valuable trophy and sets off some sports-related traps for the shocked onlookers and local cops.

As luck would have it, however, the director of the sportsman's display is having dinner in the building with Dinah Lance, wife of private investigator Larry Lance, and secretly the costumed crime fighter known as Black Canary.

Meanwhile, on the outskirts of the city, Ted Knight, astronomer, businessman, and superhero called Starman, enjoys a quiet night at home.  On his estate, Ted has crafted scale models of some the great astronomical observatories from around the world.  When Ted walks by the life-size reproduction of the Pekin Observatory, though, he hears a voice calling out for help from inside.

The Pekin Observatory is a maze designed by ancient Chinese engineers, and despite the fact that Ted had it rebuilt on his property, he doesn't know how to get through the maze.  So he dons the disguise of his adventurous alter-ego, Starman, and uses the Cosmic Rod to fly over the maze.  Inside, he finds Wildcat, his one-time teammate from the Justice Society of America, knocked unconscious.

But Starman and Wildcat aren't alone there.

Attacked by the falcons, Starman flies high up in the atmosphere where he happens to spot a shooting star falling through the night sky.  He uses the Cosmic Rod to smash the meter, sending its firry debris at the birds, scattering them at first.  When the falcons regroup, he uses the Rod to transform the moonlight into energy that freezes the birds in ice blocks.  And after that he creates an Aurora Borealis effect to distract the remaining birds.  Yeah, all of that makes perfect sense.

Starman pursues Huntress, but the lady was en route to meet her boyfriend, Sportsmaster, returning from his heist of the sportsman's show.  Sportsmaster sees Starman first and throws a ski at poor Ted.

Black Canary lifts Sportsmaster over her head and spins him around before heaving him off.  Proud of this miraculous physical feat, she doesn't see the Huntress sneaking up behind her.

Black Canary sends the tree branch back at Huntress, taking the wind out of her.  But when the Canary moves in to keep the woman down, Sportsmaster trips her with one of his skis.  Black Canary falls headfirst into the tree, knocking herself out.

Sportsmaster and Huntress escape to water where Sportsmaster has a boat waiting for their getaway.

Starman and Black Canary stake out Sportsmaster's skis, waiting for the villain to return and claim them.  Instead, however, the skis are remote activated by jets that fly them off into the sky.  Starman grabs Black Canary and uses his Cosmic Rod to fly after them.  They follow the skis to an isolated chalet in the countryside.

The heroes search the house, and when they come to the underground cellar, they find cages of animals...and Wildcat, too!

Wildcat fights the polar bear while Starman tussles with a black panther and wild boar.  He uses his rod to send the panther flying and locks the boar in another cage.  Black Canary uses her famed judo mastery on a giant gorilla.

While all of this is going on, Sportsmaster and Huntress play a round of golf outside on a green that somehow floats above the ground.  The green floats all the way to the Federal City Country Club where Sportsmaster drives golf balls at the golfers, knocking them out, so he can steal prize money from the club.

Starman engages Sportsmaster, with the latter throwing his golf hat and the pole, but Starman manages to dodge and deflect using his powerful rod.  Black Canary chases Huntress until she falls into a disguised hole in the ground.  Huntress grabs her and flips her out of the hole, sending her on a collision course with Starman.  But the Cosmic Rod sends Black Canary back at Huntress.

This story isn't as good as the previous issue where Canary teamed up with Starman to fight the Mist, but it's still pretty fun.  Sportsmaster demands a certain level of suspension of disbelief in order to take him seriously as a villain, but a few of his gimmicks were interesting if nonsensical.  We don't get much characterization from Dinah or Ted, and Wildcat doesn't do much of anything important.

Still, the best part of this issue is seeing Black Canary fight super villains.  In her solo adventures during the Golden Age, Black Canary never had a rogues gallery.  The only time she fought real costumed villains was as part of the Justice Society of America.  It makes sense then that in these issues of The Brave and the Bold she would piggyback on other heroes' foes.

I read this story in the collected Black Canary Archives.  If you can find it there or on its own, I highly recommend reading this issue!

Team-Up: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #61 (Sept 1965)

The Brave and the Bold #61 pairs Black Canary with Starman in "Mastermind of Menaces" written by Gardner Fox with art by Murphy Anderson.

That cover has a lot of text!  It calls both heroes "superstars from the fabulous forties".  At the time this comic was published in 1965, Black Canary and her Justice Society comrades had appeared a handful of times in the pages of Justice League of America.  She was part of the Earth 2 cast, however, and only appeared when the League would crossover into the parallel Earth of the Golden Age heroes.

I love this title page, with Starman and Black Canary running away from the whispy, outstretched hands of the villainous Mist.  The banner declares, "For the first time together!"  This couple would team up again in the very next issue, and both stories would be the focus of a retcon in Starman Annual #2 published thirty years later.

After a mere three panels to set up the mystery, Fox and Anderson introduce us to all three of our heroes, Dinah Drake-Lance and her husband Larry Lance, as well as the visiting Ted Knight.  Note the locations referenced in this first page.  This isn't Sherwood Florist that Mike Grell created for The Longbow Hunters, but the Drake Flower Shoppe.

The semi-retired Canary and her husband are also said to be working out of Park City.  I'll have to go back through her early appearances in Flash Comics, but I don't think Park City was ever used as her hometown or base of operations.  I think Gardner Fox made it up for this issue.  As a fan of both world-building and keeping Black Canary out of the shadow of Batman and Green Arrow, I like the idea that she might've had a Metropolis of her own to patrol.

When I think of my favorite comic book artists, I don't usually think of Murphy Anderson.  There's nothing wrong with his art--quite the opposite--but I just haven't seen enough for him to climb onto that favorites list.  The two panels above, however, have made me a fan of his for life.

I don't know if he concocted the workings of the telescope from his own mind or he was drafting something from life, but it looks incredible in scale and detail.  Contrast that image with the closeup of Ted and the tension in his forehead.  Again: incredible!

If I was a younger, more crass man, I would never stop laughing at Starman's "Cosmic Rod".  I mean, seriously!

Starman fights the goons, getting the upper hand.  Then, however, sound waves emanate from the flower on of the goons' lapel.  The effect disorients Starman, giving the bad guys time to escape.

We then find the titular Mastermind of Menaces himself, the Mist, waiting for his minions to report.  He is less distraught over the unexpected appearance of his nemesis Starman than he is curious as to why Starman didn't use his Cosmic Rod to defeat the goons.

Starman uses his Cosmic Rod to make the wall transparent (It can do that?!) so they can spy on Dinah.  As if in a trance, she reads a list of wealthy customers who are receiving flower deliveries from her shop that day.  Unbeknownst to her, she has been brainwashed by the Mist, who listens in and determines which of Dinah's customers to rob.

At about the same time, the Mist realizes why Starman's Cosmic Rod didn't work earlier.  The sound waves from his flower combined with the noises in the observatory created a specific frequency that prevented starlight from charging the Cosmic Rod.

... Man, I wish I could've taken a science class during the Silver Age...

Anyway, Starman and Larry surreptitiously snap Dinah out of her trance and explain how she'd been used as an unwitting accomplice without tipping of the Mist that they're onto his plan.  Dinah Drake-Lance is furious about being manipulated.

Thus, the Canary semi-comes out of semi-retirement.

Maybe I am that young, crass man after all, because after I read "I'm putting this miniature cosmic rod into yours, Black Canary" I had to put the book down and leave the room.

Back to the story.  A trio of the Mist's minions enter the home of Freda Van Taller, who has been entranced by the flowers to leave her valuables out in in the open.  The goons have been coated with the Mist's special chemicals so they are invisible.

Black Canary arrives and hears the criminals moving about even though she can't see them.  She breaks a capsule of red powder into her palm and blows the dust into the room.  The dust coats the invisible crooks, giving her visible targets and she springs into action.

Meanwhile, at the Park City Yacht Club, the Mist's voice commands his latest victim to place valuables into a model viking ship and set it adrift in the water.  A helicopter piloted by more goons picks up the viking ship, but Starman takes to the air in pursuit.  Starman uses the Cosmic Rod to deflect their bullets back at the helicopter, thwarting their plan.

At the same time, Larry Lance follows his targets back to the Mist's hideout.  He transmits the location to the others, but not without his presence being noticed.

With the absurd combination of frequencies negating the power of the Cosmic Rod, Starman crashes to the ground and is captured by the Mist's invisible cronies.

With her miniature Cosmic Rod (tee-hee-hee), Canary lifts all of the scientific gadgets and computers in the Mist's array and drops them like cartoon anvils on the crooks.  She then targets and destroys the flowers he used to incapacitate Starman, but then the Mist activates the room's defenses.

I have read a lot of really, really bad Black Canary stories lately in the pages of the New 52's Birds of Prey and Team 7.  I almost forgot what a good BC story looked like until I re-read this issue.  I can't praise this story highly enough!

Starman is one of my favorite heroes of the Golden Age, and I'll go into greater detail about that tomorrow, December 18th, which is Ted Knight's birthday according to the Super DC Calendar.  His powers don't compliment Black Canary, and there isn't any real thematic resonance between their superhero identities (unlike say, Canary and Wildcat).  There's no obvious story reason for these two to team up, but that's not what The Brave and the Bold was about.  Not complimentary parts, but two characters who bring out something unexpected in each other.

Ted Knight and Dinah Drake feel like good old friends, and that's just great storytelling.  Starman buddies up with his teammate's husband to help her when she's brainwashed.  And later, Black Canary uses Starman's own technology to save him and wreak havoc on the bad guys.  It's a great team up and they work together really well because they feel like rounded, authentically good-hearted characters.

Larry Lance gets to play both the private investigator and damsel-in-distress.  Like Steve Trevor (when done well), Lance is a heroic man-of-action in his own right, but he never overshadows his better half.  Dinah is the "super" of the two.  My favorite Larry moment is when Dinah appeals to his masculine ego while still establishing their pecking order.  She praises his stealth skills as a private investigator so that he won't fight the criminals himself and get hurt.

Dinah gets "duped" in this issue.  The Mist uses his chemicals and subliminal suggestions to use her in his crime spree.  When her husband and friend break her of the villain's hold, she doesn't wallow in sadness or guilt or embarrassment.  She says, "Aw, hell no!" and laces up her gloves.  She suits up for the first time in some time and unleashes the fury of the Black Canary on the criminals of Park City.

Mark Waid described Gardner Fox as the most prolific writer of the Silver Age other than Stan Lee.  Throw a stone at a pile of comics written between 1940 and 1970 and there's an even chance you'll hit one of Fox's books.  With that much sheer volume of credit to his name, you'll find a lot of good, a lot of bad, and a lot in between.  The bad scripts, I think, are the more dated Golden Age scripts that are difficult to read today.  The good scripts read just like The Brave and the Bold #61.  Fun.  Full of humor, full of character, full of crazy science and daring action.

Murphy Anderson draws a classically beautiful Black Canary in the same style as Carmine Infantino and Ross Andru.  Dinah's whole demeanor takes on a more assertive look when she puts on the costume, as though it were a uniform.  It's a great visual distinction between wholesome florist and heroic adventurer.

I read this story in the collected Black Canary Archives.  If you can find it there or on its own, I highly recommend reading this issue!