Canary Comics for March 2014

DC released their solicitations for March 2014.  Black Canary's name only pops up in two items, so if she's guest starring in any of the Forever Evil tie-ins or the latest issue of Injustice Year 2, it's not significant enough to make the solicits.

BIRDS OF PREY #29.

Written by Christy Marx

Art by Robson Rocha and Jonathan Glapion.

Cover by Jorge Molina

On sale March 19.

32 pages. $2.99 US.

Black Canary confronts Ra's al Ghul, who makes her an offer that could save her husband! Is she willing to pay the ultimate price?

Damnit, I just want to wipe my hands of this series and be done, but the story is improving, albeit at glacial pace.  And now Christy Marx is bringing Ra's al Ghul into the mix?  This has me intrigued because of how Dinah is connected to Ra's al Ghul's League of Assassins in Arrow, and how she almost married him way back in the Chuck Dixon era of Birds of Prey.  Grrr!!! I think I may have to stick with BoP after all to see where this story leads.

Also, is Robson Rocha taking over art duties full time or just for this issue?  He helped Romano Molenaar on issues #22 and #24, so he's not coming out of nowhere.

Of course, the biggest and bestest news to come out of the March solicits is for a book that's not even coming out until May...

BLACK CANARY AND ZATANNA: BLOODSPELL HC

Written by Paul Dini

Art and cover by Joe Quinones

On sale May 21

144 pages. $22.99 US.

Two of the DC Universe's brightest stars join forces in this original graphic novel!  A year ago, Black Canary infiltrated a gang of female criminals set to pull a dangerous heist at a Las Vegas casino.  Its leader was skilled in hand-to-hand combat and more than a passing interest in black magic.  Rather than be captured by Canary or the law, she went to her death, vowing to get revenge on Canary!  Now, one year later, death stalks those gang members, and Canary must turn to her friend Zatanna to help investigate.  This title also includes a special sketchbook section.

You could've knocked me over.  I had heard this was out there for a couple months.  I had seen sample pages, even the pre-order page on Amazon.com.  But somehow I didn't believe.  Couldn't believe it.  It seemed too good to be true.  An original Black Canary graphic novel: Holy crap!

And she's not partnered with Green Arrow or Batgirl or anyone else you'd expect.  It's her Fishnet Sister, the Mistress of Magic, Zatanna.  Plus, that creative team!  I first noticed Joe Quinones during Wednesday Comics where he drew the Green Lantern tale.  Great stuff, there.  And Paul Dini, who knows both of these ladies pretty well from his involvement with the DC Animated Universe, fills me with hope that this story will approach the characters from a place of love instead of cynicism.

BIRDS OF PREY #24 (New 52)

Previously...

Black Canary and Condor were captured by Condor's former teammates--Hydra, I mean Basilisk terrorists!  Regulus, the leader of Basilisk, has mysterious plans for Canary.

Birds of Prey #24: "Together Again" is written by Christy Marx, with art breakdowns by Scott McDaniel, pencils by Romano Molenaar and Robson Rocha, inks by Jonathan Glapion and Oclair Albert, and colors by Chris Sotomayor.  Jorge Molina provided the cover art depicting Dinah's agonizing moment of discovery that her husband is alive.

We pick up with Batgirl and Strix scrambling to the roof of the Birds' hideout only to watch their comrades whisked away in an air transport.  They have no idea where Basilisk is taking Black Canary and Condor, which doesn't matter because even if they did they have no means to follow them.

Luckily, there's a storytelling thing called deus ex machina that Marx utilizes effectively albeit overtly right here.

A mysterious stranger in a suit and shades shows up on the roof at that exact moment and offers his help.  Basically, he tells Batgirl, "I know where your friends are going...but I can't tell you how. And I'll help you get them back...but I can't tell you why."  Batgirl is justifiably suspicious, but desperate enough that she trusts this guy who she vaguely remembers as a former Gotham detective that worked for her father once.

Yes, this mysterious "benefactor".  That's a convenient enough cover that never needs to be explored if this plot hole is ignored.  Okay, I'm going to assume that the benefactor is Amanda Waller.  Why?  Well, last issue we saw that Regulus has Kurt Lance's body preserved in a stasis pod, but way back in issue #0, we saw that Amanda Waller was in possession of Lance's stasis pod.  That means, at some point in the last year Basilisk acquired Lance, and I'm betting that Waller wants him back.

We return to Basilisk's fortress in the Andes Mountains, where Dinah comes face to face with the husband she thought she killed five years ago.

Then, after a pretty lackluster kick, Dinah discovers the truth about Regulus!

That's right, Regulus is Dean Higgins...sort of.  Dean Higgins, the member of Team 7 that nobody cared about and that the writer(s) as often forgot about.  The teammate so useless and devoid of character, that he didn't even get a death scene in the final issue.  They just stopped drawing him on the pages!

Well, Marx decides to pounce on that continuity gaffe, by explaining that when Dinah used her sonic scream to level Kaizen Gamorra's palace, Higgins, the Kaizen, and some creepy psychic children all fused into one being: Regulus.

Okay, whatever.  It's strange, it's not clean, but it works and it creates a powerful villain with a genuine tie to Black Canary's history and a personal beef against her and her former teammates.  I'll take the consolation prize over nothing.

Meanwhile, Condor wakes up in another part of the compound.  Like Dinah, he cannot access his telekinetic powers.  Tsiklon leads him around the place where he meets up with Hammerdown and Whipcrack and discovers that Regulus has been kidnapping civilians for some reason.  I guess Condor is like a prisoner but they're not worried about him fighting back or trying to escape.  It's like they've brought him back into the fold on a probationary basis.

Batgirl and Strix parachute down to Fortress Basilisk with a crew of paramilitary soldiers waiting to back them up at the base of the mountain whenever Batgirl calls for help.  The ladies take out the fort's surveillance equipment and then go to work on the guards when they discover the captives Regulus had been collecting.

Back in the, um, stasis room, Regulus tells Dinah that he has learned to control Kurt's brain functions, which means he can control Kurt's powers to augment or dampen superpowers.  That's why Dinah and Condor can't access their abilities.

Regulus' plan revealed.  He can shut down all of the superpowers in the world, making everyone a base-line human like he is was.  But he can also activate them again at his whim, which gives him a lot of power to blackmail or auction his control of the superpowers.

Elsewhere, Condor is mouthing off to his former teammates when he sees Batgirl and Strix.  He leads the Basilisk crew right to his new friends.

Is this another betrayal?  Or is Condor going to help Batgirl and Strix fight the others and save Canary...which, I guess, would be another betrayal...?

The Characters

I must admit I was pleasantly surprised by Black Canary in this issue.  Upon seeing her husband relatively alive in a stasis pod, she didn't freak out and start crying.  She didn't try to get him out either, but I'll ignore that for now.  Instead, she was active and tried to fight Regulus.  At this point, it's pretty one-sided, but at least she's taking the fight directly and trying to stop him.

Condor clearly hasn't defected back to Basilisk.  He's playing them so he can help Dinah and Batgirl, though I don't know why Tsiklon gives him the chance to betray them.  I guess everyone in this universe trusts obvious enemies or total strangers with hidden agendas.

Impressions/Questions

I was happy that Dinah's crew were finally getting their own distinct villains, and this issue further solidifies Regulus as a worthy nemesis.  He's not the most nuanced or interesting antagonist (let's be real, he's as cookie-cutter as any '90s hero or villain), but at least he has a layered backstory that is intimately tied to characters like Black Canary and Amanda Waller.  I wouldn't miss him if he was killed, but I kind of hope he survives this encounter to plague the Birds of Prey in the future.

Since the end of the so-called crossover with Talon, this series has picked up a lot of steam (for a series as bad as it was), and Christy Marx is starting to win me over that the book could be salvaged and taken into new and interesting directions.

Of course, next issue is another shameless tie-in to a Batman event.  Oy...

Grade: B+

BIRDS OF PREY #22 (New 52)

Previously...

Starling revealed her treachery--at least one part of her treachery--by leading the Birds into a trap meant to eliminate Strix.  After Canary and the others fought off Starling and her partner, Mister Freeze, Strix was attacked by the rogue Talon, Calvin Rose, whose better angels won over when he chose not to kill her.

Birds of Prey #22: "Operation: Kaizen" is written by Christy Marx, with art breakdowns by Scott McDaniel, pencils by Romano Molenaar and Robson Rocha, and inks by Jonathan Glapion and Sandu Florea, and colors by Chris Sotomayor.  McDaniel, Molenaar, Glapion and Sotomayor provided the cover.  Typically, a book with this many artists in the credits is a bad sign that the book was behind deadline and could suffer from major lack of story cohesion.  Will that generalization plague this story?  Let's find out...

We pick up where we left off--with the Birds searching for Strix in the Court of Owls' revivification lab.  I feel compelled to mention at this point that this is Christy Marx's fifth issue of the series, and only about two hours time has passed for the characters since the beginning of issue #18.  Anyway, Black Canary, Batgirl and Condor find Strix in the basement.  She can't tell them why the other Talon let her live or why he took the dead woman's body that had been in the lab before, but it really wasn't worth reading the first time, so let's move on.

Dinah blows up the lab so the Court cannot use it again.  Then the full gravity of Starling's betrayal crashes down on Dinah as she realizes that she can't go home and she can't access her bank accounts because Starling knows too much.  Dinah is effectively penniless and homeless.  All because she trusted too many criminals.

Oh well, I'm sure that won't happen again.

The gang retreats to Condor's workshop.

Oh no, Dinah is stuck in Condor's manly garage... with all of its power tools and grease... and she doesn't have any clothes to change into... whatever will they do?

Meanwhile, somewhere in the Andes (Mountains, I assume), we meet Regulus, leader of the evil terrorist organization Cobra Hydra Basilisk.  Regulus tells his subordinate, Tsiklon, to assemble the strike team for Operation: Kaizen, a name we haven't heard since Kaizen Gamorra in Team 7; Gamorra was a haven for Basilisk back then.

Regulus dispatches the team to go retrieve their wayward co-terrorist, Condor, but he also wants Black Canary brought to him.  It seems Regulus has something special planned for her, and there seems to be a history between them.

Back at Condor's workshop, we learn that days have past--whew!--but days where Dinah hasn't seen or heard from Batgirl.  Damn, what kind of unit is she running here?

They've been hiding out for days and they still haven't bothered to put on some different clothes?

Condor, whose real name is Ben Reyes, heads out and withdraws some money from the bank.  An elderly black woman asks him for some change, and he hails a taxi for her, paying the fare.  Upon close examination, we can see that this woman is Miz Etie, the 99 year-old woman who sat across from Dinah in the coffee shop back in issue #18.  She tells the cab driver that Ben passed the test.  Who is this woman?

Batgirl returns to the hideout.  She is emotionally shaken from having to kill her brother in the recent issues of Batgirl.  Dinah offers her support, but then the Basilisk strike team kicks down the door.

Tsiklon ambushes Condor on his way back to the workshop.  From the sound of things, they used to be lovers.  Hammerdown attacks Black Canary and Batgirl, while Whipcrack uses his powers to stun Strix.

Then another crushing blow falls on Dinah, one that doesn't involve Hammerdown's rocky fists.

That's right, Dinah, the man you've been locking lips with, the most recent addition to your team... used to be a terrorist operative for Basilisk, the group your husband died fighting.

Boom.

Uplink uses her mental power to psionically attack the Birds.  Dinah and Condor are to be brought back to Regulus, while Whipcrack plans to kill Batgirl and Strix.

The Characters

There is a non-dictionary definition of insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results."  Black Canary keeps recruiting known killers like Poison Ivy and Strix, and people she hardly knows but meets under nefarious circumstances like Starling and Condor.  Even her former boss, John Lynch, subjected her to experiments that activated her meta-human power without her knowledge or consent.  Everyone she trusts tries to kill her.

Condor told her he was part of a team that didn't end well, and he dropped a line a couple issues ago about not falling for another blonde.  Christy Marx does a solid job of salvaging these lost nuggets of characterization by making him a former Basilisk operative.  It looks like he genuinely defected to the side of the heroes, but can we really trust that?  We'll have to see.

Batgirl has to deal with the fallout from events in her own book.  Marx does a decent job of taking her off the board while these actions happen elsewhere, but it does bring me back to the opinion that Batgirl does not need to be in this series.  She doesn't add anything to it other than sales, naturally, because she's wearing the bat symbol.

The big addition to this book is the villains.  Holy shit, we finally have worthy villains!

Okay, none of these characters are worthy of the Legion of Doom, or the Flash's Rogues, or Batman's enemies.  They're pretty generic bad guys who look like something out of '90s WildStorm comics.  But you know what?  They're better than the Cleaners from issues #1-7 and they're better than Heartbreaker robots from issue #17 and they're better than another Batman villain.

Regulus looks like King Cobra or Serpentor, but that's fine.  He doesn't strike me as a natural foil for Birds of Prey, but maybe that'll change.  Hammerdown has rocky arms and strong-guy powers.  Whipcrack can generate electrified whips.  Tsiklon can turn use whirling gusts of wind like Red Tornado.  And Uplink has some kind of psionic powers; I'm not sure if she was redirecting Dinah's sonic scream in that last page or not.  They're all pretty one-trick copies of other characters, but hey, something is better than nothing.

Impressions/Questions

This issue didn't piss me off.  More than that, it actually entertained me.  My Black Canary is a hot mess, but Condor is getting more interesting by the issue.  The crew finally has some visually distinct, original villains to throw down with, and the painfully slow pace of the last couple issues' confrontation with Freeze and the Talons has picked up at last.

I needn't have feared the stack of artists on this issue, because they all came together if not seamlessly then complimentarily.  Scott McDaniel's fingerprints are all over the three pages with Regulus, which looks straight out of '90s WildStorm in layout and composition.  The Basilisk strike force members look like McDaniel or Jim Lee designed them.

I'm not going to say this was a great issue, because it's still plagued by the same problems that have weighed the series down from the get-go, but it showed me something new and it kept forward momentum.  Hell, this was my favorite issue of the series.  Is it finally coming together after two dark, dreadful years?

Grade: B+